Explaining Florida's red wave

 Thomas Lifson:

As vote counts continue to be posted, it is clear that Republican hopes and dreams of a huge wave election have been dashed.  Instead of a large House majority and solid control of the Senate, Republicans will be lucky to have small majorities in each chamber, and even that outcome is not secure at this moment.

But in one state, Florida, Republicans have triumphed in tsunami-like proportions.  With 98% of the vote counted, Marco Rubio has a 16.4% landslide lead over Senate challenger Val Demings, and Governor Ron DeSantis has a 19.4% lead, a gigantic increase over his fraction-of-one-percent squeaker victory four years ago.

It's going to take some time to figure out why the rest of the country isn't behaving like the Sunshine State, but three factors suggest themselves.

Ron DeSantis displayed gutsy leadership in confronting COVID, enduring taunts as "DeathSantis" and far worse as he refused to cower before the might of Dr. Fauci, the medical establishment, Big Pharma, the media, and Democrat politicians.  As a result, Florida prospered as other states closed down their businesses and schools.  (The other governor who resisted the panic, South Dakota's Kristi Noem, won with an even bigger margin: 26.8 points with 97% of the vote counted.)...

He similarly stood up to Disney, one of if not the state's largest employers, when it pushed homo- and trans-sexual indoctrination for schoolchildren.  And his handling of Hurricane Ian demonstrated great competence.

It's worth noting that he supporters began chanting, "Two more years, two more years!," obviously encouraging him to run for president.

Hispanic voters are moving toward the Republican Party in large numbers, and there are lots of Hispanic voters, especially Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Venezuelans, in Florida, groups that may be in the forefront of this movement.

...

It is worth noting that in other states where Republican governors stood up to the left's lockdown mania over Covid they also won handily such as Greg Abbott in Texas and Kristi Noem in South Dakota. It probably also helped that Florida had an influx of conservative voters fleeing poorly run blue lockdown states like New York.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more