WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida is opening his General Election campaign with a television ad that returns to the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, his alma mater, where 17 students and staff members were killed and 17 others were injured. The 30-second spot, titled “Once,” highlights Moskowitz’s role in passing post-Parkland gun safety regulations as evidence that a divided government can still deliver. At the time, Moskowitz was a state Representative.
He worked with grieving parents and Republican colleagues to push through a legislative package that his re-election campaign says was the broadest firearm restriction enacted anywhere in the country in two decades. The GOP-run Legislature approved the measure, and Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, then Florida’s Governor, signed it.
The law lifted the minimum age to buy a firearm in Florida to 21, imposed a 72-hour pause between a gun purchase and pickup, steered millions toward campus counselors and school police, and provided court officers a process to strip weapons from people judged to be a threat.
In a statement accompanying the ad’s announcement, Moskowitz said: “I’ll never forget hearing families say as they buried their kids that the only thing they did wrong that day was send them to school.” He added: “People say government’s broken, but I’ve seen what’s possible when both Democrats and Republicans work together.”
Redrawn district shifts the calculus
The ad targets voters in a district that barely resembles the one Moskowitz has represented since 2023. Republican-led redistricting this year converted Florida’s 25th Congressional District into a coastal ribbon stretching from Delray Beach in Palm Beach County through Broward and into Miami-Dade’s barrier islands — a swath that President Donald Trump carried by roughly 9 percentage points in 2024. Unaffiliated voters make up the largest share of the electorate, at 33%, and about a quarter of residents are Jewish, the densest such concentration of any Florida district.
Moskowitz cleared his Primary last month with more than 63% of the vote against Democratic Socialist Oliver Larkin. He now faces Scott Singer, a former Boca Raton Mayor who took 31% of the vote in a five-candidate Republican Primary.
Singer began hammering the incumbent within hours of the results, arguing Moskowitz’s centrist branding doesn’t match his voting record and noting that the new congressional lines push the Congressman’s home outside the district he’s running in.
One of the state’s most competitive matchups
Democrats intend to tie Singer to Trump’s economic agenda and the downtown redevelopment plan Boca Raton voters buried at the ballot box this year. It’s one of the state’s most competitive matchups in the 2026 cycle; the Cook Political Report calls it a toss-up, and both the National Republican Congressional Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have flagged CD 25 for spending. Florida Politics ranked it first among 11 South Florida races to watch in the General Election.
Libertarian Peter Jassenoff and write-in candidate Michaelangelo Hamilton — who made news in 2022 for being too young, at the time, to run for Congress, but doing so anyway — are also on the Nov. 3 ballot. The ad’s release marks Moskowitz’s first television spot since the Primary, and it underscores the case he needs to make in a district redrawn to end his political career.
