UF Student Government overall election turnout dipped slightly compared to last Spring, based on results announced Wednesday from the Supervisor of Elections.
The decrease wasn’t equal among the two major parties. Change Party saw large turnout drops for votes tallied across all races. Vision Party, by comparison, saw a slight increase in total ballots cast — leading to wins for the presidential ticket, treasurer race and all but three of the 50 available senator seats.
The Alligator created a searchable table to find 2025 Spring election results by candidate, party or race.
Vision won the 2025 presidential election by a wider margin than last year’s victory — but its votes didn’t increase by much.
Although Student Body President-Elect Blake Cox received slightly more ballots than last year’s Vision Party victor John Brinkman, the key to his landslide came mostly from a massive decrease in votes for the opposition Change Party candidate Anamika Naidu.
Vision Party’s presidential votes went up by 86 from last year. But the Change Party went down by over 1,000.
The same proved true for the treasurer race, where Vision candidate Johanna Moncy won by an even wider margin than Cox.
Cox won nearly three-fourths of student body votes, marking the second consecutive year the gap between the winning and losing candidate has grown.
But the widening gap between the two major candidates in the student body president election hasn’t stayed constant. In 2022 and 2023, the difference narrowed between Change Party and the major contender at the time, Gator Party. I think we should mention the redistricting map here.
However, Gator Party dissolved late 2023, and in its place formed Vision Party.
After the new party emerged, Change’s losses grew. That trend began last election, where Vision appeared on ballots for the first time, and increased this year with Cox’s presidential victory — where he won nearly three times his opponent’s votes.
The presidency wasn’t the only place Change lost dramatically. Across all races, Change received about 39% of votes cast between the two major parties in last year’s election, not counting for third-party or write-ins. This year, that figure decreased to just 26%.
The drop in Change turnout resulted in 18 seats transitioning to Vision leadership. Although Change lost seats in engineering, liberal arts and sciences, medicine and pharmacy, the biggest hit came from the graduate senator race.
Change swept graduate seats for the past two years, but a near-reverse occurred this year with all seats but one flipping to Vision. The reason for the flip echoed the trend for the election: a slight increase in Vision votes, coupled with a massive decrease in Change turnout.
The only winning Change graduate candidate won uncontested, since Vision didn’t run enough candidates to fill all available seats.
Vision won 47 senate seats total, the candidates in five of which — building construction, dentistry, education, health and human performances and pharmacy — ran uncontested.
Among those single-seat races that did have more than one candidate entered, Freshman Senator candidate Jacob Eisenberg earned the largest margin of victory with 85% of the votes cast in his category.
Other than the one uncontested graduate winner, Change picked up its second seat in the arts senator race — an area with a history of dominance by the party.
The Alligator’s race-by-race data visualization shows how results for the arts election, and all elections, have shifted since 2020 in number of votes and winning candidates by party.
A Vision Party candidate ran for the veterinary medicine senate seat but received zero votes despite running uncontested. The seat will remain vacant.
It’s not an unusual result for the vet senator, a race with historically low turnout. In 2021, a Gator and Change candidate both ran and neither received any votes. For the past two elections, just one major party candidate ran, and both won the seat with just one vote each.
However, among total votes cast across all races, the number of ballots for Vision actually increased slightly. Change, on the other hand, saw a 44% decrease in total votes — accounting for much of the drop in overall turnout.
Elected candidates will take office in March. Combined with the 50 senators elected in the Fall, the total ratio in the UF Senate will be 92 Vision, six Change and two open seats.
Zoey Thomas is a media production junior and The Alligator's Spring 2025 data editor. She previously reported for the metro, university and enterprise desks. In her free time, you can find her reading, crocheting or arguing for the superiority of sweet potatoes over regular potatoes.
