The left is frightened by DeSantis's success

 Phillip Klien:

There is a reason why the Left needs Governor Ron DeSantis to fail. And it isn’t just about the 2024 presidential election.

Sure, given that DeSantis has the potential to unite the Trumpist and traditional Republican wings of the party, Democrats would much rather have him go down in flames in the 2022 governor’s race. Otherwise, they may have to take their chances against him with a nearly 82-year-old President Joe Biden or a deeply unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris. But politics alone cannot explain the level of hysterical obsession that out-of-state liberals have developed for the Florida governor.

Since early in the pandemic, liberals have been eager to portray DeSantis as a reckless sociopath — warning that he was the Grim Reaper, the kind of charlatan who puts “owning the libs” ahead of protecting people’s lives. When predictions of mass death arising from opening schools or the beaches did not materialize last year, his critics resorted to promoting the lies of a former health department dashboard manager, Rebekah Jones, to claim that the state’s COVID-19 statistics were manipulated.

So if not for politics, what explains the overblown reaction to DeSantis?

The deeper reason the Left is so eager to see DeSantis fail is that they don’t want to believe that they disrupted over a year of their lives following restrictions that may turn out to have been unnecessary. It’s comforting to believe that all of their sacrifices — forgoing vacations, missing meetings with friends and family, depriving their kids of in-person school, masking, and so on — served the noble goal of saving lives. It’s much harder to accept that it may not have made much of a difference. In an age when a crazy virus can come out of nowhere and wreak havoc, it’s human nature for people to want to feel as though they can assert control over it.
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Liberal politicians rarely admit they were wrong about anything and DeSantis is routinely proving them wrong.  All you really need to do is look at the record of blue-state governors and what they have done to their own people and their own economy to see who is right.   And their own voters are starting to see it with the downfall of Cuomo and the potential downfall of Newsom in California.  Democrat control freak government is being rejected by the voters and its failure should be obvious.  It is also why they are desperate to see people dying in Florida and Texas.

BTW, governors like DeSantis and Abbott in Texas don't have to "own the libs."  The libs are doing it to themselves.