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Governor and Lieutenant Governor
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Governor and Lieutenant Governor
Dean Abrams is a business and technology leader with three decades of public- and private-sector experience. His career includes rebuilding New York City’s emergency communications after 9/11, improving government efficiency, and serving vulnerable communities. He aims to use his leadership and fiscal expertise to make Florida safer and more affordable.
Thinking for yourself matters
A number of compounds permitted in American food are banned in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan. Those governments looked at the same science and reached a different conclusion. Floridians deserve to know that when they are standing in the aisle. I will move to ban compounds in Florida that are prohibited in those jurisdictions, and to require full ingredient, sourcing, and processing transparency on grocery and fast food labels. I will also move to ensure organic food access reaches every part of Florida, including neighborhoods where a grocery store is a long drive away.
Financial analysts have already reported that the push for AI datacenters is not financially sound, yet the Federal Government is pushing for them in every state including Florida which is a high risk zone for data centers. So what's the real reason for the proliferation of these facilities? Surveillance. I will move to ban new AI data centers in Florida. Our water, land, and power belong to Floridians. For facilities already operating, I will push to monitor environmental impacts as well as resource consumption. The public should not subsidize or suffer from a private facility by absorbing what it discharges. I will order a statewide water-use and data center impact review in my first hundred days.
Article I, Section 23 of the Florida Constitution gives Floridians a right to be let alone that stands independent of federal Fourth Amendment doctrine. Under the Winfield standard, the state must show a compelling interest and use the least intrusive means available. That protection exists on paper. It has not been enforced against modern surveillance systems. I intend to enforce it.
A private publisher has First Amendment rights and I will not pretend otherwise. What is not protected is a government official pressuring a platform to suppress speech the government dislikes, then not disclosing it. I will move to prohibit government-coordinated censorship, require disclosure of any government-platform coordination, and address deceptive moderation and anticompetitive conduct by platforms that function as essential infrastructure.
End civil asset forfeiture without a conviction. Taking property from someone never convicted of a crime inverts the presumption of innocence. Address qualified immunity so that accountability for government misconduct is real. Review mandatory minimums for proportionality, and fund re-entry programs covering housing, employment, mental health, and restoration of voting rights.
Fund emergency shelters statewide and streamline protective orders. Provide economic support including job training, childcare, and financial assistance, because leaving usually fails for financial reasons. Prevent survivors from being penalized in custody proceedings for having left dangerous situations.
Florida's fifteen dollar minimum takes effect September 30, 2026 under the constitutional amendment voters approved. I will move to tie future increases to Florida's cost of living rather than a national index, and to remove the state preemption that blocks local governments from setting their own wage floors. The honest part nobody says out loud: at a certain wage level, corporations automate. Wage policy alone leaves people stranded. Florida should be building entrepreneurs, skilled tradesmen, and craftsmen, not a permanent minimum-wage workforce. That means real investment in vocational programs, apprenticeships, and agricultural training alongside any wage floor. Gig workers deserve basic protections, including injury coverage and transparent pay calculations, without being misclassified into a category that serves the platform instead of the worker.
Florida caps interest at eighteen and twenty-five percent under Chapter 687. Federally chartered banks are exempt from those caps under the National Bank Act, which is why a Florida resident can hold a card charging far more than Florida law allows. What a governor can actually do: regulate state-chartered lenders aggressively, cap payday and title loans at the state usury limit, create a Florida consumer financial protection office, require plain-language total-cost disclosure before signing, and press Florida's congressional delegation on the rate-export loophole. I will also examine conditioning the right to do business in Florida on compliance with Florida usury standards, and litigate that question if necessary.
Small business deregulation and state-backed low-interest loans. Occupational licensing reform to reduce barriers to work, with streamlined recognition of military credentials. Cut business rent taxes and expand sales tax holidays. Support maritime and fishing industries and protect independent commercial fishermen.
Floridians pay among the highest auto insurance rates in the country. I will move to reform PIP, address uninsured motorist rates, ban credit-score-based rating, and require consent before a telematics device reports your driving to an insurer. On flood: update the flood maps, require honest disclosure to buyers and renters before they sign, open the market to private flood alternatives, and address inland flooding and repetitive-loss properties instead of pretending the risk stops at the coast.
Remove the regulatory barriers between Florida farmers and Florida consumers. Direct farm-to-consumer sales lower prices at both ends. No sales tax on food. Protect the grocery exemption we already have. Roughly eight hundred thousand Floridians fall into the coverage gap. I will direct the Agency for Health Care Administration to pursue a waiver, and durable funding will require the legislature. Florida's prescription drug importation program has been signed into law and federally approved but has hit a roadblock. I will press to start the process of bulk purchasing to bring drug prices down.
Fund emergency shelters statewide and streamline protective orders. Provide economic support including job training, childcare, and financial assistance, because leaving usually fails for financial reasons. Prevent survivors from being penalized in custody proceedings for having left dangerous situations.
Fair pay and benefits. Mental health support that does not cost someone their career to use. Cancer presumption protections for firefighters.
School choice and parental authority over curriculum. Parents are not visitors in their children's education. Full transparency on education spending. Every dollar traceable from Tallahassee to the classroom. Pay teachers what they are worth, cut administrative bloat, and move the money to classrooms. Restore vocational and trade education: shop class, agriculture programs, apprenticeships, and skilled trades. Not every student needs a four-year degree, and Florida needs the people those programs produce. No child should be exposed to sexual content or age-inappropriate material in school. Review standards should be transparent and written down so enforcement is consistent rather than arbitrary. Fix child welfare: caseworker turnover, foster home capacity, youth aging out with nowhere to go, oversight of psychotropic medication, and accountability for DCF contractors.
Paper ballots. Auditable systems. No voting machines running proprietary code the public is not permitted to inspect. Transparent campaign finance. An election system nobody is allowed to examine is asking for trust it has not earned. This is a systems question before it is a partisan one.
Energy, gas, and tolls - I will move to suspend state gas taxes during price spikes and to negotiate bulk fuel contracts for the state. I will order a full audit of toll road revenue and complete transparency on SunPass. Where the bonds on a road have been retired, the toll should come off. Where bond covenants still govern a road, the state has to honor the contract, and I will say so plainly rather than promise something I cannot deliver. On power: protect net metering for homeowners, support distributed solar and battery storage, and harden the grid. Utilities should not be permitted to convert the energy transition into a monopoly they bill you for. Rates are set by the Public Service Commission, so the governor's real leverage is appointments and legislation.
Article X, Section 11 of the Florida Constitution places the land under our navigable waters in trust for all the people. That protection is explicit and constitutional. It does not reach the aquifer. Groundwater is handled through water management districts and consumptive use permits under Chapter 373, which is a permitting system, not a trust. The water under your feet has weaker legal protection than the water you can see. I will move to extend public trust principles to Florida's groundwater. Our aquifers and fresh water belong to Floridians first, and I oppose bulk water sales to out-of-state or foreign buyers. I will move to require closed-loop water systems for large commercial facilities.
No offshore drilling. No fracking. Large projects should require statewide public notice and community approval, measured against clear criteria rather than decided in a meeting nobody was told about. Strict takings clause enforcement on eminent domain. Government should not be taking private land and handing it to developers. Create new protected wildlife sanctuaries. Restore farms, orange groves, and agro-tourism.
Everglades restoration, springs protection, and the Indian River Lagoon are not abstractions. They are named places Floridians grew up on. Nutrient pollution, agricultural runoff, and Lake Okeechobee discharges have to be confronted directly, including where large agricultural interests are the source. On the coast: upgrade drainage, seawalls, and flood-zone planning, and be honest about long-term exposure of infrastructure and repetitive-loss properties instead of rebuilding the same thing in the same place with public money.
Hurricane readiness means enforced building codes, pre-positioned supplies, and county resilience centers ready before the cone appears, not after. Florida should be able to respond without waiting on FEMA. That means fully funding the Division of Emergency Management and building a state disaster reserve fund. Preparedness and insurance are the same problem. A hardened home is a cheaper home to insure and a cheaper home to rebuild.
I support constitutional carry, which is already Florida law, and I support stand your ground and the right of self-defense. Florida's red flag statute allows a person's property to be taken before an adversarial hearing. My objection is procedural: due process is not optional because the underlying goal is sympathetic. Any process that removes a constitutional right must include a real evidentiary standard, prompt judicial review, the right to counsel, an adversarial hearing, penalties for false petitions, a strict time limit, and prompt return of property. I will publish a full replacement framework meeting that standard before asking the legislature to change the current law.
An agency built to regulate an industry ends up staffed by people from that industry, writing rules that industry can live with, then hiring those same people back. That is how the insurance office, the utility commission, and the water districts stopped working for you. I will tighten lobbying rules, revolving-door restrictions, and gift rules, and I will publish agency performance scorecards so service delivery is measured in public. The order matters: the people, then the Constitution, then government, then the people who work in it. Agents of the government sit at the bottom of that list, not the top.
Software has had this solved for thirty years. Every change to a codebase is recorded: what changed, who changed it, and when. Legislation has no such record, which is why language nobody claims authorship of appears in a bill at two in the morning. I will move to require public version history for every bill, showing every change, every author, and every outside party who influenced the text. If a lobbyist wrote the paragraph, your name should be on the paragraph. No other candidate in this race is proposing this.
Forced medical procedures violate bodily autonomy. No vaccine passports. No employer shot requirements. No school closures. Parents, not agencies, hold the authority over their children's medical decisions. I will also move to require doctors and clinics to disclose their financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies. If a recommendation comes with a payment attached, the patient should know before deciding.
A woman facing an unplanned pregnancy is usually facing a housing problem, a money problem, a childcare problem, and a fear problem all at once. Florida has spent decades arguing about her decision and almost no effort making the harder choice survivable. I support real material support: housing, food, childcare, mental health care, and healthcare. A monetary benefit for carrying to term. An adoption benefit. Ongoing annual support for mothers raising children. Funding for the outreach organizations that actually reach women who are alone in this. The principle is compassion, not coercion. Support first, and support that is actually funded.
Florida has a nursing shortage, a mental health access shortage, and a substance abuse treatment capacity shortage at the same time. Baker Act reform is overdue, and healthcare worker burnout is driving people out of the field faster than we replace them. This is a standalone statewide problem and I will treat it as one.
Remove the regulatory barriers between Florida farmers and Florida consumers. Direct farm-to-consumer sales lower prices at both ends. No sales tax on food. Protect the grocery exemption we already have. Roughly eight hundred thousand Floridians fall into the coverage gap. I will direct the Agency for Health Care Administration to pursue a waiver, and durable funding will require the legislature. Florida's prescription drug importation program has been signed into law and federally approved but has hit a roadblock. I will press to start the process of bulk purchasing to bring drug prices down.
A number of compounds permitted in American food are banned in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan. Those governments looked at the same science and reached a different conclusion. Floridians deserve to know that when they are standing in the aisle. I will move to ban compounds in Florida that are prohibited in those jurisdictions, and to require full ingredient, sourcing, and processing transparency on grocery and fast food labels. I will also move to ensure organic food access reaches every part of Florida, including neighborhoods where a grocery store is a long drive away.
Accessibility in all state buildings, programs, and digital services. Independent living programs and community-based care instead of institutional placement by default. Employment incentives and real ADA enforcement.
Fair pay and benefits. Mental health support that does not cost someone their career to use. Cancer presumption protections for firefighters.
Florida homeowners pay the highest property insurance premiums in the country. Premiums have climbed faster than incomes for years while the reasons for the increases stayed hidden inside filings almost nobody reads. I will direct the Office of Insurance Regulation to publish loss ratios, reinsurance costs, executive compensation, and rate justifications in plain language, so that any Floridian can read why a rate went up. I will move to cap insurer profit as a share of revenue minus expenditures, and to require rate reductions when loss ratios improve, and to return any surplus funds back to policyholders. Any cap has to be built with actuarial review and solvency protection so carriers stay in Florida and pay claims. Mitigation should mean something. If you harden your home, the discount should be real and it should show up on your bill. I support expanding My Safe Florida Home and tying it to enforced building codes.
Institutional investors are buying single-family homes in Florida and renting them back to the people who used to be able to buy them. A family bidding on a first house should not be bidding against a fund. I will move to bar institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes in Florida, with exemptions for legitimate builders, community land trusts, nonprofits, and small local landlords. I support renter protections: just-cause eviction, capped security deposits, and ninety days notice before a rent increase above five percent. On growth: no mass sprawl. Walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods where people can live near where they work. Large developments should require community approval, not a rubber stamp.
Condos, HOAs, and mobile homes Condo owners are facing six-figure special assessments while trying to understand board finances they were never shown. I support enforcing structural reserve and milestone inspection requirements, full transparency on board finances and management contracts, and state-backed low-interest loans for mandatory repairs. The safety requirements adopted after Surfside should not be quietly weakened because compliance became inconvenient. On HOAs and CDDs: cap fines and liens, require transparent board elections, guarantee records access, limit developer-controlled boards, and require CDD bond disclosure before purchase. For manufactured and mobile home residents who own the home but rent the land: protection from sudden lot rent increases and from displacement when a park is sold, plus storm-hardening assistance and protections for seniors on fixed incomes.
Housing First, with permanent supportive housing and transitional housing that includes wraparound services. No criminalization of homelessness. Someone sleeping outside is evidence of policy failure, not evidence of a crime.
Property taxes on your home You should not be able to lose the home you already paid for because you cannot cover the tax on it. Eliminating property tax on homesteaded homes requires a constitutional amendment and sixty percent voter approval. It is your decision, not a governor's. My position is targeted: eliminate property taxes on homesteaded homes valued within two hundred percent of the county median, with reductions above that threshold. Non-homesteaded property and second homes do not qualify. This is about protecting primary residences, not portfolios. Anyone who proposes this owes you the replacement math. Police, fire, schools, and rural counties with thin commercial tax bases all depend on that revenue. I will stand up a public property tax replacement commission and publish the county-by-county numbers before asking anyone to vote on it.
The Fourteenth Amendment says persons, not citizens. Due process applies to everyone the state detains. That is not a policy preference, it is the text. Due process is not open borders. The state enforces valid law. Violent offenders and traffickers face enforcement. Employers who profit from exploiting unauthorized labor face accountability. Federal immigration authority when carried out constitutionally with due process is respected. Detention must be lawful and humane. I oppose violent capture operations and I will not tolerate deaths in Florida detention facilities. I support a path for long-term, law-abiding residents, including those brought here as children. No private prisons. Incarceration should never be a profit center. A governor can direct the Department of Corrections to stop renewing contracts, and full transition requires the legislature and a real plan for staffing, facilities, and public safety continuity.
Floridians pay among the highest auto insurance rates in the country. I will move to reform PIP, address uninsured motorist rates, ban credit-score-based rating, and require consent before a telematics device reports your driving to an insurer. On flood: update the flood maps, require honest disclosure to buyers and renters before they sign, open the market to private flood alternatives, and address inland flooding and repetitive-loss properties instead of pretending the risk stops at the coast.
Accessibility in all state buildings, programs, and digital services. Independent living programs and community-based care instead of institutional placement by default. Employment incentives and real ADA enforcement.
No foreign government should have influence over Florida policy. Period. The standard is neutral and it applies to every one of them: Russian, Israeli, Chinese, or any other. I will move to prohibit state contracts with foreign-government-owned or controlled companies, and I will work with the Cabinet to keep state pension funds out of foreign entities engaged in human rights violations. The State Board of Administration is governed by the governor, the Chief Financial Officer, and the Attorney General together, so that one is a shared decision. On foreign policy generally: non-interventionist. I am critical of the military-industrial complex and of a foreign policy that costs American lives and money without a clear American interest.
Nursing home accountability with public inspection reports, staffing ratios, and complaint records available before a family has to choose. Serious Medicare and Medicaid fraud enforcement and real penalties for elder abuse. Protection from predatory financial products aimed at people with savings and no time to recover from a loss. Affordable prescriptions through the state importation program.
Florida has had no state personal income tax since 1924, and it is written into our constitution. I will defend that prohibition and never allow it to be introduced. I oppose federal income tax on labor, meaning wages and salary earned by working. A governor cannot repeal it. A governor can build a coalition of the states that already refuse to tax income and put sustained pressure on Washington. I intend to lead that coalition. Continue reducing state debt, growing the surplus, removing state investments from foreign entities, and auditing county budgets.
Property taxes on your home You should not be able to lose the home you already paid for because you cannot cover the tax on it. Eliminating property tax on homesteaded homes requires a constitutional amendment and sixty percent voter approval. It is your decision, not a governor's. My position is targeted: eliminate property taxes on homesteaded homes valued within two hundred percent of the county median, with reductions above that threshold. Non-homesteaded property and second homes do not qualify. This is about protecting primary residences, not portfolios. Anyone who proposes this owes you the replacement math. Police, fire, schools, and rural counties with thin commercial tax bases all depend on that revenue. I will stand up a public property tax replacement commission and publish the county-by-county numbers before asking anyone to vote on it.
My position: It's unconstitutional, has created a police state, and must be stopped immediately. Automated license plate readers photograph every car that passes, not just the ones under suspicion. Your daily movements are recorded, stored, and searchable, and you were never asked. I will move to end warrantless mass surveillance by ALPR networks in Florida, and I will order an audit of every ALPR and state surveillance system already deployed, including who has access and how long the data is kept. I know the objection: Amber Alerts, stolen cars, fugitives, trafficking. Those cases are handled with a warrant, strict use limits, short retention, and an audit trail. The current system tracks everyone in order to catch a few, and that is the part that is backwards.
Data brokers assemble files on you from sources you never dealt with and sell them to buyers you will never identify. I will move to require every broker operating in Florida to register with the state, to collect only on an opt-in basis, and to face penalties of one million dollars per incident for violations. This applies to every major player. I will move to strengthen Florida's Digital Bill of Rights so that data collection is opt-in by default rather than buried in terms you cannot realistically read. I will also move to require a warrant or genuine consent before in-car telematics and cell device location data can be pulled. Your car reports your location continuously. You should decide who receives that.
Financial analysts have already reported that the push for AI datacenters is not financially sound, yet the Federal Government is pushing for them in every state including Florida which is a high risk zone for data centers. So what's the real reason for the proliferation of these facilities? Surveillance. I will move to ban new AI data centers in Florida. Our water, land, and power belong to Floridians. For facilities already operating, I will push to monitor environmental impacts as well as resource consumption. The public should not subsidize or suffer from a private facility by absorbing what it discharges. I will order a statewide water-use and data center impact review in my first hundred days.
This one is personal. I brought a homeless veteran off the street and into my home. I helped him get into his own place and get treated for alcoholism. I watched how long the system took, and I watched what it costs a man to wait. Zero veteran homelessness as a state goal, with state veteran housing fully funded and waitlists eliminated. Healthcare access including mental health and PTSD care without bureaucratic delay. A state crisis intervention system that works independently of the VA. Veteran-owned small business loans and procurement preference. Streamlined licensing for military-trained professionals. Expanded property tax exemptions for veterans.
Sources
https://dos.elections.myflorida.com/candidates/CanDetail.asp?account=90433https://www.deanabrams.comhttps://www.deanabrams.com/terms
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Election Day
November 3, 2026
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