Loading this candidate’s profile from the FEC filings and campaign records.
Where They Stand is a nonpartisan guide to everyone running for Congress: their money, their own words and how incumbents voted. Find your ballot →
Candidates › FL-16 race › 2025–2026
Kelly Kirschner
D Democratic nominee for U.S. House, FL-16
Has not served in Congress
- On the ballot
- On the general election ballotNov 3, 2026 · Florida US House 16
- Where to vote
- Find your polling place (opens in a new tab) · More ways to vote
- Top priorities
- 1 Lower the Cost of Living +
- 2 Protect the Gulf Coast We Call Home +
- 3 Build an Affordable Economy that Invests in Our Future +
- 4 Healthcare Is Not a Luxury — Stop Treating It Like One +
- 5 Our Children Shouldn’t Pay for Someone Else’s Tax Breaks +
- Money
- $876.4K raised, $615.2K spent, $261.1K cash on hand (through Oct 14, 2026). Where it comes from
- Who gives
- 13% of individual money from donors at $200 or less · 93% from Florida · largest committee giver AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR JUSTICE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE (AAJ PAC), $5K
- Outside groups
- $10 supporting, $839.1K opposing Kirschner
- Backed by
- Sierra Club · Florida High School Democrats · West Central Florida Labor Council and 34 more. As the campaign lists them
10 priorities from kellykirschner.com, in the order they are listed there. Every heading and the text under it is copied exactly, as one passage for each page it is from, and links to that place on the page; hover a source to see which passage it opens.
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
A fully funded, proactive FEMA so that when hurricanes strike, our region isn’t left waiting for help.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)
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.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · kellykirschner.com
Heading as listed on kellykirschner.com ↗ (opens kellykirschner.com at this heading)