One Point or Four? Florida's Last Two Polls Put Donalds Ahead of Jolly — and Inside the Margin Is Where They Disagree
A 2,898-voter RedBox Research survey released Monday has Byron Donalds at 47 percent and David Jolly at 46 — a one-point lead inside its own margin of error. Research Co.'s final survey says 51 to 47. Both say Donalds leads; neither says by enough to call Tuesday early.
Florida's governor's race got its last two voter polls on Monday, and they agree on the leader while arguing about everything else. RedBox Research, polling for the super PAC A Fight Worth Having, surveyed 2,898 Florida likely voters and found Republican Byron Donalds at 47 percent and Democrat David Jolly at 46 — a one-point Donalds lead that sits inside the poll's own margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 points. It is, in the pollster's own framing, a narrow lead, not a settled one.
Research Co.'s final survey, conducted online from October 31 to November 2 among 450 likely voters in the state, found a wider gap in the same direction: Donalds 51 percent, Jolly 47. The same Research Co. release put the U.S. Senate race at Republican Ashley Moody 53 percent, Democrat Angie Nixon 46. The two polls' disagreement is mostly arithmetic — a sample of 2,898 carries a far tighter margin than a sample of 450 — and partly generational: RedBox's age splits are stark, with Jolly ahead by 62 points among voters 18 to 29 and by 49 among voters 30 to 44, while Donalds leads by 9 among voters 45 to 64 and by 21 among voters 65 and older. Which electorate shows up on Tuesday decides which poll was describing Florida.
Set against this desk's Election Eve model file — FutureBallot's 76.8 percent modeled chance for Donalds and Kalshi's 61 percent market price — the voter polls are the narrowest instruments on the table, and the only ones that asked voters themselves this weekend. Florida has not elected a Democratic governor since Lawton Chiles in 1994, and Donalds would be the state's first Black governor. The polls close at 7 p.m. Tuesday. After that, the surveys stop mattering in the only way they ever could.
