DeSantis Gives National Democrats a Terrifying Message About What Happened to Their Florida Brethren: 'A Dead, Rotten Carcass'
Ron DeSantis just gave liberals another reason to be petrified — and it’s called reality.
Florida’s Republican governor — the second-most despised name among Democrats after former President Donald Trump — sat down with Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer on a book promotion tour and described the strategy that helped him turn a purple state ruby red in just four years’ time.
It’s a strategy that could work well beyond the Sunshine State, too.
The whole interview can be heard here:
During the discussion, DeSantis noted that he’d won the governor’s race in 2018 in a close election — it was, in fact, a nail-biter that went to a statewide recount before Democrat Andrew Gillum conceded. (Considering Gillum’s future misadventures involving drugs and a gay male prostitute, rehab and an eventual indictment on financial fraud charges, it looks like Florida dodged a bullet there.)
But instead of taking a cautious approach, the governor said, his administration went on the offensive pushing conservative priorities — and it paid off.
In his November re-election fight, DeSantis won by almost 20 points over Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor who was the strongest candidate Democrats could come up with, though Crist had already lost the 2014 governor’s race to Republican Rick Scott.
And DeSantis’ victory came in the face of overwhelming opposition from Florida media — as Fox News reported in November, the state’s major newspapers had lined up behind Crist’s candidacy, only to see it blown away on Election Night, when voters had their say.
“We took a state that had been a one-point state for the previous decade and then we turned that into a nearly 20-point victory, winning by 1.5 million votes, supermajorities in the legislature, taking school boards, all this stuff up and down the line,” DeSantis told Hammer.
“The character of Florida, political character, has changed,” he said. “We’ve been really able to rewrite the map here. And the Democratic Party in this state is basically a dead, rotten carcass on the side of the road.”
That’s a message that should petrify leftists from coast to coast, since “dead, rotten carcass” pretty well describes the ideas of the national Democratic Party, too.
The party is slavishly supported by an establishment media that studiously avoids actual news that could make Democrats or President Joe Biden look bad.
(The conservative Media Research Center has documented how little interest the major, non-Fox networks have in covering first son Hunter Biden’s scandals — scandals that would have dominated American media had the last name involved been “Trump.”)
The Democrats’ progressive policies are pushed by the major cultural institutions in American life — in entertainment, in sports, in academia.
But still, the party barely managed to win the 2020 presidential election thanks to voting law machinations in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic that tipped the scales in key Electoral College states.
While it’s true that the 2022 midterms were not the Republican “red wave” that even Democrats were expecting, it’s also true that Florida’s results were a “red wave,” one of undeniable proportions, and Democrats know it.
The party is basically tied to the rapidly aging, often unstable Joe Biden at this point as its only credible candidate for the White House.
Vice President Kamala Harris has proved herself to be unsuitable even for the position she holds now, much less the desk in the Oval Office. Now, even the simpering New York Times has done a hit piece on her.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the Democrats’ brightest light in the Biden Cabinet, has been a disaster — as the fallout from the Feb. 3 train derailment in Ohio shows.
Beyond Washington, California Gov. Gavin Newsom publicly denies it, but he’s champing at the bit to bring the kinds of policies that have ruined his state to the nation’s capital — if, for some completely unforeseeable reason, the 80-year-old Biden isn’t in a position to run for re-election. That would be a tough sell even for the echo-chamber American establishment media.
As former Trump White House press secretary and newly elected Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it in her response to Biden’s State of the Union address, the battle in American politics today isn’t between left and right, it’s between “normal or crazy.”
“Normal” has a way of winning that battle.
No matter what the establishment media spin is, Republicans are in much stronger shape than the hollowed-out shell of the current Democratic Party, “led” by a doddering octogenarian who gets more eccentrically authoritarian the longer he stays in office.
Trump is seeking to become the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms.
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley has announced her run, and while she might be a long shot, she’s better than anyone the Democrats have on offer.
And DeSantis? He hasn’t announced a 2024 plan yet, but he’s already a national figure, after proving that liberty and safety could co-exist when he refused to keep the state locked down during the coronavirus pandemic. He’s taken on the woke agenda head-on, from Florida classrooms to its corporate suites, and put conservative priorities into practice.
In his November victory speech, DeSantis declared Florida is the place where “woke goes to die.”
Florida’s Democratic Party reflects that.
Whatever happens with the GOP nomination for 2024, the party needs to get its act together — from the highest-profile names to the man and woman on the street. When it does, the national Democratic Party is going to be going the way of its Florida brethren.
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