DeSantis success strategy:

 City Journal:

On a disappointing night for Republicans, Governor Ron DeSantis crushed it in the free state of Florida, lapping his challenger, Congressman Charlie Crist, by close to 20 points. Before DeSantis’s emergence, Florida used to keep us wondering whether it would turn blue or red until the wee hours on Election Night or, in the case of the 2000 election, for weeks thereafter. But it was clear well before midnight on Tuesday that Florida had turned solid red. From Portsmouth to Puget Sound, Republicans interested in replicating DeSantis’s “win for the ages” should learn from these eight rules.

Stay on offense. Given the mainstream media’s leftward tilt, Republicans are often stuck playing defense. As president, Donald Trump called the media the “enemy of the people” but also seemed to crave their approval. DeSantis, by contrast, rewrote the Republican playbook by staying on offense virtually nonstop for four years. He refused to bend or apologize for anything he said or did, even when the media called him “DeathSantis” for keeping the state open during Covid or mischaracterized his Parental Rights in Education law (falsely smeared as “Don’t Say Gay”). As he said in his victory speech on Tuesday night, “We took the hits, we weathered the storms, but we stood our ground, we did not back down.”

Every week, or so it seemed, the governor took the fight to a new target: woke corporations like Disney, intransigent teachers’ unions, Big Tech, liberal judges and prosecutors who refused to follow the law, or “sanctuary-city” leaders who “embraced” illegal immigrants—as long as they didn’t settle in places like Martha’s Vineyard.

You can create your own majority with the right approach. When DeSantis took office, Democrats enjoyed a small voter-registration edge statewide, but now Republicans hold a commanding 300,000-voter lead. He undoubtedly won over some native Floridians, but probably the much bigger factor here was his effort to inspire like-minded conservatives to move to Florida from blue states. (And perhaps this helps explain, in part, why Gretchen Whitmer, Kathy Hochul, and other embattled liberal governors survived.) I moved to Florida from Oregon in 2019 to some degree because I admire DeSantis and his approach to governance, so I count myself a member of this movement.

Conservatives in Florida feared that blue-state pandemic refugees would “vote as they did up north,” but that doesn’t seem to have happened. As DeSantis put it last night, “the woke agenda has caused millions to leave these [blue-state] jurisdictions for greener pastures. Florida has, for so many of them, served as the promised land.” While other Republicans shied away from making the pandemic an issue in their campaigns, DeSantis leaned into it, reminding us at every opportunity how he kept the state free.
...

There is much more.  

Florida is finding the same thing Texas has seen.  People leaving blue states for red states are doing so because they are unhappy with the Democrats' policies and they are more than willing to vote for Republicans who kept their states open and their kids in school.  I think the Democrat-controlled states will continue to fall behind and their kids will suffer from the lockdown mentality.