‘We can lose more freedoms’: Florida braces for Ron DeSantis’s wrath after national rout

Ron DeSantis has fallen off the national stage and America will not, after all, become Florida like he once envisaged. But back in his home state, opponents are bracing for the return of the Republican to serve the remainder of his final term as governor following the implosion of his presidential campaign. Florida is where DeSantis honed his extremist attacks on a wide range of targets from the transgender community to immigrants and Black voters. Although he will no longer be carrying them to the White House, critics here say there’s probably plenty more to come. “He’s gonna come home with a vengeance. He’s going to try to regain the mantle that he had after [his re-election in] November 2022. And he’s going to try to bring everybody back together and continue on this anti-woke, anti-democratic, anti-freedom platform,” Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic party said. “The question will be, ‘What do the Republicans do?’ Rank-and-file Republicans in Florida, elected as well as grassroots, are not having any of it. But there are those in higher up elected positions that still have to reckon with the fact that he’s going to be governor for the next few years and are going to have to play ball in order to get their priorities accomplished.” Fried was referencing the Republican supermajority in both houses of the Florida legislature, which acted as little more than a rubber stamp for DeSantis’s culture war policies that also included the near dismantling of the state’s higher education system and banning face mask and vaccine mandates as the Covid-19 pandemic still raged. Some analysts questioned if DeSantis would return to Tallahassee chastened by his national humiliation, weaker in the eyes of legislators and unable to replicate the swagger or command the same authority as he did following his 19-point re-election. Fried, who saw DeSantis in action first hand when she served in his cabinet as agriculture commissioner, and the only statewide elected Democrat, from 2019 to 2023, has no such doubt. “We can lose more freedoms,” she said, noting that DeSantis will likely remain in office until he is termed out in January 2027. “I don’t know what his agenda is for this session, he didn’t lay that out in his state of the state address, which was entirely for Iowa, so we don’t have his legislative priorities. But if he continues to try to rule with an iron fist here in Florida, we’re going to have a lot more of these misogynistic, homophobic policies that are going to come out of this administration. “And unfortunately, Floridians are going to continue to feel the impact of his wrath and his extreme agenda. That doesn’t work across the country [but] he’s going to take no learning lessons from what he just experienced, that his agenda and his policies don’t work. But he’s going to try to prove otherwise.” Other senior Democrats share her concern. Val Demings, the former US congresswoman who lost to Republican incumbent Marco Rubio in the 2022 senate election, warns the governor will remain “dangerous” with a free rein at home. “Ron DeSantis is out. All that damage to Florida through bizarre policies, for nothing. Ambition at any costs, with no guardrails, is dangerous,” she said in a tweet. So it falls to Florida’s Democratic party, written off by DeSantis a year ago as “a dead, rotten carcass”, to form the resistance, Fried says. Buoyed by a string of successes at the ballot box, including Donna Deegan’s victory in Jacksonville’s mayoral race last May, and new state congressman Tom Keen’s ousting of a Republican incumbent earlier this month, Democrats see a momentum shift fueled by “anger” at DeSantis they hope will carry through to November. “The balance is making sure we’re holding Republicans accountable for their votes for the policies that were, and are rejected by Floridians, and by the same respect talking about what we are going to do when we get out of the super-minority and start picking up seats,” Fried said. “I mean not just in the legislature, but good Democrats elected all the way down to school boards, and city and county commission seats. “What policies are we looking to reverse or to move forward on? People are tired of the divisiveness. People are tired of the anger and they just want their government to get back to work.” Ultimately, Fried believes, Republican voters nationwide rejected DeSantis because they saw the same traits, she says, that have become familiar to Floridians. “There’s nothing there. There’s no soul. There’s no charisma. There’s no ability to connect to a voter or to show true empathy,” she said. “It turned voters off. They didn’t like his personality and then they didn’t like his policies, so combine the two of them and this is the result, a disaster of a presidential campaign and from all calculations, the most expensive presidential primary bid in American history. “Americans don’t want to be Florida. They see what’s happened here in our state. And so voters now are going to be walking away, especially independent voters, from a very authoritarian overreaching of Ron DeSantis and this Florida Republican party.” Story by Richard Luscombe in Miami