Jennifer Jenkins, who excited and heartened Democrats when she defeated a conservative School Board member, is now taking on a much bigger challenge for herself and her party: running for U.S. Senate in Florida.
Jenkins announced her candidacy Wednesday, challenging appointed U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla. She also offered criticism of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who put Moody in the job, and President Donald Trump.
As a Democratic candidate for statewide office in Florida, Jenkins’ path to victory is, at best, difficult. Florida voters are becoming more and more Republican and Democrats have a long losing streak in major statewide elections.
“I’m not going to lie,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy. I think we would be foolish to say that.”
“But I do believe that there is a really significant opportunity here for Democrats to take back the state of Florida — as long as we have a candidate who can relate to everyday people who keeps it focused on the most important pressing issues that affect people every single day in their lives like affordability and public education, and access to true freedoms across the state,” Jenkins said.
She said she understands what matters to Floridians. Jenkins said the “affordability crisis” is the overarching issue of the campaign.
“Florida families are getting crushed by skyrocketing costs. I mean, whether it’s property insurance or rent or groceries or utilities, we need to make sure that we have somebody who’s running to change that,” she said. “All across this country, but especially here in the state of Florida, we’re facing an affordability crisis, and I feel like we have representatives that aren’t doing anything. They don’t even know what it feels like, and I do.”
Jenkins is a speech pathologist. Making ends meet for her family in the post-pandemic era required her to work as a driver for a grocery delivery app, something she emphasized in an interview and in her announcement video as a way to illustrate how she can identify with the concerns of everyday Floridians.
Moody was twice elected statewide as attorney general, and was a close ally of DeSantis, championing his agenda. DeSantis picked her this year to fill the vacancy left by Marco Rubio, when he resigned from the Senate to become Trump’s secretary of state.
DeSantis in 2022 and Trump in 2020 and 2024 performed well in Florida, but Jenkins said she thinks she can do well as a candidate by linking Moody to them. Asked if there’s anything she’d give Moody credit for, Jenkins said, “I think she’s done a really good job at rubber stamping anything that Donald Trump wants her to do.”
Jenkins said Moody and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., “continuously sell out Floridians. They work for insurance companies, they work for special interests, and they listen to the extremist leaders of their party. And it’s no wonder that the special interests keep winning and Floridians just keep getting screwed.”
Jenkins, 38, was born in Staten Island, N.Y., but has called Florida home since college. Her husband is a teacher and they have a daughter, age 9.
Jenkins has experience as an underdog candidate. In 2020 when she won her School Board seat in Brevard County, Trump won the county by 17 percentage points. She said she won “by being true to who I am, by being truly passionate about why I was running, and by being willing to show up in places and spaces where traditionally someone like me may not show up.”
Jenkins defeated Tina Descovich, who went on to become a co-founder of the conservative group Moms For Liberty. In the politically contentious COVID environment, she faced protests and threats, something she shows viewers in her announcement video.
She said she didn’t run for reelection after other School Board members changed the districts in a way that made reelection impossible.
After Jenkins finished her single School Board term, she became chair of a national political organization called “Educated. We Stand.” It countered conservative school board candidates and opposed Moms for Liberty policies. She said she just just left that role to focus on the Senate campaign.
Jenkins enters the race with a little less than a year until the August 2026 Democratic primary and a little more than a year until the November 2026 general election. No other major candidates are running as Democrats; a former congressional candidate, Josh Weil, announced earlier this year he was running, but he later dropped out citing serious health problems.
Jenkins announced her candidacy Wednesday in a campaign video. “We’ve let MAGA extremists and out-of-touch billionaires take over our country. And while we fight for the minimum to get by, our Senator Ashley Moody got handed a U.S. Senate seat, knowing she’ll do exactly what Trump, DeSantis, and the billionaires tell her to do,” she said in the video.
“Ashley Moody doesn’t know what it’s like to struggle paying for food, housing, health care and day care, but I do. And what’s why I’m running for the United States Senate. I’m fighting for my family and for all the families in Florida who work hard, fight harder, and won’t quit when the chips are down. And that fight starts today,” she concluded.
Political writer Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
