You don’t should be in Florida very lengthy earlier than you hear somebody complain theatrically about snowbirds—the refugees from the northern winter who flock to Orlando and Miami. The coronavirus pandemic created new creatures: Call them the maskbirds, flying south to flee the stricter COVID-19 insurance policies of different elements of the nation. Net migration to Florida sharply elevated from 2020 to 2021, one examine discovered. Search by way of the newspapers, and also you’ll see story after story about individuals abandoning New York for Florida’s sunshine, decrease taxes, and mask-free life.
That inflow alone doesn’t account for Ron DeSantis’s practically 20-point victory within the gubernatorial race, which had many causes. But it does assist clarify it. The first-term Republican’s defiance of typical public-health knowledge within the preliminary 12 months of the pandemic gave him a nationwide platform whereas additionally flattering the self-image of his present constituents—or no less than numerous them—as courageous freedom lovers. (The information bear this out: His approval scores dipped early within the pandemic earlier than recovering.)
DeSantis takes each likelihood to hammer residence the thought of Florida because the “nation’s citadel of freedom,” as he put it in a marketing campaign stump speech in Melbourne final week. That permits him to champion his personal state towards a variety of opponents outlined by geography and referenced by identify: crime-ridden blue cities akin to San Francisco, the piously pro-immigration liberals of Martha’s Vineyard, the “elites” in Washington, D.C.
In the governor’s narrative of the coronavirus, the individuals of Florida didn’t cower at residence or tentatively enterprise exterior in masks, nor did they labor below vaccine mandates as new variants unfold throughout the nation. No, they had been free. Free to help their household. Free to attend college. Free to run a enterprise. Free from the constraints of fogged glasses and never with the ability to unlock their iPhone.
To that, a liberal may add: free to get sick and even die from a respiratory illness for which protected, efficient vaccines can be found. Which is precisely the purpose. DeSantis’s COVID insurance policies reassured members of his political base that they had been in management: They understood the dangers and took them anyway. And though Florida had a relatively excessive COVID dying toll, the welter of confounding components (climate, demographics, wealth) denied liberals the smackdown they craved.
Added to that, DeSantis’s instincts weren’t as excessive as his opponents recommend—or, realizing the way it performs along with his base, as he likes to assert. Florida reopened its faculties in August 2020—sooner than many main blue-state districts however after many European nations. Throughout the pandemic, Florida’s work-from-home and masking insurance policies wouldn’t have made it an outlier in European phrases. Sometimes, liberals have to simply accept that the polarization of U.S. politics goes two methods, and that their favored insurance policies look excessive to outsiders: “No other high-income country in the world relied to such a great extent on remote instruction,” Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovits wrote in The Atlantic earlier this 12 months.
DeSantis’s COVID gamble additionally performed into different politically helpful narratives. His message was a macho one among risk-taking and braveness, which tapped into the prevailing Republican benefit amongst male voters. One of the warm-up clips on the Melbourne rally was from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News present, wherein Carlson mocked DeSantis’s Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, for carrying a masks whereas exercising in a resort health club. On the massive display, Carlson mentioned, “We reached out to Charlie Crist’s office and asked, ‘What exactly were you doing with a mask on alone in the gym, you freak?’” To that machismo, DeSantis added a touch of social conservatism, even puritanism, telling the group, “Heck, if we were just here four years ago and someone had told you we would have states in this country lock kids out of school for a year—you’d have them close churches, but they left the liquor stores and the strip clubs open—you would have said that would not have been possible in the United States of America.”
He solicited boos with a point out of the federal government infectious-disease skilled Anthony Fauci, displaying how to attract on the nicely of conspiracist vitality created by COVID with out diving into it. Soon after in his Melbourne speech, he did one thing much more fascinating with none fanfare. He slipped in an assault on his personal celebration for its cowardly adherence to the scientific consensus: “Make no mistake, at the time, I was getting hammered, hit by the media; every day, 24/7; the left’s attacking me,” he mentioned. “We even had some weak Republicans attacking me.” (More boos.)
No names got, however he was subtly laundering an concept that may show helpful in a GOP main marketing campaign in 2024. Who within the Republican Party received vaccinated, reluctantly wore a masks, and walked again his endorsement of untested remedies for the coronavirus? Trump—who briefly performed the position of “responsible world leader” for a couple of brief months of the pandemic. To whom did the hated Fauci report? Also Trump. An bold governor may ask, “Hey, weren’t you the guy who stood next to Anthony Fauci all those months while I was keeping Florida’s schools and businesses open?”
If DeSantis was certainly testing such a line of assault, it lacked the immediacy of Trump’s new nickname for him, aired at a rally a day later: “Ron DeSanctimonious.” That was Trump throughout: gleeful, grubby, trollish. But though the phrase shimmered within the air—and captivated Twitter—Trump didn’t repeat it once more at later occasions and even grudgingly semi-endorsed the governor. For as soon as, a Trump goal appeared unbruised by an encounter with the nice bully. Until now, nobody else within the Republican Party has discovered a method to defuse the mockery with which the previous president treats all authority not his personal. But profitable Florida by a larger margin than Trump did in both 2016 or 2020 speaks for itself.
When liberals take a look at DeSantis, they see a tradition warrior with authoritarian tendencies: He has pushed again on the Biden White House’s strategy to LGBTQ rights—one man at his rally wore a T-shirt that learn I IDENTIFY AS NON-BIDENARY—and makes a daily present of disdaining information media. But as Americans have uninterested in pandemic precautions, and as regrets about lengthy college closures have surfaced even amongst Democrats, DeSantis has been capable of appeal to swing voters by positioning himself as a champion of each cultural and financial freedom. The maskbirds are too few in quantity to have given DeSantis his victory. But they influenced the election all the identical—by changing into a logo of Florida as a super.