Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia has won the Republican nomination in the race to keep his post, according to preliminary election results. Ingoglia was appointed in 2025 to the Cabinet-level position by Gov. Ron DeSantis, after the previous CFO, Jimmy Patronis, won a North Florida congressional seat.

As of 9:25 p.m. on Tuesday, unofficial returns showed Ingoglia sweeping 61 percent of the vote with 94 percent of the votes counted, with his Republican competitor Frank Collige, who runs an insurance consulting firm, netting 38 percent. 

A homebuilder by trade and a former state lawmaker from Spring Hill, Ingoglia previously served as the chair of the Republican Party of Florida and was known as a key ally of DeSantis in the Legislature at a time when GOP leaders in the statehouse were openly clashing with the term-limited governor. 

Though he was appointed and not elected to his current position as CFO, Ingoglia has not shied away from using his post to publicly ridicule the spending decisions of local governments, holding press conferences across the state to scrutinize line items in local budgets. He has not leveled the same public scrutiny at the DeSantis administration for the estimated $1 billion price tag for the now-shuttered Everglades immigration detention facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” which cost Florida taxpayers more than a million dollars a day – emergency spending that was not explicitly approved by the Legislature. 

Ingoglia will face former Democratic state Sen. Annette Taddeo of Miami in November’s general election.

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.