You don’t need to 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: Name them the maskbirds, flying south to flee the stricter COVID-19 insurance policies of different components of the nation. Internet 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 folks 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. Nevertheless it does assist clarify it. The primary-term Republican’s defiance of standard public-health knowledge within the preliminary yr of the pandemic gave him a nationwide platform whereas additionally flattering the self-image of his present constituents—or at the very least a lot of them—as courageous freedom lovers. (The knowledge bear this out: His approval scores dipped early within the pandemic earlier than recovering.)
DeSantis takes each likelihood to hammer house the concept 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 spread of opponents outlined by geography and referenced by title: crime-ridden blue cities reminiscent of San Francisco, the piously pro-immigration liberals of Martha’s Winery, the “elites” in Washington, D.C.
Within the governor’s narrative of the coronavirus, the folks of Florida didn’t cower at house or tentatively enterprise outdoors in masks, nor did they labor beneath vaccine mandates as new variants unfold throughout the nation. No, they had been free. Free to help their household. Free to attend faculty. 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 would possibly add: free to get sick and even die from a respiratory illness for which protected, efficient vaccines can be found. Which is strictly 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 comparatively excessive COVID demise 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 counsel—or, understanding the way it performs along with his base, as he likes to say. Florida reopened its faculties in August 2020—sooner than many main blue-state districts however after many European nations. All through the pandemic, Florida’s work-from-home and masking insurance policies wouldn’t have made it an outlier in European phrases. Typically, 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 different high-income nation on the planet relied to such a terrific extent on distant instruction,” Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovits wrote in The Atlantic earlier this yr.
DeSantis’s COVID gamble additionally performed into different politically helpful narratives. His message was a macho one in every of risk-taking and braveness, which tapped into the prevailing Republican benefit amongst male voters. One of many warm-up clips on the Melbourne rally was from Tucker Carlson’s Fox Information present, through which Carlson mocked DeSantis’s Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, for carrying a masks whereas exercising in a lodge health club. On the massive display screen, Carlson stated, “We reached out to Charlie Crist’s workplace and requested, ‘What precisely had been you doing with a masks on alone within the health club, you freak?’” To that machismo, DeSantis added a splash of social conservatism, even puritanism, telling the group, “Heck, if we had been simply right here 4 years in the past and somebody had instructed you we might have states on this nation lock children out of college for a yr—you’d have them shut church buildings, however they left the liquor shops and the strip golf equipment open—you’ll have stated that will not have been potential in the US of America.”
He solicited boos with a point out of the federal government infectious-disease professional Anthony Fauci, displaying how to attract on the properly of conspiracist vitality created by COVID with out diving into it. Quickly after in his Melbourne speech, he did one thing much more fascinating with none fanfare. He slipped in an assault on his personal occasion for its cowardly adherence to the scientific consensus: “Make no mistake, on the time, I used to be getting hammered, hit by the media; day-after-day, 24/7; the left’s attacking me,” he stated. “We even had some weak Republicans attacking me.” (Extra boos.)
No names got, however he was subtly laundering an concept which may show helpful in a GOP main marketing campaign in 2024. Who within the Republican Occasion bought vaccinated, reluctantly wore a masks, and walked again his endorsement of untested therapies for the coronavirus? Trump—who briefly performed the function of “accountable world chief” for a number of quick months of the pandemic. To whom did the hated Fauci report? Additionally Trump. An bold governor would possibly ask, “Hey, weren’t you the man who stood subsequent to Anthony Fauci all these months whereas I used to be maintaining Florida’s faculties and companies 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. However 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. Till now, nobody else within the Republican Occasion has discovered a strategy to defuse the mockery with which the previous president treats all authority not his personal. However profitable Florida by a higher 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 Home’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. However as People have bored with pandemic precautions, and as regrets about lengthy faculty closures have surfaced even amongst Democrats, DeSantis has been in a position to 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. However they influenced the election all the identical—by changing into an emblem of Florida as an excellent.
