State Sen. Jason Pizzo, who assumes the high-profile role of Florida Senate Democratic leader in two months, may run for governor in 2026. He isn’t saying he’s a candidate.
And in an interview, he said he’s focused on his two years as party leader in the Senate following the November elections, and on knotty issues facing Florida. But he’s also clearly thought about the opportunity and obstacles presented by the governor’s job voters will fill in 2026, when Gov. Ron DeSantis is ineligible to run again because of term limits.
He described a scenario where “somebody like me” could get elected. “I think I would offer the best chance” for the Democrats, Pizzo said. “When you go down the checklist of boxes, the pros and cons, yeah, I would like my chances.
” Discussion about the 2026 election is premature, he said. “I don’t have a plan for 2026. It’s what’s right in front of me.
Greatest line I ever heard was from my dad saying, ‘Finish the circle. Close the circle,” Pizzo said, adding that 2026 is “a lifetime away. I really don’t know.
” Pressed about whether he’s contemplating a candidacy, he acknowledged he’s given it some thought, saying he’s “not crazy about our bench, to be honest with you,” referring to the slew of potential candidates who might seek the Democratic nomination for governor. Pizzo said the large number of no party affiliation voters — who make up 3.5 million of Florida’s 13.
7 million registered voters — are looking for something different than what Democrats have offered up in recent elections. They would “love to have an alternative, would like to dip their toe into something else.” What doesn’t, and won’t, work, Pizzo said, is having “people run all the time and switch different seats and just recycle the same old she’s running again, he’s running again.
Give it up, go get a hobby, go play golf or something.” Republicans greatly outnumber Democratic registered voters by almost 1 million. That gap isn’t the biggest reason Democrats have lost each of the last seven gubernatorial elections in Florida, he said.
“When Democrats had a 600,000-voter registration advantage, we didn’t win the governor’s mansion either.” He discussed the governor’s race in response to questions during an interview with South Florida Sun Sentinel opinion writers and a news reporter. Related Articles Pizzo thinks the Republicans — who like the Democrats have a large field of people who’d like to be governor — may not nominate a candidate who would be the most electable in a general election.
His assessment assumes that there are many Republican candidates in the 2026 gubernatorial primary, and is focused on U.S. Rep.
Matt Gaetz, the Panhandle Republican who is a polarizing political figure, is close to former President Donald Trump, and is cheered by many in the party and reviled by others. “Someone like Matt Gaetz runs and gets 23%, 25% plurality vote in the GOP crowded primary,” Pizzo theorized. If three currently elected statewide Republicans, Attorney General Ashley Moody, Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, run, he sees “that gaggle” getting 60% or 61% of the vote.
Finally he sees U.S. Rep.
Byron Donalds, another conservative allied with Trump, getting 16%. In that situation, Pizzo said, “I think Matt Gaetz is your GOP general election candidate, and the most vulnerable in a general election.” Under that scenario — “somebody like me versus Matt Gaetz” — Pizzo saw a good outcome.
“I’m a law and order guy. I used to handle (as a prosecutor) shootings, homicides of children,” he said. “I have no skeletons.
I wear my heart on my sleeve. I’m incredibly transparent, sometimes people say too candid. “I go to bed with it as clear of a conscience as I possibly can.
Because he’s, you know, got a lot of issues, a lot of things that have not come to light.” Pizzo didn’t provide specifics. Gaetz was investigated by the U.
S. Justice Department, which ended its probe without charges. The U.
S. House Ethics Committee said in June it was reviewing allegations that the congressman may have “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.” In a response posted on social media , Gaetz noted that previous investigations by the Ethics Committee were closed, criticized the panel for “opening new frivolous investigations.
They are doing this to avoid the obvious fact that every investigation into me ends the same way: my exoneration.” Pizzo suggested he’d outwork anyone else who might enter the race. “If somebody’s willing to get up earlier than me, go to bed later than me, be more available and be good at this, I’ll write their first campaign check,” he said, something he doesn’t see happening.
Pizzo declined to say when he’d have to make a decision if he did decide to run. No candidate has a lot of time; potential hopefuls will make detailed assessments after this year’s elections, and potential hopefuls typically would start laying groundwork in 2025 even if they don’t make formal announcements until 2026. Pizzo, 48, is the state senator for eastern Broward .
He’s well known in political circles in South Florida and Tallahassee, but isn’t one of the county’s best known political figures. He lives in Miami-Dade County, where he was an assistant state attorney and served in the State Senate. When redistricting put his home in a mostly Broward district starting in 2022, he was elected to a new term without opposition, so people in the county have never voted in an election in which his name was on the ballot.
He’s currently chair of the Broward Legislative Delegation. (The 37th state Senate district, which Pizzo represents, takes in most of Broward east of Interstate 95 from Davie Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale north to the Palm Beach County line. South of Davie Boulevard it takes in nearly all of Broward east of Florida’s Turnpike.
It includes the downtown Fort Lauderdale business district, wealthy enclaves along the coast, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Port Everglades. (It also includes a pocket of northeast Miami-Dade County, including Aventura.) He described himself as “the nerd” who “read(s) every single draft of every single bill and amendment and I’m the one that catches things on proviso language in the back of the bill.
” As a senator, he is perhaps best known for work on laws governing condominiums. He was the senator representing Surfside, home to the Champlain Towers South condominium, which collapsed in 2021, killing 98 people. He’s also worked on criminal justice issues.
Pizzo, who has bachelor’s, master’s and law degrees from, respectively, New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Miami, is constantly on the go. Pizzo said he’s up for doing whatever it takes to make progress on his goals, policy or politically. He described a full-time approach to the part-time job of state legislator.
“I do 80- to 100-hour weeks. Our day starts at 6:30 or 7” in the morning and goes until late at night. “I will meet anyone at any time,” he said, before adding a caveat: “I don’t do lunch because I think it’s a waste of time.
” Elected to his first Senate term in 2018, he has the ability to do politics full time. He comes from a family that owns apartments, commercial space and office properties in the northeast; his state financial disclosure put his net worth at $59.1 million as of Dec.
31, 2023. Pizzo flatly rejected much of the image DeSantis has promulgated, especially the notion that he’s turned Florida into a promised land luring people to the state. “I’m so tired of the boasting of the free state of Florida, how wonderful it is, everybody’s rushing to come here,” Pizzo said.
“What gets people through the door is no state income tax to be clear. “Obviously, with the fatigue of people feeling agoraphobic in their homes and wanting to get out during COVID, this is a nice place to come. Now, it’s like all of a sudden everyone has to start adulting and they’re like, holy crap insurance is out of control and spiraling upwards, right, exponentially upwards.
Cost of living, quality of life, all of these things, public safety, affordability, housing, infrastructure. I have some beautiful buildings in my district, (it) looks like Dubai in Sunny Isles right now, but they still flush their toilets in the 65 year old broken clay pipes.” For much of his time in office, almost all of the state’s Republicans went along with almost everything DeSantis wanted, even if they privately disagreed with the governor’s priorities.
DeSantis’ clout was at his zenith before his ultimately unsuccessful candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Pizzo said he never thought DeSantis as a presidential candidate would “resonate because he lacks grace and compassion and humility and human, sort of human grace.” DeSantis still has a lot of clout with two-plus years in office — “the governor still has the power of the pen” to sign or veto legislation and appropriations — but it isn’t quite what it once was when many Florida Republicans thought he might be moving into the White House in 2025, Pizzo said.
“You all saw Wilton Simpson (the former Senate president and current state agriculture commissioner) have to stand there basically and get neutered or emasculated by DeSantis cutting all of his appropriations projects for his district.” Ultimately, Pizzo said, Simpson got what he needed from DeSantis — an endorsement for his candidacy for agriculture commissioner — after something of a slow, tortured wait. DeSantis’ “political capital is waning,” Pizzo said, though his Republican colleagues would be “respectful” to the governor.
He said he, too, has respect for the office of governor, regardless of the occupant, an attitude he attributed to his father. “You wish people well. I wish DeSantis well.
I wish things would go better.” And, he said, broader circumstances could contribute to a change in Tallahassee. In recent years, he said much of the policy under DeSantis and the Republican Legislature has emanated from far-right organizations.
“These are borne out of think tanks with guys drinking old Scotch and cigars, sitting around in leather-back chairs, very Ron Burgundy style, conjuring up these ideas.” The need to respond to public pressure, to deal with the crisis in affordability of insurance, may change the focus. “Insurance and other issues are far outweighing the polling clout” that DeSantis has enjoyed.
His public description of the DeSantis-Simpson political dance aside, Pizzo has productive relationships with many Republicans in the Senate. “I’ve worked across the aisle,” Pizzo said. He often brings up the common practice of letting Democrats like Pizzo introduce legislation, which gets killed, and later gets sponsored by a Republican who takes public credit.
He said there are more than 20 bills that he filed at some point “that a Republican put their name on and almost verbatim on the language, filed again one to five years later and it passes.” He said he warns Republicans in advance about the questions he’s going to pose about their legislation, and tends not to put them on public blast. “I prefer to call people in before I call them out because that’s the most effective way of doing it and not shaming anybody, and just trying to whisper in their ear and give them the information, they can take credit for it.
It’s fine.” He’s worked closely with state Sen. Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Resiliency.
(Pizzo is the vice chair). A year ago, Albritton participated in a Pizzo-arranged conference in Hollywood on resilience and emergency operations. At the same time Pizzo becomes Democratic leader after the November elections, Albritton will become president of the Florida Senate.
That does not mean, he said, that he abandons Democratic principles. “I’m not a sellout by any means,” he said. He personally sued the governor of the use of state money to fly migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
Though the lawsuit was unsuccessful, he said it resulted in a change to state law. “I’ve made a lot of friends on both sides along the way. But I made, you know there’s some people who are probably not happy with me,” he said.
Among them, he said, is a prominent figure in Democratic politics: Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. After endorsing her in 2020, Pizzo said he didn’t endorse her reelection this year. “I like her as a person.
I think she’s fantastic. She was the best candidate and all that stuff. But I’m tired of like pleasantries and platitudes and just assuming that everybody goes along with to get along,” he said.
Levine Cava is among many Democrats whose names have been floated, either by themselves or their allies, as potential candidates for the 2026 Democratic gubernatorial nomination. The list includes U.S.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz; state Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried, the former agriculture commissioner who unsuccessfully sought the nomination for governor in 2022; state House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell; and state Sen. Shevrin Jones.
It’s not clear how seriously some of those people should be taken as prospective candidates. Under the state’s resign-to-run law, Pizzo or Levine Cava would have to resign their current posts before their terms end. Moskowitz, first elected in 2022 and running for reelection this year, would have to cut short his congressional career.
With his district’s current boundaries, political insiders see Moskowitz as winning reelection as long as he wants to serve. Anthony Man can be reached at [email protected] and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
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