A female governor in Florida: Will it ever happen?

It was 2019, and on the distant horizon appeared a chance for Florida to have its first woman governor.

Republican Ashley Moody had just taken office as attorney general and Democrat Nikki Fried as agriculture commissioner – both young, charismatic women in statewide elected offices.

“Our next governor’s race will be Nikki Fried and Ashley Moody,” said Art Wood, a former Hillsborough County GOP chair, after hearing Fried speak at a Tiger Bay Club meeting at that time.

It would have been dramatic as well as historic: the first Florida governor’s race with two female major-party nominees. But the picture looks different in 2025.

Moody is a U.S. senator – Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed her – and she’s running for election for that seat in Congress.

Fried ran in the Democratic primary for governor in 2022, losing to Charlie Crist. She’s now the state Democratic Party chair and party insiders say Fried isn’t interested in a 2026 race; she didn’t return messages for comment. 

There are other potential women candidates for governor on both sides of the aisle, chiefly current First Lady Casey DeSantis and Gwen Graham. In the 2018 primary, Graham appeared to be the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination for governor, but lost to Andrew Gillum. In 2025, Graham has recently hinted that she might look at another run, according to her social media.

Further back, in 2010, Democrat Alex Sink looked like the favorite to win the governor’s race, but lost narrowly to Rick Scott.

So the 2026 governor’s race could again end up being mainly about men – either male candidates or, in DeSantis’s case, a prominent woman sponsored by a powerful man. In fact, GOP President Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are endorsing U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds for Florida governor in 2026, according to Axios.

“2026 may not be the year,” said veteran University of South Florida political analyst Susan MacManus.

Still no women governors in Florida

Florida, according to the Pew Research Center, is one of 18 states that have never had a female governor.

It has elected one female U.S. senator, Paula Hawkins, who swept narrowly into office in the 1980 Reagan landslide, only to lose her seat to former Florida Gov. Bob Graham six years later.

If this makes it sound as if Florida is an inhospitable state for women seeking high office, it really isn’t, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

“It’s not that Florida is not electing women,” she said. “It’s kind of an average state or a little above average.”

According to statistics from Pew, the Rutgers Center and Florida Trident analysis:

• Florida now has 8 women out of 28 seats in the U.S. House, counting two vacant seats likely to be filled by men in upcoming special elections. That’s 28 percent, almost exactly the national percentage.
• Nationally, a third of state legislators are women. Florida exceeds that with 42.5 percent – 68 of its 160 seats – and ranks 11^th in the nation.
• Until Moody’s appointment, Florida was one of 31 states that have had only one or no female senators.
• Florida has elected numerous women in the past to statewide executive positions other than governor — attorney general, agriculture commissioner, chief financial officer and lieutenant governor. But it now has none since Moody’s appointment and since Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez left to become president of Florida International University. Nationally women hold 31 percent of such offices.

MacManus said women “are doing very well right now” in Florida politics but noted the big gains nationally by women in recent elections stalled in 2024 and “kind of came to a plateau.” The percentage of women in Congress remained unchanged after 2024.

She said the future could see more female influence because women are increasingly more likely than men to register to vote and to go to the polls, and because younger women are becoming less fearful of running for office.

The registration gap between men and women is now about 8 percent and still growing, she said.

MacManus said young women candidates have told her they “have a perception that the parties discount them, and they aren’t waiting any more for the party to line up behind them.”

Republican voters outnumber Dems

Florida has some disadvantages when it comes to electing women, Walsh said. 

Women officeholders in Florida and nationwide are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, and Florida, formerly a swing state, has now become solidly Republican. Registered GOP voters outnumber Democrats 5.6 million to about 4.5 million, according to Florida Division of Elections data, and the state’s last two elections were GOP sweeps.

In the Florida Legislature, where Democrats now hold historically small minorities, more than half the Democratic legislators are women – 27 out of 43 – compared to just over a third of Republicans, 41 of 116, according to the Rutger Center.

Southern states are also less likely to elect women, at least to top executive positions, Walsh said. She acknowledged Florida is not a traditional southern state but still has a southern tinge. 

“All the states around you are faring much worse” in electing women, she said.

Sink, who won election as state chief financial officer in 2006 before losing to Rick Scott in the gubernatorial race in 2010, said the Democratic Party “has traditionally been a friendlier place for women,” partly because of its stance on abortion and reproductive health care.

Sink said moderate Republican women, formerly a political force in Florida, now have no place in the GOP.

“If you look at the language coming out of Washington and the people the MAGA movement is elevating, there’s a lot of unabashed misogynism,” she said, mentioning new defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others.

But Hillsborough County Republican Party Chair Carmen Edmonds disputed the notion that the GOP in Florida is inhospitable to women candidates.

“I think a woman or a minority would be readily embraced for governor or senate,” she said. “I just don’t know that any woman so far has stepped forward.”

Last year, Edmonds replaced Dana Galen, a woman who made headlines as the first Black Hillsborough County party chair.

Edmonds said the party’s goal right now in Florida is “to get younger.” That could include getting more female, as younger political activists include many women.

Walsh said “gender gap” voting, the tendency of women to vote more often than men for Democrats, applies more to party than to gender. Women are more likely to favor Democrats, but not necessarily women candidates.

But Sink said she felt definite anti-female bias from men in her 2010 race, which she lost narrowly.

She said her credentials as a high-level banker made her a comparatively easy winner for chief financial officer, “But when it comes to executive level positions like governor, it’s definitely a factor.”

When she spoke to law enforcement groups, she said, “I could feel they were thinking, we can’t have a woman as governor.”

Speculation abounds

On the Democratic side of 2026 governor’s race, speculation has centered on a handful of male candidates and several women including Fried, Tampa state Rep. Fentrice Driskell and Miami Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

Sink, a founder of Ruth’s List, a donor group promoting Democratic women candidates statewide, said she thinks none of the three are seriously interested.

The DeSantis camp has pushed the possibility that Casey DeSantis will run to replace her husband, through comments at press conferences and, according to news stories, quotes from unidentified donors.

Casey DeSantis might also face another issue.

Historically, dozens of women, sometimes widows, have been elected as governors or Congress members as surrogates for their husbands. The tradition dates to governors Ma and Pa Ferguson in Texas in the 1920s, Gov. Lurleen Wallace of Alabama in the 1960s, and as recently as sitting U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., according to the Rutgers Center and various historical sources.

But Debbie Walsh of Rutgers, said, “There used to be more of a stomach for that in earlier days. There’s more resistance now to the notion of a spouse stepping in as a kind of surrogate.”

She cited the case of New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy, who dropped out of a U.S. Senate race in 2024 after encountering what Walsh called “real resistance among voters and even party loyalists.”

Sink said she considers a Casey DeSantis run a serious possibility, in part because, “She’s been right there by his side and is supposedly the mastermind behind getting him where he is. She’s articulate and she’s got the personality.”

But University of Central Florida political analyst Aubrey Jewett said there could be another motive for floating Casey DeSantis as a candidate besides a serious interest in the race.

For his first six years as governor DeSantis dominated the Legislature to a degree rarely seen in Florida politics, in ways some legislators considered downright humiliating.

Now that he’s entering his final two years, legislators have rebelled against him on a number of issues including his prized immigration legislation.

Suggesting he could be in the governor’s mansion for four or eight more years “could be part of Gov. DeSantis’s attempt to continue to have more leverage, to avoid the perils of being a lame duck,” Jewett said.