With 99% of votes counted Byron Donalds leads David Jolly by about 1.3 points (50.0% to 48.7%) in the Associated Press count shown by The Guardian, far less than 5 points, and the last votes cannot close that gap; the Florida Division of Elections site does not yet list the 2026 results.
History. 1 of 4: Texas 1978 by 0.7 points; the other three were won by 13.3 points or more. The 5-point line comes from the spread of these results.
Hunch. Only 17% of American adults approve of how Trump handles the cost of living, the issue Donalds has built his campaign around.
The close race market resolves on the official result: YES if the gap between the winner and the second candidate is less than 5 percentage points of all votes cast for governor, NO if it is 5 points or more. BBC News and The Guardian are the backup.
We looked for cases where the president's party had won at least three governor elections in a row in a US state, the governor was not on the ballot in a midterm, the president's party also ran Congress, and pay was rising more slowly than prices. We found five since 1966 and could check four: three on one day in 1978 and one in 2022.