What Could Have Been: Andrew Gillum and the Road Not Taken in Florida

On election night 2018, Andrew Gillum refused to concede until virtually every vote was counted. When the recount ended, the margin stood at 32,463 votes out of more than eight million cast — four-tenths of one percent. He had come closer to winning the Florida governorship than any Black candidate in the state's history, and he had done it as the first African American nominated for the office by either major party.

Three years earlier, another Black Floridian entered Congress. In February 2025, Byron Donalds stood on Fox News to announce his own run for governor, endorsed by President Trump. If he wins in 2026, he would become Florida's first Black governor. But Donalds is not simply Gillum's demographic successor — he is, in nearly every political particular, his opposite. Donalds voted on January 6 and 7, 2021 to object to the certification of the 2020 presidential election. In a 2024 CNN interview he declined, repeatedly, to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, saying his answer was "always conditional." He has championed stricter voting identification requirements and opposed federal voting-rights legislation. At a 2024 campaign event in Philadelphia he said that during Jim Crow "the Black family was together" and that Black people "have always been conservative-minded," later insisting the remarks were taken out of context. Whatever one concludes from that record, it is a measure of what has changed in American politics that the man now positioned to make history in Florida built his rise on objections to it.

The Making of a Mayor

Gillum's rise began at Florida A&M University. He arrived in Tallahassee in 1998, joined the Student Government Association as a senator, became its Senate President, and served as SGA president from 2001 to 2002 — the first student member of the FAMU Board of Trustees. He graduated in December 2003 with a degree in political science, by which point he was already an elected official.

In February 2003, at twenty-three, Gillum won a seat on the Tallahassee City Commission with 57 percent of the vote — the youngest person ever elected to the body. He was reelected in 2004, unopposed in 2008 and 2012, and served until 2014, when he was elected the 126th mayor of Tallahassee with about 75 percent of the primary vote. As mayor he presided over a city that is home to two universities and a state capital, and he built a national profile by arguing that cities, not just states or Washington, are where inclusion is tested. In August 2018 he upset a field of better-funded opponents — a congresswoman, two millionaires — to win the Democratic nomination for governor.

The general election against Ron DeSantis became one of the closest in Florida history. Gillum conceded on November 17, 2018, after the machine recount, losing 4,043,723 to 4,076,186. Two years later, at the height of a pandemic summer, his state — and the nation — were governed by the man who defeated him.

The Fall and the Reckoning

Gillum's life after the race has been public in ways few politicians experience. On the night of March 12–13, 2020, Miami Beach police responding to a reported overdose found him in a hotel room with two men; officers reported finding suspected crystal methamphetamine. Gillum was not charged. That day he said: "While I had too much to drink, I want to be clear that I have never used methamphetamines." Days later he announced he was entering a rehabilitation facility. "Since my race for governor ended, I fell into a depression that has led to alcohol abuse," he said in March 2020.

In July 2020, in an eleven-minute video message, he spoke about what had happened: "I totally underestimated the impact that losing the race for governor had on my life... All the things I wanted to suppress and numb and forget about, that depression around what I was experiencing there became far too much for me to keep down." He invoked his father, who battled alcohol addiction and died from its complications: "I knew that if I didn't want to recycle many of those same issues for my children that I had to do something about it and I had to do it now." That September, on the Tamron Hall show, he spoke publicly for the first time about his sexuality: "I don't identify as gay, but I do identify as bisexual."

The legal reckoning came separately. In June 2022, a federal grand jury indicted Gillum and his longtime adviser Sharon Lettman-Hicks on a 21-count indictment — conspiracy, nineteen counts of wire fraud, and charges of making false statements to the FBI — arising from an investigation into Tallahassee development politics. In May 2023, after a four-week trial, a jury acquitted him of lying to the FBI and deadlocked on the remaining counts. Ten days later, federal prosecutors moved to dismiss the entire remaining indictment, reportedly after learning that ten of twelve jurors had favored acquittal. The case was over. His name had not been cleared in a trial of the facts, but he was never convicted, and the government's case was gone.

What He Is Doing Now

Since January 2024 Gillum has co-hosted Native Land Pod, a weekly political roundtable with Angela Rye and Tiffany D. Cross, the flagship program of a new political podcast network. It is, in its way, the continuation of the career the 2018 race interrupted: a Black political voice in conversation, at national scale, outside the structures that once elevated and then discarded him.

A Long Line of Black Florida Leaders

Gillum's run grew out of a longer story. Josiah T. Walls, a formerly enslaved Union veteran, became Florida's first Black member of Congress in 1870. After Reconstruction ended, more than a century passed before another Black Floridian won a seat in Congress. In 1992, after new district lines were drawn, Alcee Hastings, Carrie Meek and Corrine Brown all won seats at once.

Hastings and Gillum make a telling pair. Jimmy Carter appointed Hastings a federal judge in 1979. A jury acquitted him of bribery in 1983, but the House impeached him anyway, and the Senate removed him from the bench in 1989. Three years later, voters sent him to Congress, and he served until he died in 2021. Gillum's legal troubles came after 2018. He was indicted on federal charges in 2022, a jury acquitted him on one count in 2023, and prosecutors then dropped the rest. Both men show how legal trouble can follow Black officeholders, and how Black voters have often weighed that trouble on their own terms.

Carrie Meek, the granddaughter of an enslaved person, served in Congress from 1993 to 2003. Her son Kendrick Meek took her seat and in 2010 became the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, finishing third in a race won by Marco Rubio.

No Democrat has won the governorship since Lawton Chiles, who was elected in 1990 and 1994. Gillum, the first Black major-party nominee for governor of Florida, came the closest. He lost to Ron DeSantis in 2018 by about 32,000 votes, roughly 0.4 percentage points.

A new generation carries the line forward. Jerry Demings, a former Orlando police chief and Orange County sheriff, became Orange County's first Black mayor in 2018; Val Demings, his wife, was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in 2022. Angie Nixon, a state representative from Jacksonville and one of the legislature's most outspoken progressive voices, is now running for the U.S. Senate in Florida's special election. Geraldine Thompson, who died in 2025, spent her years in the legislature pressing Florida to remember the 1920 Ocoee massacre.

What Could Have Been

There is no honest way to write about Andrew Gillum without asking what Florida lost. A Gillum governorship would have confronted the same pandemic, the same fights over schools and voting, with an entirely different orientation — toward expanding Medicaid, toward the classroom, toward the franchise. Instead, Florida got a governor who made the state the laboratory for a national cultural war, and now a candidate for that office whose record includes opposing the certification of a presidential election he lost.

The comparison is not merely about ideology. It is about what Black political power in Florida was allowed to mean, and what it was not. Gillum came within four-tenths of a percent of showing what a progressive Black governor could do in the third-largest state. Donalds may yet show what a different kind of Black governor would do there — a man who lionized Jim Crow's family values, fought voting access, and built his career on a party's grievance politics. History offered Florida both. The question, in 2026, is which it chooses.