Buddy MacKay (born March 22, 1933) is an American politician from Florida. A Democrat, he was briefly the forty-second governor of Florida following the death of Lawton Chiles on December 12, 1998. MacKay was born to a citrus farming family in Ocala, Florida. He served in the United States Air Force during the 1950s, and then attended the University of Florida, eventually receiving a law degree. MacKay was inducted into the University of Florida Hall of Fame (the most prestigious honor a student can receive from UF). He married Anne Selph in 1960; the couple have four sons.
MacKay was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1968, and to the Florida Senate in 1975. From 1983 to 1989 he served for three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he made controlling the national budget one of his main concerns. In 1988 he received the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, but lost in a very close race for that office to Connie Mack III. MacKay served as Florida's lieutenant governor under Lawton Chiles for two terms, starting in 1991, and ran for governor in November 1998 to replace the outgoing Chiles, but was defeated by the Republican candidate Jeb Bush. Chiles died shortly afterward on December 12, and MacKay became governor until Bush took office on January 5, 1999.
