Tracie Davis wins Democratic nomination for Florida Senate in Jacksonville District 5 election

State Rep. Tracie Davis outperformed Jacksonville City Council member Reggie Gaffney to become the Democratic nominee for the District 5 seat in the Florida Senate.

Davis will face Republican Binod Kumar in the November general election. Both Davis and Gaffney gave up their existing posts by running for the Senate seat being vacated by mayoral candidate Audrey Gibson.

Election results: Keep up with Duval County results | Statewide results

More on the race: What to know about Democratic primary for Jacksonville's Senate District 5

The primary continued a political career Davis launched six years ago as a last-minute replacement candidate when then-state Rep. Reggie Fullwood pleaded guilty to fraud and tax charges weeks before the general election.

A former special-education teacher and elections official, Davis was elected to the House District 13 seat without her name being printed on the 2016 ballot.

She had built a network of supporters in the years that followed, however, drawing endorsements this year from groups as varied as the JAX Chamber’s political arm, JAXBIZ, and Equality Florida, a statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization.

Gaffney, part of a family with deep roots in Jacksonville’s political and sports lives, had drawn support from community figures including a series of pastors and touted endorsements by U.S. Rep. Al Lawson and former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown.

Competing in a party primary, Gaffney was dogged by a political committee’s mailers that contrasted Davis as “a true Democrat” and the councilman as “basically a Republican, not for us.”

It was an attack that had been raised when he first ran for council in 2015 in an overwhelmingly Democratic Council District 7.

Gaffney had said then that he first registered as a Democrat in the 1970s but became a Republican from 2004 until 2013. He returned to the Democrats, he said at the time, because their policies reflected more compassion for people who were suffering.

Suffering and distress have been part of Gaffney’s career, having spent three decades operating the nonprofit Community Rehabilitation Center on North Pearl Street delivering services to people with mental health and substance abuse problems. CRC was one of several nonprofits that Brown, a former 12-term member of Congress, acknowledged falsifying donations to as part of a tax charge she pleaded guilty to in May, but neither Gaffney nor CRC were charged with taking part in that.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Election results 2022: Florida Senate District 5 Democratic primary