A Democratic Gen Z college student who works after school at an elementary school is challenging a three-term Republican state representative armed with a massive war chest in the Nov. 5 election.

Democrat Benjamin Sandlin, who recently turned 21, knows he is a long shot to defeat state Rep. Wyman Duggan, R-Jacksonville, for House District 12.

“I don’t know how to say this, but I don’t care,” said Sandlin, who raised about $4,000 as of Oct. 18 compared to Duggan’s more than $900,000. “Truthfully, I’m doing this because he ran unopposed last time, and people deserve another option at least. …  Frankly, a lot needs to change in this state and no one else stepped up to the plate, so I decided to put my hat in the ring.”

Duggan, 55, an environmental and land use attorney, first won his seat in 2018 by a slim 1,211-vote margin, capturing just under 51% of the vote. Duggan did not respond to The Tributary’s multiple interview requests for this story.

Duggan touted his experience in the Legislature as why voters should re-elect him in a recent WJCT interview.

“I’m going to use that position and that opportunity to help the district and Northeast Florida in every way that I can,” Duggan said during a First Coast Connect interview.

“I’ve been able to help bring state resources to a lot of our great nonprofits and cultural institutions and institutions of higher learning,” Duggan told WJCT. “And I continue to do that.”

He cited fighting inflation, lowering property insurance costs and reducing crime as the most important issues facing constituents in a survey for News4Jax’s voter guide.

Meanwhile, Sandlin criticized the state for passing laws to weaken labor unions and for targeting transgender students.

“I’m in vast disagreement with what I’ve seen the state Legislature doing,” Sandlin said. “I am the candidate who is going to fight for the freedom to organize, the freedom to choose and the freedom for all of our children to have a quality education.”

Duggan is running for re-election in a district that got redder after redistricting, although in the last three election cycles, Republican gains have been relatively modest compared to elsewhere in Florida. 

District 12 includes the Naval Air Station Jacksonville as well as neighborhoods on both the east and west side of the St. Johns River in Duval County.

Florida Democrats are trying to chip away at the Republicans’ supermajority. Currently, Republicans hold 70% of the seats in the Florida Senate and House.

For the first time in decades, Democrats fielded candidates in every congressional and legislative race although many of those Democrats remain underdogs and lack the campaign resources of their better-funded Republican opponents.

“Listen, you never know, right? There are former majority leaders who lose races randomly in congressional races if there’s somebody on the ballot,” said University of North Florida political science professor Michael Binder.

Still, Binder acknowledged the chances of Sandlin beating Duggan are unlikely.

“Let’s put it this way. If I were Vegas, I would not lay odds on this, and I would stay off the books,” Binder said.

But if Sandlin “gets a decent showing, gets some more experience, can build up a name, it might not necessarily be his only foray into politics,” Binder added.

Sandlin is a UNF sophomore majoring in physics. He juggles working as a UNF physics research assistant and at an afterschool program at J. Allen Axson Elementary in Duval County Public Schools.

Before he transferred to UNF this year, Sandlin became politically active at the University of Central Florida where the Jacksonville native was elected to student government and helped lead student walkouts last year to protest the state’s culture wars.

Duggan works at Rogers Towers where he is a partner. He earned his law degree from the College of William & Mary, and he served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, according to his legislative profile.

He previously chaired Jacksonville’s Charter Revision Commission. 

As a legislator, Duggan chaired the House’s Insurance and Banking subcommittee and sponsored two bills that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law this year.

One allows “patriotic organizations” such as the Boy Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, Little League and the Marine Corps League, to distribute materials and speak to students during the school day.

The other bill helped motivate Sandlin to run against Duggan.

Duggan’s bill takes the power from citizen oversight boards to review individual police officers. 

“Nobody can come to the podium and say, ‘Officer so-and-so is a racist or Officer so-and-so committed misconduct,’” Duggan told lawmakers when he introduced the bill in a House committee in January. “We want to be the most law enforcement-friendly state. That is clearly the express intent of the governor and the Legislature over the last four or five sessions.”

Duggan argued the change was needed because Florida’s 21 citizen review boards don’t have common rules for who is allowed to serve on them and uniform procedures guiding their investigations. He also said other law-enforcement agencies can already investigate officers’ wrongdoing.

“It just seemed like a deliberate attack on people that are trying to just bring social justice,” Sandlin said.

Duggan defended his bill when he spoke with WJCT, saying citizen review boards still have some leverage and downplayed the effect.

“They can talk about policies, procedures, standards, training, culture, systemic abuses, patterns and practices of racism in the past,” Duggan said.

Sandlin, a 2022 Douglas Anderson School of the Arts graduate, is one of several 20-somethings on the Nov. 5 ballot.

“People are looking for young, new faces right now,” he said as he knocked on doors.

Democratic challenger Nate Douglas, 23, is out-fundraising state Rep. Susan Plasencia, R-Orlando, in House District 37.

For U.S. Congress, 25-year-old Democrat Thomas Witkop is running against U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fort Pierce.

And in Orlando, Democratic U.S Rep. Maxwell Frost was elected in 2022 as the first Gen Z representative in Washington. The now 27-year-old is running for re-election for his second term this November.

Binder said the Gen Z candidates are attracting attention which could help with voter engagement among young people. “That’s all good for democracy,” he said.