At high noon Friday, Republican Rep. David Jolly surprised absolutely no one by announcing that he would abandon his bid for Senate and instead run for re-election. Jolly had long telegraphed this move, which comes amid heightened speculation that Sen. Marco Rubio will also reverse course and seek re-election, though Rubio has only suggested he might do so in the vaguest of terms.
That didn't stop Jolly from stepping on his own announcement by going on CNN Friday morning and declaring that "Marco is saying he is getting in"—only for a spokesman to later have to admit that Jolly "has no actual knowledge of a Rubio decision." What a weird way to kick off your own campaign—but then again, Jolly's a weird dude.
Jolly had led in most polls of the GOP Senate primary, but despite being the nominal frontrunner, he was a truly terrible fundraiser. Things got so bad, in fact, that Jolly tried to make a virtue out of his failings by declaring in January that he was simply going to stop raising money altogether—and even proposed a stunty piece of legislation that would have forbidden members of Congress from personally seeking campaign contributions.
A goofy move, but then Jolly really went too far. In April, Jolly was featured in a 60 Minutes piece on the gory details of campaign fundraising. The show made very ordinary practices seem somehow sketchy, even sneaking hidden cameras into NRCC headquarters, which Jolly called "a cult-like boiler room" filled with "sweatshop phone booths."
As you might imagine, that pissed off the NRCC something fierce, leading the committee's executive director to publicly fire off a letter that accused Jolly of spreading lies—and even likened 60 Minutes' entry into the NRCC's offices to Watergate! It's extraordinarily unusual for a party committee to attack one of its own incumbents like this, but now the NRCC is stuck with Jolly and his crappy fundraising, though it's not happy about it. Said a spokesperson following Friday's news:
"The NRCC was not included in his 'deliberations' and has not had any discussions with David about him running for re-election."
You can just feel the sneer in those scare-quotes around the word "deliberations." But the question still remains, is there—despite this whole mess—any sort of upside for the GOP here?
At least one prominent Republican has gone on record saying he doesn't think so: David Jolly. Last year, when the state Supreme Court ordered changes to Florida's congressional map, Jolly declared that "virtually every person in the political sphere will tell you no Republican can win" the redrawn 13th District, which shifted from one that Barack Obama won by just 2.5 points to one he carried by almost 11.
Jolly's analysis wasn't off-base, which is why he decided to run for Senate instead. And the GOP's chances at holding the 13th grew even narrower once former Gov. Charlie Crist entered the race for the Democrats. Throughout his career, Crist has always done well in Pinellas County, which contains his base in the city of St. Petersburg. Crist carried the new version of the 13th, which is contained entirely within Pinellas, both during his 2010 run for Senate as an independent and his 2014 bid for governor as a Democrat, despite losing both races statewide.
But even before Rubio started bigfooting around the Senate race, Jolly's odds of winning his party's nomination weren't great, despite his early poll leads. As what passes for one of the more moderate members of the GOP these days (he was an early Trump critic), Jolly was always going to struggle against the conservative true believers (like Rep. Ron DeSantis) and rampaging nativists (that would be wealthy businessman Carlos Beruff) he was going up against. And of course, there's that fundraising issue: It's pretty hard to win a primary in a state as big as Florida without a lot of money.
Against this backdrop, local Republican leaders began pushing Jolly to reconsider and run for the House again, claiming they had polling showing that he "could" beat Crist, in spite of the long odds. Well, "could" is a big word, and no one ever shared those polls publicly, though a survey from St. Pete Polls did show the race tied at 44. St. Pete, however, has a pretty checkered record, so we're not taking those numbers as any kind of gospel.
That said, Jolly does have a better chance than the Republican Some Dudes currently running in the 13th, so we're moving our rating on this race from Likely Democratic to Lean Democratic. But Jolly's not in a good place, particularly with Donald Trump wreaking havoc at the top of the ticket. Crist is still favored, and it would take a hell of a lot to go right for Jolly to win—following a year in which most things have gone wrong.