Launching attacks at political opponents has been a campaign strategy for decades, but sometimes the claims candidates use to discredit their opponents or to highlight their own accomplishments lack necessary context or are just not true.
And the race to pick Florida’s next leader is no different.
Democratic candidate David Jolly and Republican candidate Byron Donalds will face off Nov. 3, along with several other third-party candidates.
Jolly declined to participate in any debates with Donalds in September.
“You can’t debate a liar,” Jolly said in an appearance on MSNOW, formerly MSNBC, adding that debating Donalds would not be constructive and would just create further division.
“Voter literacy is what fact-checking does,” Samantha Putterman, a PolitiFact journalist who has fact-checked several claims made during this election cycle, said.
So, how true are the biggest claims they have made this election season?
Jolly’s hurricane insurance proposal
Jolly’s biggest priority is affordability, according to his campaign website. One of the ways he plans to address that is by creating a state disaster fund he says will cut insurance premiums for homeowners by 60% to 70%. In a Sept. 8 ad, Donalds said the fund would essentially create a hurricane tax, costing homeowners more, not less.
Both claims are missing some context.
Jolly’s proposal is to create a state-backed fund to carry the risk of hurricanes and wind, so the insurance companies don’t factor those risks into their prices. The fund would be paid for by taxing the insurance companies, according to Jolly’s website.
This fund technically already exists, but it’s utilized differently. It was created in 1993 to stabilize the insurance market after Hurricane Andrew caused more than $26 billion in damage in South Florida. Currently, it serves as a backup insurer to reimburse insurance companies for a portion of damage caused by catastrophic disasters.
Jolly’s proposal would convert that fund to a primary insurer for wind insurance, instead of a backup insurer, covering that wind risk upfront rather than after a disaster occurs.
He claims removing wind coverage from the insurance process would save homeowners 64% on their premiums.
A similar policy is already in play in California. California’s FAIR Plan provides state-backed wildfire coverage for homeowners who can’t find insurance through the private market. Wildfire risk is separated from the standard insurance policies, much like Jolly proposes hurricane risk is separated.
But, according to Mark Friedlander, the director of the Insurance Information Institute, it nearly doubled insurance costs for Californians rather than lowering them because they had to buy two plans, rather than one all-inclusive policy.
This is slightly different from Jolly’s proposal, though, as the hurricane risk would be covered by taxing the insurance companies, rather than having homeowners buy a separate policy.
The California plan is comparable to Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, which is a state-backed insurance company that provides coverage for homeowners who can’t purchase coverage through the private market.
However, when state-backed insurers hold too many policies, they risk not being able to meet claims in a disaster, which would then result in a surcharge on all insurance plans to make up for the difference, essentially a hurricane tax.
“You never want your state-backed insurer to be your largest insurer,” he said. “They are only there as a back stop, that is what was intended by the state Legislature.”
However, following a series of legislative reforms that significantly decreased fraudulent claims in 2023, the insurance industry is strong enough to prevent that from happening.
Citizens insurance now holds less than 300,000 policies in Florida, the lowest on record, and insurance premiums are actually decreasing year-over-year as the reforms attracted more insurers to Florida, leading to increased competition, and therefore, lower premiums.
“They’re heading in the right direction,” he said. “The Florida insurance market is in its strongest fiscal position in a decade.”
He said insurers are in a good position to cover major loss events, like a catastrophic hurricane, without major shortfalls in meeting claims.
“Our opinion is the reforms are working very well, and results prove it,” Friedlander said. “We think it would be not in the best interest of consumers to make further changes.”
Jolly’s plan doesn’t make hurricanes less risky, it just changes who bears that risk.
But if a catastrophic hurricane depleted the fund, the state would have to finance the plan with money from elsewhere, a debt that could eventually fall back onto taxpayers.
Because of that possibility, Donalds claimed that the proposal is essentially creating a $1,000 hurricane tax on Floridians. This claim also lacks important context.
The precise $1,000 figure came from a Florida State University study completed Aug. 31, called the Expanded Windstorm Coverage Feasibility study, which was commissioned by the Florida Legislature in 2024. The study researched what would happen if all wind coverage was shifted away from the private market and insurance companies covered only non-wind risks, but did not look at Jolly’s proposal specifically.
According to PolitiFact, the study, which does not have publicly available results, found shifting wind coverage away from private insurers would create more predictable insurance prices, but it would also reduce competition and create a single point of financial failure.
The idea of a $1,000 hurricane tax comes from the study saying policyholders could be charged that amount every year after a catastrophic storm if the catastrophe fund becomes depleted.
“To give people that kind of information, which can completely, depending on the person and what they care about, it could change how they view a candidate,” Putterman said about the clarification of this claim.
VERDICT: Jolly’s hurricane insurance likely will not save homeowners money on insurance, but it also will not create a $1,000 hurricane tax outright, as Donalds claimed. Neither of the candidates’ claims are correct.
Does Jolly support offshore oil drilling?
Jolly says no, but Donalds says his record shows otherwise.
In 2011, when Jolly was serving as a lobbyist before becoming a congressman, his firm supported a bill that would have expanded offshore drilling, which was prohibited within 230 miles of Tampa Bay and 125 miles of the Florida Panhandle at the time.
According to a lobbying disclosure form Jolly submitted, which was cited by Politifact, he attended a meeting where the bill was discussed, but he claimed he did not actively lobby for it. However, under federal lobbying rules, his attendance at the meeting technically constituted lobbying.
So, Jolly’s claim that he never lobbied for offshore oil drilling is technically not true.
However, while serving in Congress, Jolly supported an extension of the ban on drilling in the eastern Gulf, saying the state didn’t need to risk Florida’s beaches just to increase oil production.
He now takes a strong position against oil drilling off Florida’s coast, advocating for a phasing out of oil production entirely. So, the answer is no, Jolly does not currently support offshore drilling.
VERDICT: Donalds’ claim that Jolly lobbied for expanded offshore drilling in the past is technically true, but neither candidate currently supports the practice.
Does Donalds support AI data center development?
The answer is unclear.
One of Jolly’s biggest selling points among moderate voters is his stance on artificial intelligence data centers, with a promise to enact an immediate one-year moratorium on data center development if elected.
Donalds holds a slightly different position that has changed throughout the duration of the 2026 election season.
He previously supported AI infrastructure development, calling it important to the growth of the state, a position he has taken a step back from in recent months as public opinion surrounding the topic swayed in the opposite direction.
In July, he introduced a bill to the Legislature to ensure the costs of data center development are not passed down to taxpayers, and now supports a more cautious approach to development, supporting local control over decisions of whether or not to allow them.
However, data center supporters and developers have donated more than $5 million to Donalds’ campaign, causing some to question his position on the subject, although he claims the funding has no influence over his decisions.
VERDICT: Donalds’ stance on data centers is unclear.
Does Jolly want more taxes on Floridians?
The short answer is no. The claim originates from Jolly’s opposition to a bill that would eliminate taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, although the reason he opposed the legislation was because it also cut Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding.
In an August X post, Jolly did say it’s fair to tax wages however they are earned, but he would support certain tax breaks for tips above the standard wage rate.
In an August campaign ad, Donalds said Jolly wants to tax people more, and Floridians can’t afford that.
However, the governor of Florida would have no control over the taxes Donalds refers to in the ad because Florida doesn’t have an income tax.
That’s the clarification Putterman said PolitiFact was aiming to make with its fact check of this claim. Donalds’ ad refers to Republicans’ federal tax and spending law, which included temporary breaks for tips, overtime and many older Americans. Jolly wasn’t in Congress when the bill passed; he spoke against it because of its cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and tax breaks for large corporations.
“We had to do a fact check on that to explain that this position that Jolly is going for, it would not affect any of those taxes,” she said. “And we needed to add context that Jolly had said he does not support taxing Social Security. We didn’t find any evidence he ever had.”
VERDICT: Jolly does not support additional taxes on Floridians.
Jacob Neiheisel, an associate professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, said attacking opponents is a common political strategy.
“Usually as Election Day approaches, they tend to pivot toward attacking each other,” he said.
First, they have to get their names out there, especially when there is no incumbent.
“Given that they’re both fighting for this open seat, I think that both are going to have to establish themselves before going on to exchange blows,” Neiheisel said.
But once both candidates get to that point, launching attacks on their opponents can actually be an effective campaign strategy.
“For the most part, we think that attack advertising works because it draws a lot of attention,” he said. “You can go too far.”
If a candidate airs an ad too negative, it can turn people off. However, those extreme ads are usually produced by third-party advertisers, Neiheisel said, so the candidates themselves can insulate themselves from the backlash.
Neiheisel said if candidates lie, it may not have much of an impact on their campaigns.
“Among people who are deeply partisan, they’re going to stick with their team and they’re going to tend to distrust anything that is negative about their team,” he said. “So, there is a discounting factor that happens there.”
He added that people generally expect politicians to be untruthful, so it’s less surprising and impactful when they find out that a candidate lied.
In theory, the moderate voters would be the most persuaded by fact-checking, Neiheisel said.
“The problem with the moderate voters is moderates tend to be more checked out until later in the campaign,” he said.