Ashley Brundage, 44, a DEI educator and former bank executive, moved one step closer on Tuesday to becoming the first elected transgender lawmaker from Florida despite a smear campaign perpetuated by the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis.

Brundage, running for a state House seat from the Tampa area, swamped her opposition with more than 81 percent of the vote in Florida House District 65’s Democratic primary. 

She’ll face incumbent Republican Florida state Rep. Karen Gonzalez Pittman in November.

“I am incredibly honored and humbled to announce that we’ve won the Democratic primary election with a resounding victory over 80% for Florida State House District 65!” Brundage posted on X.

Brundage joins two other winning LGBTQ+ candidates in Florida, former state representative Joe Saunders and climate advocate Nate Douglas, in trying to erase Republicans’ super majority in the state legislature in November.

A fourth LGBTQ+ candidate, former Obama staffer Chad Klitzman, did not fare as well, losing his primary in heavily Democratic Broward County to a pro-LGBTQ+ rights candidate, Barbara Sharief.

Brundage’s opponent in the general election is a former teacher in the Tampa area who voted in favor of Don’t Say Gay legislation and book bans in school libraries. Brundage is the award-winning author of Empowering Differences: Leveraging Your Differences to Impact Change.

Brundage says Pittman “only helped to scare away people from wanting to come to Florida” with the “draconian laws” she’s helped to pass.

Those include Gov. DeSantis’ signature Don’t Say Gay legislation, which Brundage described in an interview with LGBTQ Nation as “absolutely ridiculous.”

DeSantis’ antipathy for Brundage extends back, incongruously, to an award for which he congratulated her.

In 2022, Brundage was given a Spirit of the Community award by the Florida Commission on the Status of Women for bringing in tens of millions of dollars to the Tampa area with an international economic empowerment conference. Brundage received a letter of congratulations from DeSantis, who, it turns out, didn’t know Brundage was trans.

But news organizations did, and Brundage says DeSantis “dodged everybody’s request for comment on it. No comment. No comment. No comment. I announced my candidacy, of course, and talked about the letter. And then he finally responded — to the Daily Mail in the U.K. And he told them that he would have never given me the award if he had known that I was a transgender woman.”

Like his hateful Don’t Say Gay laws, Brundage called DeSantis’ disavowal “ridiculous.”

“I still brought in a $12.5 million conference, selling out two entire hotels and a convention center for the city of Tampa,” Brundage says. “I still did that. I still created a scholarship foundation for youth, and I still mentored children and women in my community through financial literacy educational programs for free.

“So none of that has changed, but because he knows my political affiliation, all of a sudden, he wants to say that he wouldn’t have given me that award. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with our political world right now. Partisan politics get in the way of actually accomplishing things that are good for our economy.”

Brundage and Pittman face off on November 5.