Lenny Curry discusses his campaign in a May 12, 2015, TV appearance. | AP Photo, Brendan Farrington
Published on June 22, 2025 at 2:58 pm
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Former Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry can’t run for a third term. But the Republican who emerges in 2027 to take on Donna Deegan in May needs to figure out what made him a winner and how to bring 2015 style into the next local election.
It’s important for Republicans to understand how Curry got over. It wasn’t just that he was a former party chair, or that he had Rick Perry’s endorsement, or that he brought the normies back who Mike Hogan drove away. It’s that he was the most disciplined politician in local history, and that overcame other flaws in his game.
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What Curry did best and what the winning candidate should be getting ready to do after July 4 is find a way to win a news cycle everyday. He parlayed then-Jacksonville Sheriff John Rutherford’s endorsement and animus toward Mayor Alvin Brown into a compelling public safety message, one that was much more effective than whatever T.K. Waters did for Daniel Davis in 2023.
The “Liberty Street collapse,” an ill-timed infrastructure failing, provided more ammo. As did strategically timed Democratic endorsements – Johnny Gaffney, Denise Lee. And Brown’s campaign team never understood him, meaning the still-popular mayor’s message was muddled and left voters befuddled as he triangulated between conservatives and the activist left who wanted him to support LGBT protections in the Human Rights Ordinance.
Curry was nominally against the human rights proposal as Brown seemingly was before running for re-election, but some conservatives weren’t fooled. The mayor got out of the way, and a law got passed in the waning years of the Rick Scott era, legislation that probably wouldn’t pass amid today’s War on Woke.
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Timing is everything, and when Lenny Curry ran as “not a politician,” he understood that being outside of City Hall allowed him to make a sharper critique than he could as a member of City Council or whatever else. One of the issues that known political names face is that they are too defined by the grit and the musk of the insider baseball of the legislative branch either in the St. James Building or the state Capitol, even if they don’t have universal name recognition.
His operation won news cycles every day, causing the Brown campaign to have to dump its staff in a failed effort to calibrate a winning message.
Two years from the next inauguration, do we have a Republican who understands that the campaign for the mayor’s office is a two-year engagement?
It’s paradoxical, but having your name behind hard-right culture war bills is not the political winner certain conservative pols think. While it may play well in a conservative council district or against a Democrat running on a shoestring budget, it doesn’t play well outside the base. There just aren’t enough of those voters countywide.
To that end, expect various side issues to be elevated by Deegan’s opponents.
The “illegal gun registry” that was a major talking point just weeks ago may be largely forgotten by now by many. But there is a hope among some that the investigation of the issue surfaces at a more meaningful time in the race. If Attorney General James Uthmeier or Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses the issue locally, it will be worth watching to see if any potential mayoral candidates are on the stage at that press conference.
Yet the illegal gun registry isn’t the kind of issue that is going to keep Democrats sitting home or drive them to the eventual 2027 candidate’s camp. And it’s unclear if any Republicans will have a willingness to go outside their comfort zones and campaign to people who don’t agree with them on every issue. Curry did some of that, and it boosted him in 2015 and did a lot to keep Democrats from even bothering in 2019.
Speaking of Democrats, the greatest gift Republicans can get is a Democrat who runs a campaign intended to turf the current mayor, hitting her on issues such as stadium funding and more spending on police and fire that the council signed off on resoundingly. A chaos agent spoiler would put Deegan on the defensive. And who knows? There might be a job for whoever that is in a post-Deegan political era.
Deegan is, in the end, a popular mayor according to polls, and beyond the flashpoint issues like illegal immigration, she’s gotten City Council to see things her way on most major pieces of legislation. Will that continue under the presidencies of Kevin Carrico starting next month, and very likely Nick Howland after that?
We will get the best indication of that during August’s budget discussions, in which the Finance Committee will look to shear whatever proposal comes out of the Mayor’s Office. And depending on what happens with Rory Diamond’s illegal immigration bill passed last month, but not with a supermajority needed to override a veto, we may find out sooner than that.
Regardless, it’s important for whoever is running to find ways to manufacture earned, mainstream media and to leverage themselves as the most salient critic of the administration, finding a way to counter all of the advantages of incumbency. Obvious advice, and easier said than done.
If Republicans don’t figure it out, they are wasting their donors’ time in the 2027 cycle.
