Florida Democrat enters US Senate race, wants independents to vote in the primary

Former Brevard County School Board Member Jennifer Jenkins is launching a longshot Democratic bid for Marco Rubio’s former Senate seat — and hoping the polarizing prospect of bringing independents into the party’s primary will strengthen her chances.

The Senate election will mark Jenkins’ first statewide race at a time when Florida Democrats have struggled to show a pulse, and after the last Democratic Senate candidate, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, lost by almost 13 points.

Jenkins’ biggest political win so far is a 2020 defeat of a Moms for Liberty cofounder for a formally nonpartisan school board seat in a Trump-majority county — a win that also placed her squarely in the middle of heated local battles over covid, masking and LGBTQ rights in schools. She went on to lead a political committee focused on Florida school board races.

Jenkins insists that her experience overperforming among Republicans makes her optimistic, even in a party that hasn’t eked out a statewide win in almost seven years.

“I beat the Republican incumbent by nearly 10 [points] and I think it was just because I had integrity. I was honest about where I stood on the issues and people respected that,” Jenkins told the Miami Herald. “They knew they could trust that if we were to have a disagreement or a conversation that I wasn’t going to move the goal post.”

She points to her background as a community college student, University of Central Florida graduate, speech pathologist and parent in a new campaign video launched Wednesday, where she says she knows “what its like to struggle paying for food, housing, healthcare and daycare.”

She’s eyeing another possibility that could give her statewide campaign a boost: opening the Democratic primary to independent voters.

It’s a controversial proposal that party Chairwoman Nikki Fried has also pitched, garnering public backlash from some local party chairs who believe it would water down Democratic voters’ preferences and possibly pull the party to the right, particularly down ballot. Both Fried and Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairwoman Laura Kelley declined to comment for this story.

“It’s divisive within our own ranks and I don’t necessarily think it will fix the structural problems that our party has,” Democratic National Committee member and Orange County Democratic Party Chairman Samuel Vilchez Santiago said.

“It impacts negatively our Black voting base, it also impacts our progressive voting base,” he added. “Instead of being united or working together against the Trump administration and what DeSantis is doing here in Florida, we’re going to be having a pretty heated internal conversation about our primary process.”

Jenkins sees it as a way to bring independents into the conversation earlier in the election cycle.

“We get distracted by the Florida GOP bragging about their voter registration advantage, but we forget about the fact that one-third of the voters in the state of Florida are registered independents. And so allowing them to participate in our primary brings them into the fold,” Jenkins told the Herald.

As to potential intra party backlash? “That’s the reality of the reflection of the state and don’t we want representatives to reflect the actual makeup of the state and the majority of people who are living here?”

The proposal is still hypothetical and would face logistical hurdles. But some Democratic consultants are also pushing the idea, arguing that the party has little left to lose after years of statewide losses. Republicans also have 1.3 million more active registered voters than Democrats.

“It’s not like the current system is working well for us,” Florida Democratic consultant Steve Schale told the Herald. “I don’t know what we’re protecting by keeping a closed primary other than just keeping doing what we’ve been doing, which over the last 10 years has led to loss after loss.”

Jenkins is now the most high-profile Democrat in the race. Repeat candidate Alan Grayson has also launched a bid. Progressive former Congressional candidate Josh Weil briefly entered the Senate race earlier this year, but has since dropped out, citing health reasons. U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz told journalist Chuck Todd that he would “perhaps” look at a run if the Florida Legislature gerrymanders his South Florida congressional district.

If she wins the primary, Jenkins would likely be running against Republican U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody, who Gov. Ron DeSantis put in the seat after Donald Trump tapped Rubio for secretary of state. She won her last statewide race, for attorney general in 2022, with 60% of the vote.

Even though it’s a longshot election for Democrats, after years as a target of the right on the school board in Brevard County, Jenkins says she has thick skin for the higher profile race: “There’s very few things that scare me anymore.”

The winner of next year’s special election will keep the seat until the end of Rubio’s original term in 2028.

This story was originally published September 10, 2025 at 5:00 AM.