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Per-judge retention calls inside

The ballot

Florida Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor from Judicial Nominating Commission nominees and then face the voters in a nonpartisan, yes-or-no merit-retention vote — first in the next general election after appointment, then every six years. A majority of YES votes retains the justice for a new six-year term; a majority of NO votes creates a vacancy the governor fills by appointment. No Florida Supreme Court justice has ever lost a retention election since the merit-retention system was adopted in the 1970s. The election is November 3, 2026; early voting is already open. One justice is on the statewide ballot this year.

The evaluation gap, printed up front: Florida has no state judicial-performance-evaluation commission for retention judges. The Florida Bar's merit-retention poll of lawyers — the closest thing to an evaluation Florida voters had — was discontinued after 45 years in 2023, so there is no 2026 Bar poll. The last poll, in 2020, is reported below with its date attached; it is evidence about 2020, not a current evaluation, and this guide prices it as such.

Justice Carlos G. Muñiz

Appointed by: Governor Ron DeSantis, January 2019. On the bench since: January 22, 2019 — about seven years on the Supreme Court, including service as Chief Justice from 2022 to 2026. First retention: 2020, retained with 65.75% YES votes.

Before the bench (credits): Yale Law School graduate; general counsel to the U.S. Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos; chief of staff to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi; earlier legal posts in Florida state government. He had no prior judicial service when appointed — a fact his critics cite and his defenders answer with his appellate-government record. In 2020 President Trump included him on a published list of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees.

Evaluation: In the Florida Bar's 2020 poll, 71% of responding lawyers favored retaining Muñiz overall — but only 63% of lawyers reporting "considerable knowledge" of him did, the lowest considerable-knowledge rating of any jurist polled that year. Voters retained him anyway, 65.75% to 34.25%. No Bar poll exists for 2026 (discontinued 2023), and no conduct body has published an adverse finding against him in this research.

The record — credits column. Muñiz is a self-described textualist and Federalist Society member whose signature methodological opinion, Conage v. United States, rejected Florida's old rule that interpretive canons apply only after a court finds text ambiguous, directing courts instead to consider all textual and structural clues. As Chief Justice he led the court's civil-justice reform program, including case-management and discovery rule changes aimed at moving cases faster. Supporters credit a consistent, text-bound jurisprudence and an administratively active chief justiceship.

The record — dirt column, at the proven standard. The documented controversies are jurisprudential, not personal, and they are real:

The organized campaign against him, evaluated. A published op-ed campaign (Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, October 2026) and at least one progressive voter guide urge a NO vote. Read closely, their case is the precedent record above — the 2020 framework change, the summary-judgment rule change, and the abortion ruling — argued as proof the court rewrites law when its membership changes. That is a serious jurisprudential argument, and voters who weigh precedent-stability heavily can weigh it. It alleges no misconduct, no ethics finding, and no failure of competence or temperament, and no source in this research documents any. Under the standard this page applies to every retention judge — a NO call requires proven misconduct, proven activist judging that disregards governing text, or an evaluation failure — disagreement with a textualist court's overrulings, however consequential, is a ruling dispute, and the 2020 Bar poll's soft considerable-knowledge number is six-year-old evidence that the voters who saw it answered by retaining him.

OUR CALL

Carlos G. Muñiz — RETAIN.

Our rule is narrow and it is the same one we apply in every state in this coverage: Retain is the call for a serviceable documented record; Do Not Retain requires proven cause. Muñiz's record is fully documented and sharply contested on the merits — he helped remake Florida precedent doctrine and authored the redistricting opinion — but the file contains no misconduct, no discipline, no evaluation failure in any current evaluation (there is no current Florida evaluation to fail), and no sourced showing that he decides cases outside the text-and-precedent method he professes. The campaign against him proves disagreement, not disqualification. We print his whole record above, both columns, so a voter who prices precedent-stability differently than we do has everything needed to vote the other way — but this page's call, on this standard, is Retain.

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Sources

Election result — November 4, 2026

Result pending. No verified call (Associated Press or official) as of November 4, 2026. This page will be updated when the race is called or certified. The original article above is unchanged.

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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