He is a member of the Florida Senate from the 17th district since 2024, covering much of Orange County east of I-4, having been elected without opposition upon the qualifying deadline on June 14th.
He then served as communications director and senior advisor to Joe Saunders during his successful 2012 bid for the Florida House of Representatives in the 49th district.
[3] He resigned his chairmanship of the Orange County Democratic Party in the summer of 2015 to focus on his bid for the seat Randolph and Saunders had held before him.
Smith secured a success for Equality Florida by reaching agreement with Republican lawmakers that the law would not be expanded to allow private businesses to refuse service to members of the LGBT community, essentially neutralizing the bill.
Over the course of his 2016 campaign, Smith received endorsements from prominent progressive politicians, organizations, and unions, including Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, former Florida House Representative Joe Saunders, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman, and the Florida Professional Firefighters State Association.
Smith, who had attended the club in the past, felt personally shocked and targeted by the attack, the victims of which were mostly Latino and LGBT.
[19] Despite being part of a small Democratic minority in the House, Smith filed several ambitious pieces of legislation and has advocated aggressively on a series of progressive issues.
In his 2018 re-election campaign, Smith received 64 percent of the vote, beating Republican challenger Ben Griffin by an almost 2-to-1 margin.
For the 2017 legislative session, Smith filed a bill to ban the sale, transfer, and possession of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
Largely motivated by the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, Smith has advocated fiercely for the restrictions, arguing at a January 2017 press conference that "the people killed by gun violence every day have rights too.
Smith refiled his assault weapons ban for the 2018 legislative session just days after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, in which a lone gunman killed 58 people and caused 851 injuries.
On February 20, less than a week after the massacre that killed 14 high school students and three teachers, Florida Representative Kionne McGhee moved to withdraw Smith's bill that would ban assault weapons from its committees and immediately consider it on the floor.
Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School watched the motion fail from the House chamber's viewing gallery.
"[28] Spano is the chair of the Criminal Justice Subcommittee in the Florida House of Representatives,[29] the first committee to which Smith's assault weapons ban was assigned.
Ten Democrats, many of them representing areas of Broward County and South Florida near Parkland, supported the legislation, giving Republican leadership the votes they needed to pass the plan.
On March 9, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act into law.
Smith spoke out against the implementing legislation favored by Republicans, which banned smokeable cannabis and instead limited its use to oils and vape pens.
[41] Though the Sunshine State legalized medical marijuana in 2016 through a ballot measure, lawmakers passed legislation in 2017 outlawing smokable forms of the substance.
Smith has advocated for protections for undocumented immigrants, including the Florida Trust Act, which he has sponsored in the 2017 and 2018 legislative sessions.
[45] Smith has fought to improve conditions for racing greyhounds in Florida, filing legislation in 2017 to ban the use of anabolic steroids in the industry.
[46] In 2017, Smith secured $2.5 million in funding for UCF RESTORES, a PTSD clinic located on the campus of the University of Central Florida.
The center provides virtual reality immersion therapy to help veterans and first responders with PTSD to overcome the disorder.