Florida Started A Race To Reshape Conservatism. Now It Has Some Catching Up To Do.
The vanguard of American conservatism is Florida — at least, according to its governor.
The state is on “the front lines in the battle for freedom,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said to the Florida legislature in March, telling lawmakers that “we have the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to swing for the fences so that we can ensure Florida remains number one.”
For the second-term governor, swinging for the fences has been a higher-stakes proposition: DeSantis is widely expected to announce a campaign for president in the coming days. He will enter the race with a legislative record that looks quite different than it did a year ago. Since gaveling into session in March, the Florida legislature has moved quickly on DeSantis’s priorities, passing bills on topics ranging from school vouchers to gun control to tort reform. So, before his four-country international “trade mission,” before his jaunt up to Washington, D.C., to rally support among the Florida congressional delegation and before his visit to Iowa for a weekend of meet-and-greets, DeSantis spent weeks in Tallahassee signing his agenda into law.
But the extent to which DeSantis’s agenda has truly been “groundbreaking and nation-leading” is less clear. FiveThirtyEight dug into the state’s recent legislative changes and compared a sample of its new laws to those of other GOP-dominated states. This is not an effort to evaluate the impact of Florida’s recent spate of legislation; it is simply an examination of when that legislation passed relative to comparable laws in fellow red states enacting Republican priorities. We found that, in some areas, Florida is indeed leading the pack. For example, DeSantis and his allies have been at the forefront of implementing conservative education-related and anti-LGBTQ policies, even as polls have suggested some of those policies may have limited appeal. But when it comes to other conservative priorities, like gun policy and abortion, Florida Republicans have largely moved with — or even lagged behind — a larger group of red states.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/desantis-florida-conservatism-2024/
Red states are in a struggle over which one can be the most stupid.
