Trump pushed Florida GOP over the finish line

George Neumayr:

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The national media portrayed Trump as a weight on Republicans. In fact, he was their source of energy. Had the Florida GOP been ambivalent about Trump and kept him out of the state, Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott would have lost. Journalists mocked DeSantis for “tying himself to Trump,” but they now fall silent as it becomes clear that that was perhaps his only winning strategy.

The press propagandized relentlessly for Gillum, who was flush with money from George Soros and Tom Steyer, while kneecapping the scrappier DeSantis over minor lapses, and Gillum still couldn’t win. Notice also the media’s silence about Obama. Yet again the darling of journalists shows himself to be a crappy campaigner for others. In his narcissistic shade nothing grows.

The media’s excited talk of a “blue wave” in Florida never struck me as very convincing as I walked around various cities in Florida. The media’s giddy keenness for Gillum was never reflected in any of the conversations I ever heard. In mid-October, I walked around the Volusia County mall in a MAGA hat as an experiment to test the media’s claims of a spreading anti-Trump backlash. Nobody seemed to care in the slightest. In fact, a self-described independent who said that he “had voted for Jimmy Carter” made a point of walking over to me as I sat in the mall’s food court to express his support for Trump’s policies. “I didn’t vote for him,” he said, “but he is delivering results.”

At the Daytona Beach watch party, a DeSantis volunteer noted to me that the media was too caught up in its adulation for Gillum to notice that under Trump counties like Volusia now harbor more registered Republicans than Democrats. “There is a silent majority in Florida that the media ignores,” she said. “I have been working on registration since Trump won. We have gotten stronger. DeSantis is going to win.” She said that early in the evening, long before any vote tallies suggested a DeSantis victory.

Journalists had invested a great deal in the storyline that the floundering of Dems in Florida governor’s races was due to the paucity of progressive choices. Stop running centrists, they argued, and field a full-blown leftist and the Democratic rank-and-file will flock to the polls. You won’t hear any journalists this morning owning up to that dumb advice. In fact, they are already trying to cast Gillum’s defeat as nonideological: simply the result of a “corruption smear” peddled by Republicans. It wasn’t, you understand, that he looked like a better ideological fit for Cuba than Florida. No, it was that the poor man had accidentally associated with an undercover FBI agent. “How an FBI investigation and a broken relationship tanked Andrew Gillum’s campaign,” the Miami Herald headlined a piece. Liberals will console themselves with that myth in the days to come.

The irony is that if the Dems had run a Manchin-like candidate this year instead of a socialist flim-flam artist and grifter they could have won the governorship....
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I liked DeSantis from the start and could not understand why he was polling behind Gillum.  The guy is a fighter and he kept pushing.  That Trump was there to generate excitement may have made the difference. 

Trump is a terrific campaigner which is something I did not notice as much in 2016.  He has the ability to connect with an audience in an entertaining way.  The media is too filled with hate to notice I think.  Obama could make misstatements of fact and the media would ignore it.  If Trump does so, they run a lengthy fact check and call him a liar.  People notice the difference and it is one of the reasons the media has lost credibility in the Trump years.