—“He has a proven record solving problems.”
Rick Kriseman, former St. Petersburg Mayor
“His decades of service to others are the antidote to the ‘me-first’ mentality in D.C.”
Jennifer Webb, Gulfport City Council Member, former State Representative
Florida's 16th Congressional District
Courageous Leadership. For Our Families.
Washington has been sold. It's time to take it back. Kelly is running for Congress to lower costs, defend health care, and bring opportunity home to the Gulf Coast.
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Priorities
Washington Has
Washington Has
Been Sold.
Time To Take It Back.
We own this government — and it's time it worked that way again. For too long it's been run like a private club for lobbyists, the super wealthy, and corporations who can buy access, not the people who actually live here. So, we pay more for groceries, insurance, prescriptions, and rent while they pay less in taxes. Our kids inherit the debt while big donors pocket the tax breaks. Our neighbors rebuild after the storm on their own while the powerful rebuild their portfolios. What about us?
Here's the good news: this is fixable. Kelly Kirschner has spent his life fighting for people like us. When a developer tried to drop ten-story condos into single-family neighborhoods, he organized hundreds of residents, ran for office, and beat a well-funded incumbent with 75% of the vote. As Commissioner and Mayor, he took on and beat powerful interests like Florida Power & Light and predatory developers. To get big money out of local politics, he led the effort to pass the strongest local campaign finance reform in Florida — approved by more than 80% of voters. And just last year, as a private citizen, he helped stop a special-interest grab of the Ringling Museum. He's ready to do it for us in Washington. Let's fix this.
1 Lower the Cost of Living +
When insurance companies raise your premiums while lobbying Congress to leave them alone, that’s not business; it’s socialism for the rich and powerful.
Government is supposed to solve problems for the people it serves. My first priority is, lowering the cost of living for Gulf Coast families — and protecting the healthcare and retirement security you’ve already earned. On day one, I will get to work on:
- Lowering insurance, healthcare, and prescription drug costs by creating an insurance backstop, repeal cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and allow government to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices.
- Expand affordable housing and stop Wall Street from buying up single-family homes and gouging renters.
- Protect people with pre-existing conditions, and keep Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the promises they’ve always been – an earned right.
- Invest in affordable energy that lowers your bills.
- Tear up the tax breaks that let billionaires pay less than we do.
2 Protect the Gulf Coast We Call Home +
Every decision about our water, growth, and natural resources should answer one question: Who does this help?
If the answer isn’t the people who live here, work here, and raise their families here, it’s time to fix it. This region’s water, wetlands, and working lands have been sold off piece by piece for too long. When the algal blooms come, our families, small businesses, and tourism economy pay for someone else’s shortcut.
- When the next Piney Point happens, our bays absorb it, and our families foot the bill. When disaster money gets handed out, the neighborhoods with the least influence are always last in line.
- Protect Tampa Bay, Sarasota Bay, and our coastline by prohibiting offshore drilling, stopping open-water fish farming, and enforcing the Clean Water Act.
- Keep public lands public. Invest in more conservation land upstream to protect our water and wildlife, and stop the push to privatize state and federal lands for golf courses, development, and additional resource extraction.
- Hold phosphate companies accountable and strengthen clean air protections, so toxic waste and dirty air don’t become the taxpayers’ cleanup bill.
- Keep AI hyperscale data centers out of District 16 until they prove they won’t drain our aquifers, raise utility costs, contaminate our air, or override local control.
- Fix stormwater systems and stop rewarding the kind of overdevelopment that causes flooding and polluted runoff
- Make sure disaster and insurance dollars reach every community based on need, not zip code or political influence.
3 Build an Affordable Economy that Invests in Our Future +
Affordability isn’t just about prices. It’s about opportunity.
Whether you’re raising a family, starting a career, serving our country, building a business, or enjoying retirement, you should be able to build a good life right here in our community.
You should be able to afford a home, a college education, quality healthcare, reliable insurance, and a secure retirement. Young people should be able to stay and build their future here. Veterans should have every opportunity to build the next chapter of their lives close to home. Small businesses should have the confidence to invest and grow.
- Restore the workforce opportunities our Manasota region lost by supporting nursing, teacher preparation, veterans’ education, workforce training, apprenticeships, and affordable four-year degree pathways.
- Oppose federal funding that rewards states for dismantling successful public institutions through political patronage. Federal investments should strengthen communities—not political agendas, nor line the pockets of the well-connected.
- Protect the Gulf Coast that powers our economy. Clean water, healthy beaches, and resilient coastlines protect tourism, commercial fishing, home values, and thousands of local jobs.
- Support affordable, reliable alternative energy that lowers utility bills, strengthens our electric grid, and gives families and businesses more certainty.
- Give small businesses, farmers, manufacturers, and commercial fishermen stable, predictable rules so they can invest, hire, and grow with confidence.
4 Healthcare Is Not a Luxury — Stop Treating It Like One +
One in three people in this district depend on Medicaid or Medicare. These aren’t handouts — they are promises.
Medicare and Medicaid are pledges made to seniors who worked their whole lives, to families doing their best, to veterans who gave their bodies and minds in service.
Congress just broke that promise, stripping healthcare from nearly 280,000 of your neighbors in this district alone.
- Restore every cut.
- Protect every patient with a pre-existing condition.
- Make crystal clear to every hospital along the Gulf Coast: we are not abandoning you.
When Congress guts Medicaid, it isn't some abstraction — it's our brother or cousin choosing between medication and groceries. That ends.
5 Our Children Shouldn’t Pay for Someone Else’s Tax Breaks +
Congress just raised the national debt — and used the money to hand tax loopholes to corporations that already pay zero in federal taxes. Zero, while our kids and grandkids are handed the bill.
If the answer isn’t the people who live here, work here, and raise their families here, it’s time to fix it. This region’s water, wetlands, and working lands have been sold off piece by piece for too long. When the algal blooms come, our families, small businesses, and tourism economy pay for someone else’s shortcut.
- Close those loopholes and pay down the debt.
- Put the savings to work for working families instead of offshore accounts.
- Make sure the AI revolution — which billionaires like Elon Musk are building with our data and our labor market — works for the middle class, not just for them.
- Workers deserve protection. Consumers deserve rights.
The future of this country should not be engineered by a handful of unelected tech oligarchs.
6 The Most Solemn Duty: Ending Wars of Choice +
There is no higher responsibility for a Member of Congress than the power to send our sons and daughters into harm’s way.
Yet, for too long, Washington has treated this solemn duty as a secondary concern. Under the Constitution, Congress — and only Congress — has the power to declare war.
It’s a moral outrage that when we face the prospect of “wars of choice,” leadership in Washington often ducks debate, choosing to take two-week vacations before even beginning a serious deliberation on “excursions” that cost American lives and billions of taxpayer dollars.
These poorly thought-out conflicts, funded with blank taxpayer checks and met with a Congressional blind eye, are eroding decades of trust throughout the world and putting our children’s future in peril.
- No more blank checks.
- No more blind eyes.
- If it’s worth American blood, it is worth a full, public, and rigorous debate in the halls of Congress.
7 Our Veterans Earned Everything. Stop Nickel-and-Diming Them. +
As the younger brother of a career Army officer who served tours throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan, Kelly doesn’t just thank veterans for their service — he knows what that service actually costs.
It costs marriages, sleep, and sometimes limbs and lives. We owe our veterans a VA that answers the phone, a crisis line that works at 3 a.m., and a government that doesn’t make them fight a second war just to get their benefits.
- Fully staff VA clinics.
- Restore the Veterans Crisis Line to full 24/7 operation.
- Make sure no veteran ever has to choose between their dignity and their bureaucracy.
A Representative for the New D16
Accessible. Accountable. For you.
Kelly is running to be a serious elected official for all the constituents of the new D16 — from the neighborhoods of St. Pete, Bradenton and Sarasota to the farms of Manatee, DeSoto, Hardee and Polk counties.
Disaster Readiness
A fully funded, proactive FEMA so that when hurricanes strike, our region isn’t left waiting for help.
The Insurance Crisis
Affordable home and flood insurance — and an end to the price-gouging and “business-as-usual” corruption that lets insurers lobby for immunity while your premiums skyrocket.
Support Small Business
Whether you’re a small business owner in St. Pete, a farmer in the eastern part of the district, or a commercial fisherman on the Gulf — I will be your voice.
Accessibility
You won’t have to look for me in a lobbyist’s office. I’ll be in our community, listening and working for the families who actually live here with town halls and individually.
The Bottom Line
The Founders built this Republic for we, the people — not we, the donors. Kelly Kirschner has beaten a rigged system before. He's ready to do it again — for you, for our families, for the middle class, and for a Gulf Coast that deserves better than what Washington has been selling.
He is asking for your vote and for your support.
Let's fix this.
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Grassroots donors—not corporate PACs—power this campaign. A donation today helps us reach more voters across the Gulf Coast.
Media
In The News.
Press, photos, and stories from the trail across Florida's 16th District.
Endorsements
“It is a true honor to be endorsed by the Florida AFL-CIO and the West Central Florida Labor Council, the Florida Democratic Party Jewish Caucus Board, Social Security Works, the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, the Florida High School Democrats, the Democratic Environmental Caucus of Florida, the Sierra Club, the Florida LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus, the National Organization for Women, UnidosUS, and Florida Veterans for Common Sense. I am committed to fighting for, and protecting, everyone's rights in Congress.”– Kelly Kirschner
More than two dozen current and former elected officials from across the district—spanning federal, state, and local government—have endorsed Kelly Kirschner. Here's a sampling:
—“I know firsthand what it takes to go from City Hall to Congress, and Kelly has what it takes. I'm proud to endorse him for Florida's 16th Congressional District." Congresswoman Lois Frankel, FL-22
“Kelly Kirschner will do right by veterans, and bring back value-driven leadership."
Rev. Willie Shaw, former Sarasota Mayor
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About Kelly
Florida Roots.
Florida Roots.
Florida Fight.
A third-generation Floridian, Peace Corps volunteer, former Mayor of Sarasota, and a single father who built a non-profit lifting first-generation students into the country's top universities — debt-free.
Kelly Kirschner is a third-generation Floridian who grew up near the Sarasota-Bradenton airport, in the kind of neighborhood where a hard day's work was the baseline expectation. After school and on weekends, Kelly worked the family fruit stand, Blue Heron Fruit Shippers, selling oranges and grapefruit alongside the rest of his family. Those long hours and thin margins taught him early that most people aren't asking for much: an honest product, a fair price, and to be treated like they matter.
After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees from Georgetown University, on a full scholarship working as the head manager of the men's basketball team, Kelly chose a different path than his classmates. In 1999, he joined the Peace Corps, spending four years in northern Guatemala helping Mayan farming families reach new markets and grow household income. It was measurable, lasting work — not press releases.
Service is the Kirschner family's common thread; Kelly's brother served multiple tours as a U.S. Army officer in the Middle East and Afghanistan. That same conviction — that you owe something to a cause bigger than yourself — has anchored Kelly since he was a kid bagging tangerines at the Blue Heron.
Kelly has spent his life taking on the “untouchables” — and winning for those who have long been ignored.
Back home, Kelly proved he could deliver in the private sector, scaling sales at Manatee County's Bio-Pro Research from $60,000 to over $2.5 million in just three years. But the pull of public service remained. When Sarasota's government spent decades dodging its promise to fund Payne Park, Kelly organized his neighbors until the insiders ran out of excuses and the park was finally built. When a developer tried to drop ten-story condos into a single-family neighborhood, Kelly stopped them — and then ran for City Commission. He beat a well-funded incumbent who outspent him 3-to-1, winning with 75% of the vote.
As Commissioner and Mayor, Kelly took on the heavyweights. He led the passage of Florida's strongest local campaign finance reforms (approved by more than 80% of the electorate), pushed FPL for unprecedented resident concessions, and clawed back millions for taxpayers by exposing a sweetheart lease at Marina Jacks. Most recently, in 2025, he stood with community leaders to stop special interests from seizing control of the Ringling Museum of Art.
Outside of City Hall, Kelly spent a decade raising his two children and building institutions that work. He grew UnidosNow into an organization that has helped over 1,000 first-generation students earn debt-free admission to elite universities, and led executive leadership development and lifelong learning programs as Vice President at Eckerd College.
The system has been rigged against ordinary families for too long. Kelly has spent his life taking on the “untouchables” — from the Guatemalan government, to predatory developers, to corporate monopolies — and winning for those who have long been ignored. He's running because protecting our kids and standing up for working families shouldn't be up for negotiation. It's time for a leader who knows that public service is a debt you owe your community, not a ladder for yourself.
Let's fix this.
