Former Florida governor and U.S. representative Charlie Crist has run for public office seven times in the past 20 years.

Now, Crist, 69, is considering running to be the mayor of his hometown.

“I’ve had a lot of friends encourage me to consider it,” Crist told the Tampa Bay Times on Oct. 15 about jumping into the St. Petersburg mayor’s race. He said he’s “seriously considering it” because he loves the city.

Crist lives in the Gateway area with his fiancée, Chelsea Grimes. He said he would talk to his family more before making a decision.

Crist has the name recognition and a political background that could shake up a mayor’s race that is a year out. The primary election is in August 2026, with a runoff in November if no candidate wins a majority.

A couple of names have already entered the fray, including City Council member Brandi Gabbard, 49, who said this week she will run, and community activist Maria Scruggs, 68, who has filed as a candidate.

Mayor Ken Welch hasn’t filed yet but has started campaigning.

Crist most recently served as a Democratic U.S. representative for Florida’s 13th Congressional District from 2017 to 2022 but resigned to mount an unsuccessful challenge to incumbent Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In his long career in public service, Crist has been a state senator, education commissioner, attorney general, congressman and governor. He was a Republican governor from 2007 to 2011, then ran as an independent for U.S. Senate in 2010, and is now a registered Democrat.

Should he decide to jump into the nonpartisan mayoral race, Crist would pose a challenge Welch has not seen before. Welch went uncontested to keep his Pinellas County Commission seat in 2008 and 2016. He handily beat a challenge from Scruggs in 2012.

And in his 2021 mayoral bid, Welch beat council member Robert Blackmon, midway through his first term on the council, by 20 percentage points.

“Everywhere I go, people are talking about Charlie Crist,” said council member Gina Driscoll, who endorsed her colleague Darden Rice over Welch in 2021. “If it’s true, the race between an incumbent mayor and our former congressman and governor will be a true heavyweight match. Definitely one to watch.”

Crist’s candidacy would not only pit two Democrats against each other, but two allies. They are also both former Republicans. Welch ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for the Pinellas County School Board in 1998.

Crist gave Welch one of his first endorsements in 2020, before Welch even entered the mayor’s race. Welch, as mayor-elect, endorsed Crist for governor the following year. Their political committees have exchanged campaign contributions.

“He’s a friend,” Crist said of Welch. “And I’ll have more to say later.”

Welch, 61, declined to comment specifically about Crist’s potential candidacy. A city spokesperson referred to an Oct. 14 statement emailed in response to news that Gabbard was jumping into the mayoral race.

“My focus remains on doing the job the people of St. Petersburg elected me to do, and the results speak for themselves,” Welch said in that statement.

One thing Crist, Gabbard, Scruggs and former state Sen. Ben Diamond — who this summer conducted a poll as he considered his own run for mayor before deciding against it — all have in common: They all endorsed Welch in 2021.

That’s not lost on J.C. Pritchett II, a staunch Welch supporter, family member by marriage and executive director of the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club political forum.

“It is unsettling when your friend and ally says, ‘I think I should have that seat. I think I should be mayor,’” Pritchett said.

Welch, the city’s first Black mayor, has devoted much of the past four years to striking a deal to keep the Tampa Bay Rays in St. Petersburg by building the team a new stadium and redeveloping the area around it. He got closer to doing that than the last five mayors on either side of Tampa Bay until the team’s former owners backed out.

Other projects Welch inherited have stalled or were spiked altogether, from a Moffitt Cancer Center campus downtown to a new city headquarters, an overhaul of the downtown marina and the revival of the Science Center.

But his supporters say he was an honest broker in the Rays talks who got all the hurricane debris from the busy 2024 season picked up on time.

“I think the mayor’s done a good job in his first term. I think there were factors, external ones, that were very difficult,” said developer Will Conroy, who has donated toward Welch’s reelection campaign.

Vito Sheeley, Crist’s former congressional district director, said he has spoken with him a couple times recently about a potential run for mayor. Sheeley has been taking the pulse of how the African-American community feels about Crist as a potential candidate, and said the feedback has been “really good.”

“The city of St. Petersburg has voted for him every time he’s run for office,” Sheeley said. “I think it’d be a great fit for him especially right now with the frustrations with the current mayor.”

Sheeley campaigned to get Welch elected in 2021 but left, he said, due to what he described as mistreatment.

“Charlie’s trying to feel out anything and not step on any toes and make sure this doesn’t become a Black versus white thing,” he said.

News of Crist potentially going from governor to mayor has drawn parallels to the upcoming New York City mayor’s race, where former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is competing.

But even former Welch supporters say they may not gravitate toward Crist. While they acknowledge he’s a master of retail politics, they say that doesn’t translate to being good at running Florida’s fifth-largest city. Even as governor, he was able to delegate day-to-day decisions to longtime professionals.

“I think by track record, Charlie is just not the guy for that,” said Scott Wagman, a real estate investor who once ran for mayor and has fallen out with Welch. “His joy in politics is running and getting elected.

“You need a ground-level executive to run a city,” he said. “In some respects, Ken has suffered from the same thing.”

Former state Sen. Jeff Brandes, a Republican, said he is no fan of either Crist or Welch. But he said Welch, as the incumbent, will be hard to beat.

“While I think most people are frustrated by the lack of direction by the city, most people think everything is generally running OK,” Brandes said.