Florida governor results: Donalds wins, but by how much?

Unofficial results checked November 4, 2026, at 2:20 a.m. Eastern.

Byron Donalds is NBC News’s projected winner of Florida’s governor election, with 50.0% against David Jolly’s 48.7% at 99% of the expected vote counted. His reported lead is 108,481 votes, or approximately 1.3 percentage points, with the count still unofficial. NBC6 results

For Miami readers, two questions follow: how different is this from Florida’s last midterm, and what could Donalds’s agenda change for household costs?

The result and the last midterm

Measure	2026 election-night snapshot	2022 completed result
Republican candidate	Donalds: 4,131,527 votes	Ron DeSantis: 4,614,210 votes
Democratic candidate	Jolly: 4,023,046 votes	Charlie Crist: 3,106,313 votes
Republican lead	108,481 votes	1,507,897 votes
Percentage-point lead	About 1.3	About 19.4

The historical figures come from Florida’s official 2022 results. Margins are calculated by subtracting the two candidates’ totals or displayed shares.

Republicans retained the office, but the near-complete reported margin is about 18.1 percentage points narrower than in 2022, calculated as 19.4 minus 1.3. This compares different candidates and an unfinished count with a completed election. It does not establish which voters switched parties, why they voted differently or the final size of the change.

Who won, and was he expected to?

Donalds is a Republican U.S. representative. Jolly is a former congressman who ran as a Democrat. Donalds’s victory makes him Florida’s first Black governor, according to AP’s election coverage.

The New York Times/Siena survey released October 28 put Donalds at 48% and Jolly at 44%. That establishes a pre-election lead in one poll, not a consensus forecast or a four-point guaranteed winning margin. Undecided voters and polling uncertainty also prevent a direct equation between the survey shares and the final result.

How the prediction market moved

The market’s path was not simply a steady march toward certainty. Florida Politics’s November 2 report recorded Donalds’s Yes price at 84 cents on August 18 and 63 cents on November 2. Our election-night observation after winner projections was 99.95 cents.

Those checkpoints suggest confidence weakened before rebounding after results. The first two are a newspaper’s reported observations, not our independently downloaded trade history. They cannot establish which event caused either move.

At approximately 10:20 p.m. Eastern, the Polymarket Florida governor contract labeled for Donalds showed a Yes price of 99.95 cents. Its reported changes were:

Window ending at the snapshot	Yes-price change
One day	+35.45 cents
One week	+23.45 cents
One month	+23.45 cents

These are rolling changes reported by the market, not independently sampled historical closing prices. The contract resolves on the party nominee, and this observation came after winner projections. It cannot be presented as evidence that traders assigned Donalds a 99.95% chance before voting ended.

A price describes a tradable contract’s valuation, not the percentage of Floridians supporting a candidate. It also cannot explain the cause of a price move without evidence tying trades to a particular event.

How much money did each side raise?

Florida Politics’s late-campaign accounting reported more than $173 million raised across Donalds’s campaign and Friends of Byron Donalds, against nearly $27 million across Jolly’s campaign and Florida 2026, through October 29. Reported spending exceeded $165 million on the Donalds side and approached $25 million on the Jolly side.

Those are combined campaign-and-committee figures. They should not be described as individual donations to each candidate or as a complete accounting of all independent spending. The distinction matters when comparing this contest with a federal race reported through the FEC.

What Donalds’s platform could mean for Miami

His published affordability agenda proposes an insurance comparison scorecard, changes to storm-hardening grants, faster rebuilding permits and measures intended to stop data-center costs being shifted onto other utility customers. Those are campaign commitments, not changes that take effect because a race has been called.

Reader concern	Proposal to watch	Evidence that it is becoming real
Home insurance	Insurer scorecard and mitigation grants	An operating comparison tool and published grant eligibility
Hurricane repairs	Faster rebuilding permits	Adopted procedures and the jurisdictions using them
Utility bills	Protection from data-center cost shifting	Specific rate rules or enacted legislation

For a Miami household, the meaningful follow-up is the implementation document: who qualifies, when a rule starts and which charge it affects. A campaign’s promise to reduce costs does not establish the amount on a particular renewal notice or utility bill.

Also read what Florida Amendment 3’s result changes for Miami.