At 10:45 p.m. on July 2nd, police in Daphne, Alabama pulled over a 46-year-old man driving erratically on U.S. Highway 98 near North Main Street. On the center console sat a glass pipe. In the vehicle, officers recovered several rolled marijuana cigarettes and three packages of a substance that tested positive for methamphetamine.

The driver was Andrew Gillum — the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Florida.

Gillum, who served as mayor of Tallahassee before his gubernatorial run, lost to Ron DeSantis by fewer than 34,000 votes. Less than one percentage point. Four million Floridians pulled the lever for him. Barack Obama personally cut campaign ads on his behalf.

Now he's sitting in the Baldwin County Correctional Facility on charges of unlawful possession of a controlled substance — a Class D felony under Alabama law — and second-degree marijuana possession, a Class A misdemeanor. He was initially booked into the Daphne City Jail before being transferred. He has since been released.

This isn't Gillum's first brush with catastrophic personal headlines. In 2020, he was found inebriated in a Miami Beach hotel room where another man had overdosed. No charges were filed. At the time, Gillum released a statement: "This has been a wake-up call for me. Since my race for governor ended, I fell into a depression that has led to alcohol abuse."

That was six years ago. The wake-up call apparently didn't take.

In 2022, Gillum faced federal charges for allegedly misusing campaign-related funds with a political ally. He was acquitted of lying to the FBI, and the remaining charges were dropped after a mistrial. That same year, DeSantis won reelection by 20 points.

The contrast writes itself. The man who nearly ran the third-largest state in the country has spent the years since losing bouncing between hotel-room incidents, federal courtrooms, and now a traffic stop in coastal Alabama with a meth pipe in plain view. Meanwhile, the man who beat him turned Florida into the model red state and became a national figure.

Gillum had been co-hosting a podcast called "Native Land Pod" with Angela Rye and Bakari Sellers. Whether that continues after a felony drug arrest is a question someone at the network probably fielded this weekend.

As reported by RedState, the police statement confirmed that "several rolled marijuana cigarettes and three packages of a substance that tested positive for methamphetamine were recovered" from the vehicle. Not a gray area. Not a misunderstanding. Three packages.

Florida chose DeSantis over Gillum by a margin so thin it could have gone either way. One of them spent the next eight years governing. The other spent it in a cycle that now includes a felony drug charge in another state.

Sometimes 34,000 votes is the difference between a governor's mansion and a county jail.