The New York Times ran a highly gratifying but deceptive story that still made my morning, headlined, “Florida Stopped Being a Swing State Slowly, Then All At Once.” Ha!
The post-pandemic swing was to +1,000,000 red voters. That headline is encouraging enough, but the sub-headline added: “Once a top presidential battleground, Florida is no longer competitive.” Take that, dems.
The Times bent itself into a damp pretzel trying every way it could think of to avoid saying the real reason why Florida flipped red. To set the stage, as the Times correctly noted, just a few years back in 2018, it was pretty purple. For instance, the Democrats’ far-left (i.e., open communist), gay, black, single, male-escort connoisseur, coke-snorting candidate Andrew Gillum, was nearly elected.
DeSantis barely scraped by after a contentious recount, edging Gillum out by fewer than 30,000 out of 16.1 million votes (0.5%).
But only four years later in 2022, DeSantis won re-election by millions of votes — over +20%. The Times ignored the obvious question: what significant event happened in between 2018 and 2022, say in 2020, which made DeSantis who he is, and which painted Florida deep red? Hmm?
The word “pandemic” was mostly absent from the Times’ article, which instead floundered around whining about wonky hispanic voting trends, pining over democrat underspending and voter-registration outsourcing, and gnashing its teeth about Republican gerrymandering.
The Times won’t, but I will tell you how it happened. I was here. I was neck-deep in all of it.
Florida flipped red for one reason, and that reason’s last name is DeSantis.
The federal government’s fascistic overreach set him up perfectly. The hyper-fascistic overreach from Florida’s blue counties armed DeSantis with even more ammunition. And, at some point in early summer 2020, DeSantis made the fateful decision that transformed him into one of the most well-known politicians in the world.
Governor DeSantis defied lockdowns at a time when doing that meant the narrative-enforcing media would immediately savage you and try to destroy your political career. DeSantis did it anyway. He also shut down the Summer of Protest. And he fought to free people —like me— who live in Florida’s few blue counties.
The media’s effort to destroy DeSantis backfired. They just gave him more publicity. The result was that, over the next two years, Florida experienced a red tsunami of Republican in-migration unlike anything that has maybe ever happened in American history. Conservatives across the country fled to Florida in droves. Meanwhile, small herds of liberals moved out, indignantly muttering “deathsantis” to each other all the way up I-75.
These conservative pandemic gains led to Florida’s legislative supermajority, which promptly, after close observation of the 2020 election, started plugging the holes in Florida’s electoral code. Florida was already better than most, but now Florida is one of the most secure states in the country in terms of election integrity. They also resisted mandates and fought Biden every step of the way.
Florida stopped being a swing state all at once thanks both to Ron DeSantis and Joe Biden.
But I’m giving DeSantis all the credit.
