Rep. Jolly to announce Florida Senate plans on Friday

Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) says he’ll make a decision by Friday whether to continue his campaign for the open Senate seat in his state amid calls from GOP leaders for the incumbent, Marco Rubio, to run for reelection.

Jolly told reporters off the House floor Wednesday afternoon that he’ll make an announcement Friday morning about his future plans. He laid out three options: stay in the Senate GOP primary, drop his Senate bid and run for reelection in the House, or forgo serving another term in Congress altogether.

Florida’s filing deadline to launch House and Senate campaigns is next Friday, June 24 at noon. But Jolly said he wants to make his plans clear ahead of time regardless of when Rubio makes a decision on whether to run for reelection at the behest of Senate GOP leaders. 

{mosads}”What happens if Marco makes a decision at 11:59? I’m not going to be subjected to the whims of Marco’s final decision,” Jolly said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other GOP leaders have privately and publicly urged Rubio to reconsider running for reelection. 

A Rubio reentry would scramble the five-way GOP primary for the Florida Senate seat. In addition to Jolly, Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), businessman Todd Wilcox and real estate developer Carlos Beruff have declared their candidacies. 

Further complicating matters is that Lopez-Cantera is a close friend of Rubio.

Yet Jolly appeared to predict that Rubio, who suspended his presidential campaign earlier this year, would decide to run for the Senate.

“I think ultimately he decides to get in. Clearly the orchestration by Republican leadership on the other side of the aisle has shown their hand as well, and I think ultimately he accepts their recruiting effort to get back in,” he said.

Jolly accused GOP leaders for staying on the sidelines for the last year, only to throw a wrench in the primary late in the game. He went on to argue that a failure to recruit Rubio would damage the rest of the GOP field and amount to helping the likely Democratic candidate, Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Fla.). 

“The message from Senate Republican leadership was very clear to the five candidates in the race in the past three weeks. And if they are unsuccessful in getting Marco in the race, boy, they have done a lot of damage to the Republican field. And in many ways, have made an in-kind contribution to the Senate campaign of Patrick Murphy,” Jolly said.

Jolly, a former lobbyist and Capitol Hill staffer who won a special election in 2014, has drawn ire from fellow Republicans for his extended appearance on a recent “60 Minutes” segment about the influence of money in politics. In the piece, Jolly touted that he was no longer meeting the fundraising expectations and claimed he had been told to raise the equivalent of $18,000 a day for reelection.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the House GOP’s campaign arm, issued a scathing statement accusing Jolly of mounting a “publicity stunt designed to help a lagging and underfunded Senate campaign.”

Should Jolly decide to run for reelection to the House, he’d face former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican-turned-Democrat who lost to Rubio in the 2010 Senate race.