Byron Donalds Environment Florida

Byron Donalds's Ad Says David Jolly Made '$5 Million' Pushing Offshore Drilling. His Firm Made $30,000 From That Client — and Jolly Fought Drilling in Congress.

PolitiFact rated Byron Donalds's offshore-drilling attack on David Jolly Mostly False: the $5 million was his old firm's total billings for every client, the drilling client paid $30,000, and in Congress Jolly introduced a bill to extend Florida's drilling ban.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 03, 2026

Byron Donalds's Ad Says David Jolly Made '$5 Million' Pushing Offshore Drilling. His Firm Made $30,000 From That Client — and Jolly Fought Drilling in Congress. — Photo: Eric Gay / AP, via WLRN

Byron Donalds has another campaign ad that doesn't hold up — and this time it's about the Gulf of Mexico.

On September 28, the Donalds campaign posted an ad to X attacking his Democratic opponent for governor, David Jolly, over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The ad says:

"While Florida was still cleaning up, lobbyist David Jolly was already cashing in. Just months after the spill, Jolly was in Washington, pressuring Congress to expand drilling off the Florida coast, over $5 million in billings."

PolitiFact Florida checked it and rated it Mostly False.

The $5 million wasn't about drilling

The "$5 million in billings" is the line doing the work in that ad. It makes it sound like Jolly got rich pushing oil rigs toward Florida's beaches.

He didn't. PolitiFact found the $5 million was the total his lobbying firm, Three Bridges Advisors, billed across all of its clients and all of its issues — not money tied to drilling.

The client connected to drilling was a group called Free Enterprise Nation. In the first three months of 2011, the firm's federal lobbying disclosures show it earned $30,000 from that client.

That's less than one percent of the number in Donalds' ad.

One meeting, listed on a form

PolitiFact found one accurate piece of the claim. Jolly attended a 2011 meeting where an offshore drilling bill, H.R. 909, was discussed, and his firm listed it on the disclosure form — which technically counts as lobbying. Jolly says he did not lobby on its behalf. This isn't new: PolitiFact looked at the same history back in 2014.

The Donalds campaign told PolitiFact the bill would have "fast-tracked" federal offshore leasing, and pointed to a blog post in which Jolly supported it.

What the ad leaves out

The bigger problem is what Donalds skipped. When Jolly was actually in Congress, from 2014 to 2016, he worked against drilling near Florida. PolitiFact lists:

A bipartisan letter he signed in 2014 opposing seismic testing for oil and gas.
H.R. 2630, a bipartisan 2015 bill he introduced to extend the federal ban on drilling in the eastern Gulf until 2027.
An amendment he introduced in 2015 heading off a Senate plan that could have expanded drilling off Florida's Gulf coast.

An ad that says a man was "pressuring Congress to expand drilling off the Florida coast," while leaving out that he introduced a bill to keep drilling away from it, isn't telling Florida voters the truth.

A pattern of ads that don't check out

This is not the first time a Donalds ad about Jolly has fallen apart. In August, an ad from the Friends of Byron Donalds PAC cut a sentence in half to claim Jolly backs "gender changing surgeries on kids" — when Jolly had been quoting someone else. Another PAC ad, which Donalds shared, claimed Jolly wanted higher state taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security — taxes Florida doesn't have. And his insurance ad's "$1,000 every single year" figure came from a study that never looked at Jolly's plan.

What the record shows

Byron Donalds's September 28 ad claimed David Jolly pushed to expand Florida offshore drilling for "over $5 million in billings." PolitiFact rated it Mostly False: the $5 million was his firm's total billings for every client, the drilling-related client paid $30,000, and as a congressman Jolly introduced a bill to extend Florida's drilling ban.