Leonard Spencer, a Democrat, is ahead of Republican Carolina Amesty in one of the closest races in the area. He is running for a swing spot in the Florida House.
Spencer, a 53-year-old business executive, was about to beat Amesty, a 30-year-old lawmaker who was on the last day of her first term and was facing felony charges for her work as a supervisor at her family’s small college.
It looks like Amesty will be the only Republican State House member in Central Florida to lose her seat. This is despite the fact that six of her colleagues were thought to be vulnerable.
Many people in the area paid close attention to Amesty’s race because the GOP changed its mind about supporting her after she was charged in August and Democrats wanted to flip the open district.
All polls in Orange and Osceola counties had reported, and Spencer had a lead of 217 votes. As of late Tuesday night, just over 38,000 mail-in ballots were still being counted across Orange County, though fewer were in District 45. Early counts showed that mail-in votes were strongly in his favor.
Spencer, who worked at Disney for more than 15 years and is now a senior manager of supplier engagement for Amazon, said during his campaign that he wanted to fix Florida’s insurance problem by making things more clear.
He said that the state should have an elected insurance commissioner to oversee the business and a nonpartisan group whose job it is to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Amesty was charged with four felonies in August after it was found that she had faked a man’s signature on a paper that she had notarized in 2021 while working as an administrator for Central Christian University in Orange County.
The school is on North Hiawassee Road and was started and is run by her family.
The indictment came after two investigations by the Orlando Sentinel into Amesty’s background, qualifications, and behavior while she worked at Central Christian. In September, she said she was not guilty of fraud.
Amesty became a rising star in the GOP after winning a seat that President Joe Biden won by 5.5 percentage points in 2020. She was even mentioned as a possible future House speaker.
This year, though, her campaign was quieter. After her arrest on August 29, people stopped giving money to her campaign account and political committee, and her Republican peers were less openly supporting her run.
During her first term in the state House, Amesty consistently backed the priorities of Republican leaders.
These included passing laws that made it illegal to have most abortions after six weeks, stopped cities from requiring workers to be safe in hot weather, extended the so-called “Do not Say Gay” law, and made Florida’s voucher program bigger.