TALLAHASSEE (AP) -- Florida state Sen. Paula Dockery will challenge Attorney General Bill McCollum in the Republican primary for governor, she announced Monday.

Dockery has been mulling the race for months, encouraged by supporters to take on the candidate that has been backed by the Republican Party of Florida in a campaign that will be seen as bucking politics as usual in Tallahassee. She has confirmed on her twitter page that she has officially filed her paperwork..

The state party had been hoping to avoid a primary in the race to fill the seat Republican Gov. Charlie Crist is giving up after one term to run for U.S. Senate.

This past session, Dockery successfully fought a proposal to have the state buy 61 miles of rail from CSX Transportation Inc. for about a half-billion dollars to build an Orlando area commuter rail system. She said the proposal, which Crist supported, was a bad deal for the state and for the communities that would have had to deal with rerouted freight traffic.

Dockery, 48, of Lakeland, has said she could use some of her personal wealth to get her campaign rolling. She is little known outside her district, but has said she's received encouragement to run from people around the state. She has been making appearances around Florida throughout the summer.

She is challenging one of the state's most prominent Republicans. McCollum served in the U.S. House for 20 years and twice ran unsuccessfully for Senate before winning his current seat in 2006. The state GOP pressured Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson to stay out of the race after he initially said he would run.

Dockery didn't comment further about the run as she prepares a formal announcement, but her Facebook page lists her favorite quotation as Winston Churchill's "Never, never, never give up."

She was elected to the Senate in 2002. She recently sat on a commission formed by Crist to study open government issues. Among legislation she's sponsored was a bill to ban touchscreen voting machines and replace them with machines that could provide a paper trail. The House version of the bill became law.

Should Dockery prevail in the primary, it could ensure that Florida elects its first woman governor. Alex Sink, the state's chief financial officer, is currently the only major Democrat running for the seat.