The DeSantis lesson in how to win

 Michael Barone:

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The biggest winner of election 2022 was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Four years ago, he carried Florida 50%-49%, by just 32,000 votes, and he has been under repeated attack by the national press for his policies on COVID, concentrating on protecting the elderly and insisting on open schools and outdoor activities, and for a bill forbidding overt sexual material in kindergarten through third grade.

His mettle was tested when Hurricane Ian attacked southwest Florida on Sept. 28 at a point not predicted by meteorologists (weather experts have improved greatly in recent decades but aren’t perfect). He got the Pine Island bridge repaired within three days and the Sanibel Island bridge repaired in three weeks rather than the predicted three months. He didn’t just promise to build things — he delivered.

This year, DeSantis won reelection by 19 points, a 1,506,000-vote margin, in the state that George W. Bush carried in 2000 by a 537-vote margin after 35 days of recounts and litigation.

DeSantis carried 62 of 67 counties and won 16% from black people. He carried Hispanics 52%-45%. He carried majority-Hispanic Miami-Dade County 55%-44% — the first Republican governor to win there since Jeb Bush in 2002. He also carried heavily Jewish Palm Beach County, the first Republican governor to win there since 1986. He carried majority-Hispanic Osceola County, which includes part of Disney World, 53%-46%.

DeSantis won majorities from women, as well as men, from all age groups, from all income groups, and from every religious group except Jews (he got only 42%) and those with no religion (only 40%). Overall, the DeSantis victory looks like the model for the durable national Republican majority that neither George W. Bush nor Trump was able to deliver.

This Florida model may be applicable further than the disappointing, for Republicans, Senate election results. On current returns, DeSantis won by larger percentage and popular vote margins than Democrat Gavin Newsom in California and much larger margins than Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York or billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker in Illinois.

In those big states, Democrats’ margins have held up in glitzy neighborhoods packed with liberal white college graduates but have sagged elsewhere, thanks to high rates of crime, homelessness and taxes, and as is apparent in races for congressional races. To use a phrase I came up with in the 1970s and have found apposite since, Democrats are carrying the beautiful people but losing the dutiful people.

You can see the aggregate effect if you add together the votes for Republican and Democratic governors in the 10 most populous states (using votes for senator in North Carolina, which elects governors in presidential years). The result so far this year is Republicans 51% and Democrats 48%.

We have been accustomed to a politics in which Republicans carry rural areas and run hopelessly behind in major metropolitan areas. DeSantis’s performance suggests that that’s not inevitable. He carried the Gold Coast (Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties), metro Tampa, metro Orlando, and metro Jacksonville — something no Republican presidential candidate has done since the 1980s, in another era when voters also feared high crime and high inflation.

The DeSantis triumph in Florida and Kemp’s solid win in Georgia stand in vivid contrast to the disappointing-to-dismal fates of the candidates who rode Trump endorsements to primary victories and then, with little or no funding from Trump and on the defensive from his faults, fell short of the Republican potential.

Relitigating the 2020 election is a backward-looking posture and a vote-loser. Achieving a solid list of goals, delivering on promises, and standing up to criticism from the press with a solid command of the evidence is a vote-winner. Donald Trump and Joe Biden were the big election losers this week. Ron DeSantis was the big winner.
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I think Greg Abbott also had a good election and largely for the same reasons that DeSantis did.  It should be clear that the Democrats were mostly wrong in dealing with Covid and Governors like Abbott and DeSantis got it right, kept their states open, and kept their students in school.  Blue states fell behind on the economy and on education because of their lockdown policies.