Candidate Profile: LaVon Bracy Davis

Following her win in the June Democratic Special Election Primary, in which she bested a field of four that included a former U.S. Congressman, an Ocoee attorney and her own brother, a former state senator, State Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis, 46, takes the fight to represent Senate District 15 to the Sept. 2 general Special Election where she faces Republican Willie J. Montague, a TV talk show host and founder of KavaCon and the House of Timothy residential facility for at-risk adolescent boys.

“I am a leader who listens. My mission, as a candidate, as a state representative and as a state senator, will always be to lift the voices of the unheard, to build bridges of opportunity and to deliver on promises,” the Ocoee lawmaker, who secured her primary win with 43 percent of the 12,880 primary ballots cast, told VoxPopuli during a phone interview. 

Lift. Build. Deliver. Those three words are featured throughout her campaign website, and Bracy Davis hopes voters will remember them ahead of the upcoming election. But if they forget, she has an easy way for people to remember what she's staked her candidacy on.

“If you think about lifting, building and delivering, you can't help but think of LBD. When you think of LBD, you think LaVon Bracy Davis,” she said.

Florida state senators earn $29,697 annually and typically serve four-year terms, although the winner of this special election will serve through 2028 to finish the term of the late State Sen. Geraldine F. Thompson who died unexpectedly in February after complications from knee surgery. The district includes Ocoee, Winter Garden, Oakland, Pine Hills, Eatonville, Apopka, and parts of Dr. Phillips and Orlando. 

The last day to request a mail-in ballot is Aug. 21. Early voting will take place Aug. 23-31, daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Click here for early voting locations.

Family legacy

Married to Pastor Adrian R. Davis of the Bethel IFM Church in Mount Dora, Bracy Davis comes from a powerhouse Black political family. 

Her grandfather, Rev. Thomas A. Wright Sr., was president of the Gainesville NAACP and is credited with introducing the civil rights movement to the city. Her mother, the author, civil rights advocate and three-time delegate to the Democratic National Convention, Dr. LaVon Wright Bracy, was the first Black student to integrate Gainesville High School in 1965. Her father, the late Rev. Dr. Randolph Bracy, founded Orlando’s New Covenant Baptist Church and was the former president of the Orange County NAACP.  

It’s a legacy Bracy Davis said she has worked hard to uphold. 

She’s worked as a senior attorney with the Florida Department of Children and Families and as director of community programming for the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. She served as a legislative appointee on the Florida Council on Arts and Culture. In 2022, she ran for an open seat in House District 40 and won. Last year, she won re-election with 67 percent of the vote. 

In the House, she worked together with Thompson to pass the Tyre Sampson Act, which makes amusement park rides safer following the fatality of a teen at Icon Park because he was not securely buckled into a ride. 

Bracy Davis also expanded access to the Randolph Bracy Ocoee Massacre Scholarship, which awards 50 $6,100 scholarships a year to descendants of survivors of the 1920 Election Day violence and/or Black high school graduates in Ocoee pursuing secondary education. 

Bracy Davis added Florida’s three private historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) — Bethune-Cookman, Florida Memorial and Edward Waters — to the list of schools where the scholarship funds can be used.

She also worked alongside Thompson on the Harry T. and Harriet V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act. Supported by both Democratic caucuses in the Legislature and numerous voting rights groups, the bill would expand voter access by establishing Election Day as a holiday, repealing laws that complicate voting by mail, authorizing same-day voter registration, creating a database for returning citizens to verify their eligibility to vote and disbanding the Office of Election Crimes and Security. 

“We were really just tired of these horrific voting laws that didn't do the people any good or any justice and disenfranchised and created barriers,” Bracy Davis said. “We sat down with all sorts of voting advocates and talked through what are some of the things that we know have disenfranchised voters.”

Were it not for Thompson’s untimely death in February, Bracy Davis would still be serving District 40 in the House. But she told VoxPopuli that the two had spoken at length about Thompson endorsing her to run for her senate seat after she retired. That day just came sooner than anyone expected. 

“She's my mentor, my mother's best friend. My mother was a maid of honor at her wedding 50 years ago. I was really heartbroken by her unexpected death,” Bracy Davis said. “She did tell me before she passed that when she was ready to retire, she did want me to run for her seat.”

Thompson’s family has said the same. “She was very clear and  explicitly stated that when she left office, she intended to endorse and support Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis,” Thompson’s daughter Elizabeth Thompson Grace said when Bracy Davis announced her candidacy in March. “She believed that Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis was the best fit to be an advocate and a spokesperson for the constituents of Florida Senate District 15."

Bracy Davis' House resignation is effective Sept. 1, just one day before Election Day for the special election. That date is no coincidence. She said she met with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s chief of staff to ensure there would be no gap between her resignation and the election. 

“We already don't have a senator, and then we also wouldn't have a state rep going into the legislative and budget process,” Bracy Davis said. “I thought I would do my people a disservice by resigning ... Never will House District 40 be without [representation.] As soon as I leave, there will be another representative there.”

The decision impacted her initial ability to fundraise since election law prohibits candidates from accepting donations while the Legislature is in session, especially since  the session ran into overtime, finishing its budget work on June 16 instead of May 2.

But Bracy Davis was able to catch up: She's raised more than $72,000 and has more than $30,000 in the bank going into the final weeks of the election while her opponent Montague raised just shy of $5,000 in campaign donations and has about $959 left, according to campaign finance reports.

"Nonsense bills"

Faced with a Republican supermajority and a small Democratic caucus, Bracy Davis said she’s confident in her ability to legislate across the aisle. 

“You have to figure out a way to get things done,” she said. 

During the most recent legislative session, Bracy Davis worked with Republican State Rep. Berny Jacques of Pinellas County on HB 1405, a juvenile justice reform bill aimed at reducing truancy and providing social services to keep at-risk kids out of the criminal justice system. 

“Today, Governor DeSantis signed HB 1405 into law — a bill I proudly filed and sponsored on behalf of the Department of Juvenile Justice,” Bracy Davis wrote in a post on June 19. “This legislation modernizes a part of Florida law that hadn’t been updated in over 30 years, bringing critical services to children and families in need.”

And before the Big Beautiful Bill threatened to push 2.3 million Floridians off of their health insurance, Bracy Davis partnered with other Democrats to co-introduce a bill that would have extended Medicaid eligibility for low-income adults. However, that bill died in committee.    

Bracy Davis was often frustrated by what she described as a “dysfunctional” Legislature, consumed with “wasting time” with “nonsense bills,” like changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in textbooks, rather than deal with “real concerns” like rising property insurance premiums across the state.

“The number one issue in Senate District 15 is affordability,” Bracy Davis said. “Floridians can't afford to be Floridians. That's what we should be focusing our time on, instead of giving insurance companies bailouts, instead of answering questions that people aren't asking, instead of these culture wars, instead of attacking the LGBTQ+ community, instead of creating this false sense of fraud in the election space.”

Bracy Davis said lawmakers should help people by offsetting the impacts of inflation and rental and home insurance, the latter of which increased roughly 40 percent from 2022 to 2024. 

“You know what hasn’t gone up with that percent? People's paychecks,” Bracy Davis said emphatically. “When people tell me that their property insurance has doubled, I say my property insurance has doubled as well. I am the working class. I don't come from generational wealth or trust funds. When we talk about affordability, I suffer from the same things that my constituents suffer from.”

One of the ideas she floated when she ran for re-election to the House last year was a grant or subsidy program for homeowners whose property insurance premiums had doubled. “Like the government did stimulus during Covid,” she explained at the time. 

She also plans to fund initiatives like the Live Local Act , which she said has been “transformative” for affordable housing in Florida, and the Hometown Heroes Loan Program, which provides down payment assistance.

Immigrant ally

During her campaign and in her continued work as a representative, Bracy Davis has repeatedly spoken out against the state’s mass deportation efforts. 

In a video posted to Facebook on June 13, Bracy Davis said the state and federal intimidation tactics toward immigrants would not succeed as long as there were allies to the immigrant community like herself and others. 

She’s one of the lawyers who filed a lawsuit against Gov. Ron DeSantis and Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Department of Emergency Management, after Democratic state lawmakers were denied entry into the immigration detention facility in the Everglades known as Alligator Alcatraz in early July.

On July 12, Bracy Davis and her colleagues were allowed to enter the center on a “tightly controlled” visit in which she said lawmakers were constantly monitored, prohibited from taking pictures or speaking to the detainees. She described the center as tents filled with cages, each with three toilets, and holding up to 32 men. Temperatures inside the facility reached 83F degrees.  

"Florida is in crisis,” Bracy Davis wrote in a post following her visit. "Families can’t afford rent. Property insurance is sky-high. Teachers are underpaid. Schools are underfunded. And yet — $450 million is being spent on cages in a swamp. This is cruelty dressed up as policy — and waste disguised as patriotism.”