Donalds and Jolly Make Their Final Pleas for Florida - and Both of Them Started the Last Full Week in Escambia County

The race for Florida governor began its final full week in Escambia County. The campaigns of U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the Republican, and former U.S. Rep. David Jolly, the Democrat, both appeared in the county to open the week - the campaigns supplied the photographs of the Pensacola stops - before touring the state with their running mates and picking up down-ballot candidates at stops along the way, NorthEscambia reported Sunday. A Democrat has not occupied the governor's mansion since early 1999, and the two men's closing arguments are mirror images of that fact: Donalds is running on continuity, Jolly on the counties where continuity has not paid.

Donalds' pitch is that the record is the argument. 'In Florida we've been consistent for a very long time, and now under Governor DeSantis it's been supercharged,' he declared when his Defending the Florida Dream Tour stopped in Tallahassee on Tuesday morning. 'And what have we seen as a result? We've become the number one state in all of America.' His surrogates sharpened it: Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia told supporters that what Democrats hope is a blue wave 'winds up a little blue trickle and it hits into a big red wall,' and his running mate, former state senator Bryan Avila, said Democrats 'don't believe in freedom; they believe in socialism.' Jolly, whose strategy is to run up numbers in South Florida and the urban counties while limiting Republican margins across northern Florida, answered the label directly at his Believe in Better Tour stop in Tallahassee on Tuesday evening: 'They're yelling communism, socialism, radicalism. We're not radical, we're not even cool, folks.'

Jolly's closing case is arithmetic and the cost of living. 'We're leaving it all on the field,' he said, and, on the map his campaign has to solve, 'Let's be honest, where we have lost in the past, we've got to lose by less. And where we've won, we've got to win by more.' Democrats have hammered the governing party on prices for groceries, gas and insurance, and Jolly framed his economic pitch as repair rather than replacement: 'We want the economy to keep growing. Where it's working in Florida, let's keep it working. But it's not working for everybody.' The candidates have not appeared together to argue any of it face to face. Escambia County, where both chose to start the final full week, renders its share of the verdict on Tuesday.