John Morgan, a Florida trial attorney and co-founder of the state's largest personal injury law firm Morgan & Morgan, plans to start a new political party and is offering a $100,000 prize to the winner of a contest to name it, he said in a video posted to X on Monday.
In the video, Morgan ended speculation about whether he would run for Florida governor and announced the formation of a new political party instead.
“Time marches on and I gotta think, how much energy do I have left in my tank?” the 70-year-old said. (Watch his full video announcement here.)
Morgan said later in the video, “I’m not gonna do it because Mother Time is getting away from me. I do like living in Hawaii, I do like marijuana and I do like spending time with my grandchildren.”
The attorney said that he spends his winters in Maui.
In recent years, he was the primary driver of two constitutional amendments that passed in Florida.
The first amendment was to legalize medical marijuana. During his first bid to legalize it, he “lost by a little bit,” Morgan said, but in that “second go round, I won by a big margin, 73 percent.”
He also supported an amendment to raise Florida’s minimum wage.
“Everyone thought I was crazy; it couldn’t happen; it would never happen,” he said. “Guess what? It did happen.”
Minimum wage has increased in $1 increments since that amendment passed in 2020 and will reach $15 an hour by this fall.
Because of the success of these amendments, many people have asked Morgan if he’d consider a run for governor, but ultimately, the role isn’t for him, he said.
“Look, there’s a lot of things I would like to do for Florida, but my time is limited,” Morgan said, adding, “I’m not the kind of guy that can campaign door to door or go to Wawa’s or Buc-ees.”
He also thought ahead to what hurricane season might be like as governor, saying, “I like to go to bed with a [marijuana] gummy … I wouldn’t be able to take my gummies during hurricane season, so I didn’t like that either.”
Morgan determined that he could truly make an impact in Florida by forming a third major political party.
“If you take the ‘D’ [for Democrat] and the ‘R’ [for Republican,] we agree on most things together,” he said, noting, “I believe that what’s missing in Florida and across the country is a third party, not [one with] no labels, but a third party.”
It is unclear when the naming contest will begin for the party or how entries can be submitted.
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