‘I’m going to get up and fight’: Meet Gay Valimont, the FL Democrat running for Matt Gaetz’s seat in Congress

The gun violence prevention activist running for Congress in a special election on April 1 shared with Floricua her plans to provide Floridians with affordable healthcare and housing, and a better education for children.

It is true that when tragedy strikes, some people react in a way that, perhaps, surprises even themselves. In the face of unspeakable pain, they become stronger, more aware of the need all around them and what they can do to make it better for others. 

Pensacola resident Gay Valimont faced such a challenge when her husband was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. 

As the family tried to navigate the diagnosis, the couple’s 8-year-old son fell down at school. Afterwards, he couldn’t regain his balance. The family was flown to Nicholas Children’s Hospital, where the parents were informed that their son had a fatal brain tumor. 

“I became their full-time caregiver. I was with both of them until they took their last breath,” Valimont told Floricua. “My son died three years ago in September, and my husband will have been gone for three years in April.” 

When she received an alert on her phone in 2023 announcing that then Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz had filed a federal stand your ground bill, “I knew right then that there was nobody more equipped to fight him.” And as a gun safety advocate, Valimont worked with Moms Demand Action to fight for common sense gun laws and background checks. 

Now, spurred by her personal history and her desire to help others, Valimont is running as a Democrat in Florida’s 2025 1st congressional district special election to fill the seat previously occupied by Gaetz, who was tapped to serve as President Donald Trump’s attorney general and resigned from Congress but ultimately withdrew as the nominee amid allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor and illicit drug use. 

This, she says, feels natural. “We all go through difficult things in our lives, and that’s how we respond to them. So, I’m going to get up and fight.”

Valimont sat down with Floricua for a one-on-one interview to discuss some of the issues most pressing for Floridians right now: healthcare, the cost of housing and property insurance, and gun violence prevention.

The below interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What was the turning point for you that made you decide to run for office?

All I want to do is protect this district with everything I have, because every corner of it reminds me of my family. I believe gun violence prevention led me to it, but there are an endless number of things that we need to do in government. 

One of the core issues of your platform is healthcare access. What can you tell us about that?

Obviously, with what I went through with my family, healthcare is special to me. But I also work in healthcare in sports medicine. We’re treating young Black kids, athletes, and trying to navigate the Medicare or Medicaid system to get things paid for. Then, once my family got sick, I had to beg insurance companies to pay for cancer medication. And we had good healthcare. But still I was left with $100,000 worth of medical debt. People shouldn’t have to face that. And people shouldn’t have to go in for any procedure and not know what they’re going to pay when they come out. 

What is your vision for improving healthcare for Floridians?

I believe that if somebody has United Healthcare and somebody has Blue Cross Blue Shield, and somebody has Medicare, it should all be on one pay scale, because each insurance company negotiates their prices with each medical facility. So, there’s no way that the consumer can possibly know what they’re going to owe when they get out. I am suggesting that every medical insurance company has to abide by one pay scale. Some people may call that Medicare for all. We can call it whatever as long as people know what they’re going to owe. The last thing we should have to worry about with one of the highest bills that we pay every month, is that it’s not going to be there when we need it. And more often than not, our insurance companies are not there when we need them.

Gov. DeSantis has passed laws limiting what teachers can teach in schools. Critics claim these laws are keeping Florida children from receiving a good education. What are your thoughts?

Both of my parents were public school educators. My mom taught for 42 years, and my dad taught for 36. I know what teachers go through to have to teach. If you’re a teacher, you should have every resource available to you to be able to teach. But what we’ve done in Florida is tried to arm our teachers. We are freaking our kids out with these lockdown drills, and teachers are expected to manage a whole lot more than their classroom. 

What do you think needs to happen to empower teachers and give kids a chance at a good education?

I say we get back to basics. We need to pay teachers a living wage, and that’s all teachers. DeSantis passed a bill this past spring that gave teachers a pay raise, but it wasn’t all the teachers, and it wasn’t significant. They have made a lot of rules about what teachers can call the kids, about the books in their classrooms. We are limiting our teachers, and we need to empower them.

My plan is that we put more federal funds into public schools. Florida has completely messed up. They have implemented private school [vouchers], so, if your child goes to a public school, and if that public school is failing or is failing your child, they will give you $8,000 to go to another school or to homeschool. There have been rampant stories of people buying other things with that money that have nothing to do with education.

And so, we are throwing a lot of money out of our public schools into these private schools and into private religious schools, and we have zero oversight with what they do with that money. That needs to be corrected. But to do that, we have to change our state legislature. And we have to invest in public education. We have to make sure that we elect a governor who cares about our kids and not about funding private schools.

With rent and property insurance costs soaring, affordable housing is another problem that Floridians are facing right now. What do you see as a solution?

We have most people in a crisis with their homeowners’ insurance. And the prices keep going up. There are big corporations that are jacking up the rent and making sure that people that can’t afford it have to move out. In our district we have military facilities everywhere, huge buildings and hangars that are empty. These buildings already have plumbing, they already have electricity.

Give builders tax incentives to turn these empty buildings into housing for people that need it. It’s a simple plan, but it is effective. We also need some sort of oversight. I think that’s where we’re going wrong in Florida, especially with our insurance rates. Jimmy Petronis, who is potentially my opponent in the race for Congress, is the very reason that we are stuck in this homeowner’s hell. He refuses to cap what insurance companies can pay or can charge, and to me that is killing Floridians.

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With Florida ranking as one of the states with the most mass shootings in the U.S. in 2024, how do you propose to curb gun violence in the state?

When we passed stand your ground in Florida, our homicide rate went up 32%. I have a background in gun violence prevention and have volunteered with Moms Demand Action for 12 years. I’ve been doing this for so long, I can see the benefits of background checks on all gun sales. And when I talk to people about background checks, they’re like, ‘Oh, how is that going to help?’ We have to implement laws, and it starts with background checks on all gun sales. When you buy a gun in the United States from a licensed gun dealer, you have to have a background check.

But in Florida, we have what we’ve for years called the gun show loophole. People in Florida can sell weapons [via] person to person sales, and it’s perfectly legal. It was originally meant to be for people to hand their guns down or gift their guns to their family members. But it has turned into a free for all. And so, these people are not required to have background checks. Well, when you sell a gun to somebody else, we have no trace of those guns.

What do you tell people is the danger in that?

We don’t know if they know how to handle their weapon. And so, I’m asking responsible gun owners, and a lot of military people here, to abide by the same rules as the military: you should have to go through some training. You should have to have a background check.

You have also expressed concern about Florida’s failure to implement Red Flag laws. 

We have a red flag law in Florida that has worked in places where they have implemented it. But most of our sheriff’s deputies have not implemented it, and red flag laws could have stopped what happened in Parkland. Red flag laws can stop domestic violence shootings. Red flag laws work so that when a loved one owns a gun, and you think they are a threat to you, to themselves or others, then you report that, and you go in for an immediate hearing and you have to prove why you think that that person shouldn’t have a weapon.

It’s not an easy process, and the opposition says that it’s an easy way for gun grabbers to ‘get your guns.’ But it’s not easy for a woman who has been beaten to go in front of a judge and say, ‘this man’s going to kill me if you don’t take his gun away.’ That’s not easy. So, implementing red flag laws in Florida and passing red flag laws nationally would be a huge key to stopping gun violence.

In view of everything you have said, why do you say it is especially important for Democrats to win in April?

Right now, our Congress is at 218 Republican, 215 Democrat. So, we are 3 seats behind. It is a slim margin, and I cannot express to you how important this is. One vote can make the difference. There are any number of issues that may come down to one single vote. And we are talking about votes on the Affordable Care Act. We’re talking about votes on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and providing health care to children that need it. I believe that we need good people in government, honest people in government, and my predecessor did not give that to the people of this district, and I believe I can.

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