It’s time to rethink the Lieutenant Governor’s office.
The Lieutenant Governor of Florida may be the strangest high-level job in America.
On paper, it is the second-highest office in the nation’s third-largest state. In practice, it functions somewhere between a ceremonial surrogate, a campaign asset and a constitutional insurance policy. We don’t choose Lieutenant Governors because they’re the best people to help run one of America’s most complex governments. We choose them to help win elections.
That’s backward.
Imagine assembling the leadership team for one of America’s largest, most complex organizations. One candidate spent a career modernizing transportation systems. Another rebuilt an insurance market after a financial crisis. A third ran one of the nation’s largest hospital systems. The fourth balances the ticket geographically and appeals to a key voting bloc.
In almost every organization, the choice is obvious. In politics, we too often pick the fourth.
That isn’t a criticism of any individual Lieutenant Governor. It’s an indictment of the incentives we’ve built into the office.
Florida isn’t simply a large state anymore. It manages a property insurance market in perpetual hurricane mode, one of the nation’s most challenging housing affordability problems, an aging population, cybersecurity threats, disaster response, transportation systems and the integration of artificial intelligence into government itself. Yet we still structure executive leadership as though the state’s greatest challenge is winning the next election.
Campaigns optimize for politics. Governments should optimize for competence. Those are not the same thing.
If housing affordability is one of the defining economic issues facing Florida, why wouldn’t a Governor want a lieutenant Governor who has built housing, financed housing or reformed land-use policy? If insurance is in crisis, why not someone who understands catastrophe models and capital markets? If artificial intelligence is reshaping government, why not someone who has spent a career deploying emerging technology?
These aren’t political questions. They’re leadership questions.
The honest defense of the status quo deserves a hearing. Running mates are chosen to win because losing candidates don’t govern.
Electoral viability isn’t a corruption of the system — it is the system.
But that argument confuses two very different jobs: the 90 days of a General Election and the 1,460 days of governing that follow. We optimize the hire almost entirely for the campaign and treat the much longer governing assignment as an afterthought. Candidates with both electoral strength and executive depth exist. We rarely get them because we’ve never demanded them.
The assumption that every Lieutenant Governor should spend years auditioning for Governor is just as outdated. When every decision is filtered through the next election, governing competes with campaigning, and campaigning usually wins.
Florida should reject that model.
The Lieutenant Governor should be selected as a governing partner, not an heir apparent. I’d go one step further: anyone accepting the office should publicly commit not to run for Governor while serving in it.
This requires no statute and no constitutional amendment. It requires only a Governor willing to ask and a nominee willing to agree; the expectation is made public so voters can hold both accountable.
That single expectation transforms the job. Instead of building political capital, the Lieutenant Governor spends four years building governing capacity. Success gets measured by whether insurance markets stabilized, housing became more affordable, infrastructure accelerated and permitting improved, not by fundraising totals or campaign speculation.
The obvious objection is succession. What happens if the Governor leaves office? The same thing that has always happened: the Lieutenant Governor becomes Governor. But ask yourself this: Who should inherit one of America’s largest state governments? Someone chosen because they balanced a ticket years earlier? Or someone who spent four years helping govern through the state’s toughest challenges?
Florida doesn’t suffer from a shortage of talent. It suffers from a shortage of pathways for talented people to serve. Many of the people best equipped to solve the state’s biggest challenges will never spend a decade raising money and climbing the political ladder. They are military commanders, university presidents, emergency managers, engineers, entrepreneurs, hospital executives, housing experts and technology innovators. Florida should want those people in the room where decisions are made, not standing beside the Governor for campaign photos, and then sent on a multi-year publicity tour.
This state has never been afraid to rethink outdated institutions. Executive leadership should be next.
Florida doesn’t have a Lieutenant Governor problem. It has a leadership design problem.
The question isn’t who helps win the election.
It’s who helps govern the state.
Those should be the same person.
Too often, they aren’t.
___
Jeff Brandes is the founder and president of the Florida Policy Project. A former Florida state Senator from Pinellas County, he served in the Legislature from 2010 to 2022 and now focuses on developing evidence-based policy solutions for Florida’s biggest challenges.