The selling of Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t add up

Conservative pundits, like Ross Douthat of The New York Times and mainstream reporters like CBS Miami TV reporter Jim DeFede, are portraying Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the great Republican white hope* of the 2024 race for president.

Part of the sales job is the claim that DeSantis’ “open wide” Covid-19 policy has been relatively good, producing a slightly lower death rate than the national average.

That is laughable. The United States has the worst Covid-19 record in the world. Barely beating a disgraceful performance hardly merits credit. DeSantis essentially has followed Trump’s disastrous Covid-19 policies slavishly, and if Florida’s death toll has been marginally lower, it isn’t thanks to the governor.

The reason Florida’s results have been somewhat better than in the rest of the country is the weather. It almost never gets very cold in the main population centers in Florida as it does everywhere else in the rest of the country. It never gets as hot in the summer as in most other Sunbelt states. In July 2020, Phoenix hit a high temperature of at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit for the 34th time that year. The record high for Miami is 98 degrees.

Temperatures of 110 degrees or 10 below don’t happen here. Covid-19 spreads indoors much more readily than it does outdoors. People in colder or hotter areas flock indoors. Florida’s weather is milder year-round. It is the outdoor state as much as it is the Sunshine State.

Even with the state’s advantageous geography, Florida’s Covid-19 is terrible compared with the results in most of the rest of the world. Compared with frigid Michigan, Florida doesn’t look that bad, but then again Michigan public officials, over and above the weather factor, have had to battle fierce resistance from Republicans and militias adamantly opposed to any public health measures. After death plots, armed protests, and large-scale recalcitrance among many citizens, the state government caved in. The infection, hospitalization, and death rates, already high, rose even more.

Let’s compare oranges with oranges. Thailand, like Florida, is a tropical paradise, but the similarities stop there. Thailand is a low-middle income country. The GDP per capita in Thailand is $6,500. Florida’s is almost seven times richer. The GDP per capita is $44,000. Florida has way more resources for a more robust response to Covid-19 than Thailand.

Thailand’s population is three times as large as Florida at almost 65 million compared to Florida’s population of 21.5 million. More people mean more potential infections and more deaths.

But that is not at all what has happened. To date, there have been 104 Covid-19 deaths in Thailand. In Florida, 34,439 have died so far. Florida’s Covid-19 deaths have been 331 times those in Thailand!

By what yardstick is Florida a Covid-19 success story?

The Trump administration set the bar so abysmally low for the nation regarding Covid-19 that a terrible record, such as DeSantis’, can be deceitfully portrayed as good in comparison.

Republicans who liked Trump are rooting for DeSantis. DeSantis is a conman in training; a habitual liar though not quite as prolific and hyperbolic as Trump; a racist and xenophobe with the lighter touch that an education at Yale and Harvard can provide; a crusader for the most predatory form of capitalism; a fan of uncontrolled development, the environment be damned; and an enemy of democracy who tries to get around the will of more than 60 percent of voters on things like environmental spending and reinstating the vote to felons who have served their sentences.

Like Trump, DeSantis is a class warrior against the common citizen. The Florida legislature is his army. Right now, the legislature is getting ready to eliminate pensions for teachers and other state workers. The legislature, in line with its contempt for democracy and the Constitution, just approved a law, construed as an anti-riot law, that is in effect an anti-demonstration law, making protest marches illegal among other restrictions on free expression. It is the legislature’s way to try to squash the Black Lives Matter movement.

The legislature this year made its disregard for the state’s citizens in another important way. In Florida, voter initiatives are the only way for citizens to bypass the ideologically monolithically and highly partisan legislature by changing the state constitution by a direct vote. Before 2006, such a change required only a simple majority vote. That year, the legislature, evidently unhappy with the peoples’ decisions, increased the threshold for approval to 60 percent. This year, they are planning to raise that to two-thirds. Clearly, the people have lost the confidence of the legislature; maybe the legislature should dissolve the people and elect another.

The 2020 election that brought this legislature to power may be the high-water mark for the Republican Party in Florida and the nation, however. Nationally, Trump lost the election by millions of votes. His coup failed. Many Republicans have been deserting the GOP after the Trump loss and the disgraceful coup attempt. The Big Lies that Trump told—about electoral fraud, about the benign nature of Covid-19, about everything—are beginning to fray, and to the extent that Biden succeeds in taming the pandemic and turning the economy around, it will all gradually come apart.

It takes time for reality to supersede dearly held delusions. But unlike a mirage that disappears as you approach, delusions fade gradually the farther you get away from the conditions that brought them about. They fade faster when facts on the ground change. And they have been changing. Under Biden, jobs and economic growth have been growing fast, the vaccination rollout has been going well.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is at war with itself and with the twenty-first century, drifting farther and farther out toward the loony ultra-right. Republicans are demoralized, core Democratic constituencies like African Americans are mobilized, and GOP attempts to make it harder for them to vote can only increase their motivation.

The people have retaken the White House. Why not the Florida legislature?

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* In the first half of the twentieth century blacks were not allowed to play in major leagues sports like baseball and basketball. However, boxing was an exception, and it was dominated by African Americans champions like Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Sugar Ray Robinson. Many whites were upset with this situation and kept hoping for a great white boxer to come along. In 2018, DeSantis, a virtual unknown, narrowly defeated his black adversary, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, in a campaign marked by Trump’s endorsement of DeSantis, and DeSantis’s use of racist language.