DeSantis was supposed to be the winner of the pandemic. Credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Ron DeSantis was supposed to be one of the pandemic’s few political winners. His reputation as Florida’s Republican governor has soared thanks to his laissez-faire approach to Covid-19 — so much so that many consider him an early frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination in 2024.
But DeSantis’s victory lap has been rudely interrupted. Thanks to the Delta variant, the Sunshine State is now the epicentre of the pandemic in the US. In the last week, Florida has broken its records for the number of daily cases and hospitalisations. Last month, it was responsible for one in five of the country’s new cases, despite being home to 6% of Americans.
But as cases rise, DeSantis is steadfast in his refusal to impose the sorts of rules that have been reintroduced in other parts of the country. He has opposed a new indoor mask mandate and resisted vaccine passports. “In Florida, there will be no lockdowns,” DeSantis said recently. “There will be no school closures. There will be no restrictions and no mask mandates.”
Predictably, such stubbornness has cemented his status as a liberal hate figure. Pundits who have been waiting to say “I told you so” for months are making up for lost time. The ever-hyperbolic Washington Post columnist Jenifer Rubin, for example, thinks that by resisting further lockdowns, the likes of DeSantis have “formed a sort of death cult that elevates ‘owning the libs’ over the prevention of needless death”. In the New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that “at every stage of the pandemic DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus”.
But there are also signs that the current surge is hurting DeSantis’s reputation beyond the opinion pages of America’s prestige media. Many assumed that DeSantis would cruise to re-election in 2022, but a poll published this week shows him trailing (albeit narrowly) Representative Charlie Crist, a one-time Republican who served as governor from 2007 to 2011 now running for his old job as a Democrat.
“For as long as we have to contend with the pandemic, then Ron DeSantis lives or dies politically based on how Covid-19 is impacting Florida,” says Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist based in Miami. Florida pollster Brad Coker agrees DeSantis is taking a huge gamble “By sticking to his guns and being consistent, he is seen as a strong executive,” he says. “But he’s also gambling that Covid will not be a much of a factor by the end of the summer”, giving him a clean run at 2022 and potentially 2024.
DeSantis, it’s worth noting, has been here before. After locking down early on, his was one of the first states to reopen — much to the horror of many commentators. He focused state resources on surging hospital capacity, protecting care homes and PPE supply. He has held firm ever since, resisting pressure to reintroduce rules.
The lethal spikes never arrived with quite the force that so many public health experts predicted. In terms of deaths from Covid-19, Florida’s performance has been middling by US standards. But it has largely avoided the costly social distancing restrictions implemented in other parts of the country. Employment fell by 4.6% in Florida last year, compared with 10.4% in New York and 8% in California. Between the start of November and the end of February, case rates in the three states were roughly the same, only businesses in Florida were open at full capacity.
Since the pandemic started, DeSantis’s greatest asset has been liberal overstatement. His decision to reopen earned him the nickname “DeathSantis”, while photographs of busy beaches (made to look busier thanks to long-lens foreshortening) were presented as evidence of the height of “Florida man” stupidity.
No doubt he hopes his opponents’ previous hyperbole will soften the political impact of the current Delta wave. Moreover, DeSantis firmly believes that restrictions and mask mandates are harder to justify when vaccines have been widely available for months — something which was the stated view of the White House and the CDC until a few weeks ago.
There is, however, another shadow looming over DeSantis’s political future: the man to whom he owes his rapid rise: Donald Trump. Without the then President’s endorsement, his underdog 2018 gubernatorial bid would likely have failed. That race — and one television advertisement in particular — established DeSantis as a kind of Trump wannabe.
In the 30-second viral video, DeSantis’s wife Casey tells viewers: “Everyone knows my husband Ron was endorsed by President Trump, but he’s also an amazing dad.” DeSantis is then shown teaching his children to build a wall, reading to them from Trump’s memoir The Art of the Deal, and reciting “Make America Great Again”. Mrs DeSantis then says: “People say Ron’s all Trump. But he’s so much more.”
Needless to say the joke was lost on many. But while the Florida governor is capable of nauseating sycophancy towards the 45th president, the relationship between DeSantis and Trump is more complicated than it first seems.
In a world of mini-Trumps, there are comparatively few stylistic similarities between DeSantis and the former President. Yes, there’s the boxy tailoring and the Trumpian pinch of index finger and thumb while he speaks. But DeSantis offers a very different sort of pugilistic conservatism. Trump is a booming heavyweight slugger. DeSantis is a nasal and nimble counterpuncher. Where the former president is off-the-cuff, unapologetic and unfiltered, DeSantis is lawyerly, careful, strategic, even defensive.
Republican strategist Luke Thompson attributes the idea of DeSantis as Trump to “wishful thinking, pig ignorance or wilful dishonesty”. It is important, he argues, to distinguish between DeSantis the governor and DeSantis the media phenomenon. Prior to the pandemic, DeSantis was governing in the mould of his moderate GOP Floridian predecessors, Jeb Bush and Rick Scott. He was focused on education and on broadening out his appeal to beyond the core Republican vote.
Amandi describes DeSantis as “a canny interpreter of the political environment without the Trump histrionics, which makes him formidable.” Adding to his strengths, says Amandi, is a “nimbleness in cherry picking issues that makes him palatable to moderates. That shows real political tact.”
Then there’s the role of the media. DeSantis emerged as a leading national figure during the pandemic in part because liberal outlets needed a red state counterpoint to Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor whose early pandemic press conferences — part-public health briefings, part-motivational speeches — earned gushing praise.
But that script didn’t quite play out as Cuomo and his media cheerleaders hoped. With the pandemic raging, Cuomo was busy writing a self-laudatory memoir, which earned Cuomo a $4m advance while his advisers were busy trying to cover up deaths in his state’s care homes. Then came the accusations of sexual harassment, corroborated by a report into the New York Governor’s conduct published this week.
“As Cuomo has looked more and more like the absolute monster that he is and exposed the American media as the highly tendentious lickspittle idiots that they are, DeSantis’s standing with Republican primary voters has improved drastically,” says Thompson. “Every unfair attack, every ludicrous effort in character assassination has really bonded the GOP voting bloc to DeSantis and raised his profile.”
Compared with Cuomo, DeSantis’s reputation is relatively untainted. But will his stock continue to rise?
DeSantis has firmed up his conservative bona fides with a series of laws on hot-button Republican issues. He has passed a (possibly unconstitutional) bill aimed at banning critical race theory from being taught in schools. Though he has refused to explicitly endorse Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, he is one of a number of Republican governors to indulge those claims by introducing a slew of election safeguards. In doing so, he is prioritising popularity among Republicans nationwide over broadening his appeal in Florida.
Nor must we forget that while Florida may be the home of the last Republican president, sulking in his Palm Beach palace, it’s also a veritable graveyard of overhyped GOP contenders. Former Governor Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the state’s Cuban-American senior senator, were Donald Trump’s highest profile victims in the 2016 primary.
But perhaps it’s not so surprising that Republicans from Florida often have their eyes on higher office. After all, Florida is a 21-million-person rebuttal to some of the core assumptions of the contemporary American Left. It is a growing, multiracial, economically vibrant state. And it is only getting redder.
Democrats are eager to paint the modern GOP as a rump party supported by a shrinking demographics in America’s declining backwaters. “I won in the places that are optimistic, diverse, moving forward,” boasted Hillary Clinton after her 2016 defeat. Florida is a brash, cacophonous repudiation of that Democratic assumption. In other words, Florida is a feel-good story for the GOP. And by making himself synonymous with that story, DeSantis can certainly mount a credible 2024 bid.
But the big, orange elephant in the room is the former president, who continues to tease that he will run again. That puts DeSantis and Trump on a collision course. An early skirmish came last month, when the governor asked that the former president postpone a rally in the state scheduled for shortly after the collapse of an apartment building in Surfside. Trump went ahead with a raucous rally. DeSantis, meanwhile, cut a more sombre figure, appearing alongside President Biden in a visit to the site of the catastrophe.
It was proof, if we needed it, that DeSantis is conscious of the need to balance the support of Trump’s base with the risk of alienating other voters. How ironic, then, that whether or not he can keep this balancing act up probably depends not on Florida’s Covid-19 numbers, but on the decisions of the famously capricious and impulsive man to whom he owes his political career.
Oliver Wiseman is the deputy editor of The Spectator World and author of the DC Diary, a daily email from Washington. He is a 2021-22 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow
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SubscribeI can vaguely recall a time when Paul Krugman was regarded as some sort of quasi-academic oracle of wisdom.
It was a time before I’d read anything he had written. Everything by him that I have read indicates that he is in fact a malevolent Marxist loony.
I believe he had expertise in some specialist financial areas (analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.) which is what won him his 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Nobel.
His furious backpedalling on Venezuela is funny to watch though, as is the convoluted NYTimesplaining of his supporters about what he really meant when he proclaimed it as a model of true socialism.
Yes, should I ever be interested in trade patterns and business siting decisions, I’d very much want to know Krugman’s views. Otherwise, he has as much claim to my attention as a randomly chosen PhD in a randomly chosen field speaking about any topic outside his or her narrow specialty.
Krugman and the odious Jen Rubin function as dysfunctional Cassandras; what they condemn, you can be sure shall be elevated.
“Yet the lethal spikes never arrived with quite the force that so many public health experts predicted. In terms of deaths from Covid-19, Florida’s performance has been middling by US standards. But it has largely avoided the costly social distancing restrictions implemented in other parts of the country.”
I know this is an article about how Trump might scupper DeSantis’s political future (and it’s a fine, thought-provoking article–kudos to the author), but I’m most interested in why lockdowns seem to have limited effects on covid? I’m not trying to get into the politics behind lockdowns, just the science.
It seems counter-intuitive that large scale lockdowns don’t substantially slow the spread of the virus and reduce the number of deaths but that appears to be true. Why is that? What does it tell us about the best way for society to react to this virus?
I know those are loaded questions and I hope I don’t trigger a flame war here in the comments section, but I want to understand this issue. I suppose one explanation goes to the duration of lockdowns and whether the number of deaths is measured during the period of lockdown or over a much longer period of time. Lockdown might slow infection and death rates in the short term but they both come roaring back when lockdown is eased. Maybe that’s the answer to my question.
Looking at statistics regarding Covid deaths worldwide, there does seem to be little correlation between the stringency of lockdowns and the number of fatalities. Belgium had some of the strictest lockdowns and one of the worst deaths per capita in Europe, while Sweden did much better with a much more targeted approach. Peru in South America also struggled despite locking down hard, and in the various states in America it doesn’t seem to have made much difference.
I think the reason so many countries did it is because governments were simply too scared not to. If your neighbours had locked down and you didn’t, if at the end you had substantially more deaths it would have been curtains politically. However if you simply copy everybody else you merely blend into the background, the it becomes much harder for opponents to attack you regarding the outcomes
Quite. De Santis is paid to LEAD, not to follow.
I will echo that hard lockdowns do not appear to have worked (lockdown being different to lockout in certain remote island states). There are numerous examples of this, with epidemic curves and timings of lockdowns being studied in many states and countries, but Sweden was always the model that was scrutinised the most.
I looked up their deaths per capita now and they sit at 39th in the world. During most of last year they were 8th. So here we are more than a year after we listened to Prof Giesecke outlining their approach and it certainly appears to have worked – plus they have a largely intact economy.
The different impact of COVID by country will turn out to have little to do with government responses and much to do with demographics and vaccination progress.
That doesn’t happen though. Look at the UK “freedom day”. Two days later cases dropped off a cliff.
I will try to answer your question. If you are genuinely curious about this become a reader of dailysceptic.org – Will Jones is doing a great job of exploring the possibilities here and the analysis is of a high quality. I’ll summarize some theories about what’s going on.
Lockdown theory is based on several extremely dubious and unverified assumptions about viruses and germs, assumptions like:
(2) is important. There’s evidence that viruses can be transmitted long distances. Think about influenza: each year there are spontaneous new outbreaks around the world that occur simultaneously everywhere. There isn’t a single patient zero each year from whom flu waves spread outwards along lines of contact. Modern epidemiologists basically ignore this phenomenon although older generations were curious about it.
(3) is also important. Lockdowns are claimed to be “effective” against a modelled counter-factual of mass deaths if they aren’t done. If the counter-factual is wrong then lockdowns by definition cannot be “effective”. And we know the counter-factuals are very wrong because model predictions keep being falsified, over and over, most recently with UK freedom day. Note that all the models for COVID at the start were predicting a single giant wave. They couldn’t predict anything else because they assumed only lockdowns can stop epidemics and that otherwise a virus will simply keep spreading exponentially until 100% of the population has been infected. With no understanding of natural immunity, nor for how long SARS-CoV-2 had really been spreading in the population before mass testing started, they had to make this assumption in order to make predictions, but it renders their model useless. They ended up confidently asserting nonsensical scenarios on the back of very incomplete scientific understanding, something which our broken and brainwashed society was totally unable to push back against.
So: lockdowns probably don’t work because the alternative scenario they supposedly protect against isn’t real, because they’re based on bad understandings of probability and biology, and because the germ theory on which lockdown theory rests appears to be incomplete. And underneath it all, because the “experts” who push this theory know no more about viruses or disease than you or I do.
Re (2). Another Bliar fiasco. Those poor farmers. Those poor cows.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
You’re welcome!
Excellent comment
Lockdowns do not work because covid spreads in the home more than anywhere else. Lock people in the house togther is bad, let them out wile using their judgement on how to protect themselves in public – much better. Get outside, that is good.
Sure the Delta or the Lambda or the next nonsense to sell more vaccines. How many shares of BioNTech does the author have? I bought a bunch in June. Figured if I can’t beat them I’ll join them. OMG the Delta!!!! Lol
The writer is very pro democrat,
“the Florida governor is capable of nauseating sycophancy towards the 45th president,”
He is not full Guardian, but has a good dose of TDS, which I find annoying as a British Journalist based in DC, it would be great to be neutral – but that would never happen. I find his articles tell us more of the Liberal Consensus than they do of the topic he selects.
I would say that the more incoming rounds that DeSantis survives from Dems, the more we racist-sexist-homophobes are gonna like him.
Obviously, at some point, Trump is gong to take a swipe at DeSantis. Again, we racist-sexist-homophobes want to know if he can take a punch, and even punch back.
Meanwhile, as my grandfather would have said, I really like the cut of DeSantis’s jib. Little bit of sailor talk for you old salts.
The assertion, “…he is one of a number of Republican governors to indulge those claims by introducing a slew of election safeguards. In doing so, he is prioritising popularity among Republicans nationwide over broadening his appeal in Florida,” is not so clear. Polling suggests that the main election safeguard, voter ID requirements, is broadly popular, in fact favored among minority voters by a wider margin that among whites. Backing election safeguards is surely popular with GOP voters nationwide but there is no basis for asserting this is a popularity won without broadening his appeal in Florida.
My one bone of contention with this article is that the author talks about the surge of cases in Fla without mentioning that Ca (with many more restrictions) is doing worse per-capita. That is an important caveat.
Alberta, Canada has relaxed a lot of Covid “guidelines”
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/alberta-to-eliminate-covid-19-quarantine-rules-as-cases-rise-among-the-unvaccinated-1.5526426
I would like to know more about the
and why you think they are indulging Trump’s claims about 2020.
What happened in the stolen election was vote harvesting was done so cleverly it withstood the fact it was illegal.
Basically several states (whose own constitutions set how the vote is to be done, the Fed Gov does not control this) just allowed massive voter address collection by special interest – and then mailed out ballots. NONE of them had such a law passed in their State congress! They just violated their own voting law requiring ID, and voting at poling places – and gave out ballots – ones which then the special interests visited the people and convinced them to vote democrat, got the ballots sent, dropped in boxes, or what ever – ALL ILLEGALLY.
The thing is no Judge would hear this because they said that although the vote was done illegally, the individual voter voted in good faint, not knowing this was illegal – and SO THE JUDGES WOULD NOT OVERTURN THEIR VOTE.
Trump won, but Biden became President. Such is the state of democracy today.
Although postal or absentee voting is necessary in some circumstances, it is not, and cannot be, a guaranteed secret ballot.
You don’t have to prove tampering before or after – the fact remains that even if ballots were mailed to the right addresses and collected and counted by irreproachable persons of high calibre, you simply cannot know if the ballot was a)made by voter alone and out of sight of others, b)not subject to intimidation c)not seen by somebody else present d)made by the correct voter e)not harvested by others present, whether residing or visiting that address e)or even at that address when they marked the paper.
It’s a major problem for any democracy when absentee ballots become a significant proportion of the total, say, more than 2%.
You don’t have to be paranoid to suspect that certain parties sensed a fantastic opportunity to use COVID as a cover for subverting the core principle of the secret ballot, since it had been producing the “wrong” results since at least 2016.