Dennis Alan Ross was born in Lakeland in 1959, the youngest of five children of Bill and Loyola Ross, who had moved to Polk County four years earlier.
The family lived on modest means. Dennis spent nine years in Catholic school and graduated from Lakeland Senior High School in 1977. He met his future wife, Cindy, in student government, and his first campaign was hers: he ran her race for class president. They married in Lakeland in 1983 and raised two sons there.
He studied at the University of Florida, earned his degree in organizational management at Auburn University in 1981, and worked as a legislative aide in the Florida House and in the early personal-computer industry before earning his law degree at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law in 1987.
The party
A Young Republican, then a county chairman.
Dennis came up through the party the way most members of the State Executive Committee did. He showed up, did the work and was asked to lead.
He served as president of the Greater Lakeland Young Republicans in 1990. In 1992 his fellow Republicans elected him chairman of the Polk County Republican Executive Committee. Under his chairmanship the county party elected Republicans to local office and built a lasting organization around individual freedom, personal responsibility, less government and lower taxes.
In 1996 he made his own first run, for the Florida Senate against a well-known incumbent Democrat. He lost, went back to work for the party and his law practice, and came back four years later to win.
The law
A Lakeland lawyer who built a business.
After starting at Holland & Knight and serving as in-house counsel at Walt Disney World, Dennis opened his own firm in Lakeland.
Ross Vecchio, P.A. represented Florida employers in workers’ compensation cases for more than twenty years and grew to seven lawyers and 27 employees. Dennis served as president of the Lakeland Bar Association and on the board of the Lakeland Chamber of Commerce, and he was inducted into the Florida Workers’ Compensation Hall of Fame. He gave up his stake in the firm when he was elected to Congress.
Tallahassee
Eight years in the Florida House.
In 2000, Polk County voters sent Dennis to the Florida House in the seat Adam Putnam had held.
He served until term limits ended his tenure in 2008, with a reputation as a firm conservative who kept his word. He once lost a committee chairmanship for casting a free-market vote on principle, and he helped negotiate the creation of Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland.
On the floor of the Florida House, April 2004. Photo: Florida House of Representatives.
Washington
Four terms in Congress and a seat at the whip table.
Dennis won an open seat in Congress in the Republican wave of 2010 and was re-elected three times.
He served on the Financial Services, Oversight, Judiciary and Education and the Workforce committees and was a member of the Republican Study Committee. House leadership named him a Senior Deputy Majority Whip. He wrote the Flood Insurance Market Parity and Modernization Act to give Florida homeowners private alternatives to the federal flood program, and it passed the House without a single vote against.
He opened for Donald Trump in Lakeland in October 2016, voted for the 2017 tax cuts, flew into Hurricane Irma with the Hurricane Hunters, fought for disaster relief for Florida and stood in Jerusalem when the United States opened its embassy there.
Home
Back in Lakeland, building the bench.
Dennis left Congress on his own terms in 2019 and came home.
He returned to the law as an attorney and certified mediator, and he joined Southeastern University in Lakeland as a Distinguished Professor of Political Science, where he teaches and mentors the next generation of Florida leaders. He serves as a trustee of Ariel University in Israel and on the advisory board of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. In 2024 he published a memoir, and his columns on tax and family policy run in Townhall and The Hill.
He and Cindy worship at First Presbyterian Church in Lakeland. He is a lifelong hunter and outdoorsman, a habit he passed on to both sons.
He is running to give back to the party what it gave him: a start, a team and a cause worth the work.
