Now he’s up against Republican candidate Ron DeSantis, who notched a pretty stunning victory of his own.

Just a few months ago, Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam seemed like a shoe-in as the Republican gubernatorial candidate, but then President Trump endorsed DeSantis, and the race flipped pretty quickly. DeSantis captured more than 56 percent of the vote statewide.

Gillum vs DeSantis is going to give us an interesting couple months. Don’t worry, we’ll be here to help you through it.

SOME OTHER ELECTIONS ALSO HAPPENED.

Here are a few other things to know about last night if you want to sound smart making small talk today:

• Donna Shalala, former Clinton administration official and UM president, won the Democratic primary for U.S. District 27 with 32 percent of the vote. (That’s Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s seat.) Shalala was the ultra establishment candidate in an election cycle when the anti-establishment candidates have been killing it.
• TV personality Maria Elvira Salazar won the Republican nomination for congressional district 27 with 41 percent of the vote.
• Michael Grieco won the Democratic primary for Florida House District 113 with 41 percent… less than a year after he had to drop out of the Miami Beach mayoral race and resign his commission seat after he got caught accepting illegal campaign donations.
• Both Bruno Barreiro, the former Miami-Dade commissioner, and his cousin, Gus Barreiro, lost their races (Bruno for U.S. District 27, Gus for Miami-Dade County Commission District 8). Bruno’s wife, Zoraida, lost her race for his old commission seat this summer. Rough summer for the Barreiros.
• Every incumbent county commissioner was re-elected.
• A somewhat acceptable 21.14 percent of Miami-Dade County’s registered voters voted in the Aug. 28 election. But… that was the highest turnout in a primary election in 10 years. The 2016 primary came close, with 20.48% turnout. Statewide turnout was 27 percent.

You can find the rest of the results here.

“Look, what I’m facing here in Florida is decades of muscle memory around what our nominee is supposed to look like, sound like, where they are supposed to come from—I’m none of those things—even from progressives who may like me.” – Andrew Gillum in The New Yorker

Leaky ship. Miami is adding more tech jobs than ever before, and producing more tech-degree graduates as well, but we still don’t have enough tech workers to fill all those jobs. Why? Because our salaries are too low to keep them around. (Miami Herald)

You missed the point. Back in 2015, the Miami-Dade County Commission decided that tickets were an adequate substitute for jail time for possessing less than 20 grams of marijuana. But oddly enough, pot arrests have been steadily going up since then – 5,255 have been sent to jail for that in the last three years. That’s a whole lot of taxpayer money spent on jail costs, police time spent on arrests, and attention given to a minor infraction when the county is dealing with scores of other problems. (Miami New Times)

You fancy huh. Food & Wine, one of the most important food industry mags out there, just declared Joe’s Stone Crab one of the 40 most important restaurants of the last 40 years for its influence on the crab and seafood industries. (Miami.com)

The doctor is in. South Florida is going to play a key role in a very important 100,000-person, five-year National Institutes of Health study. The goal is to make treatments and drugs more effective by tailoring them to a wider array of genetics, environments, and lifestyles. Our ethnic diversity makes South Florida a prime candidate for that, and 40,000 of the study participants will come from our region. (Miami Herald)

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY.

We promise you a couple weeks of election-free coverage. 😌

– The New Tropic