Two liberal Democrats from Massachusetts moved to Florida.
The headline sounds like the premise for a TV sitcom.
I learned about fish-out-of-water comedy when watching The Beverly Hillbillies on TV. Two people about my age moved from a Boston suburb to Palm Beach County, Florida. They like the weather, but they aren't seeing the humor in the culture clash as regards politics.
In fact, they insist on being anonymous in this Up Close Guest Post. The guest post author's wife does the political canvassing. Not the husband. He realizes he is extreme in his partisanship.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who votes R is morally arrested and soulless. Period. Exclamation point. If anyone starts a political conversation, I just stop it: "That's between you and the voting booth. I don't talk politics.
This blog takes a different approach to political discourse from the Guest Post author. I keep trying to understand why Republican voters moved from the party of Bush, McCain, and Romney to a party that would excuse--and assist--an attempt to overthrow an election to keep Donald Trump in office. The guest post author isn't curious about Republicans. He is angry with them.
Guest Post: Dispatch from Florida
My wife and I became legal residents of Florida in 2008 with the hope that our two Blue votes would be part of what seemed at the time to be a slow but seemingly steady movement from Red toward Purple and then Blue. We reasoned that our votes were superfluous in deep Blue Massachusetts anyway, why not let them be meaningful in the Sunshine State.
My wife canvassed door to door in the wearying Florida high heat and humidity of October for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and for Hillary Clinton in 2016. We were certainly buoyed up when Obama took Florida over McCain healthily in 2008 and narrowly over Romney in 2012, but Trump’s win over Clinton by more than 100,000 votes in 2016 and his margin of more than 370,000 votes over Joe Biden in 2020 tells the sorry tale of a state smashing right through Purple into clear Redness.
My very informal perception of what the holy heck Floridians like about Trump or DeSantis is that they dislike Democratic liberalism so much that they tolerate Trump and DeSantis. We heard repeatedly, "yeah he's flawed but the other side is worse."
We learned that Trump and Fox closed the deal on the idea of Obama as "other." We heard people say Obama was "a Muslim prick." "Obama isn't an American." It wasn't just an epithet. They believed it.
Hillary got accusations of wild conspiracy theories. Two Haitians told us Hillary had agents threatening their families in Haiti. A bicycle rider stopped us on the street to tell us that Hillary had vans cruising the neighborhood to kidnap Republican voters and imprison them until after Election Day. They believed this.
One nice moment came from a younger woman who invited her in, then told her she wanted to vote for Obama but wasn't "allowed to" because she was a registered Republican. My wife patiently explained that her Republican registration meant she could only vote in the Republican primary but had no bearing on the general election in November and she could indeed vote. The canvassing did some good.
The governorship here is even more distressing. In 2018 Ron DeSantis defeated the Democratic Party candidate Andrew Gallum by fewer than 33,000 votes out of more than 8.2 million votes cast. This razor-thin margin gave us hope that our Blue votes here remained meaningful. Those hopes were dashed in the 2022 gubernatorial election: DeSantis defeated challenger and former Florida governor Charlie Crist by more than 1.5 million votes. Sadly, this victory propelled onto the national stage the smug Trump-like hateful self-appointed megalomaniac guardian of the good ol’ white USA. Those who identify as ethnic and racial minorities, gay, trans, immigrant, vaccine-aware, woke and interested in the facts of American history are out of luck in Florida. And his eyes are on the presidency.
DeSantis can speak in coherent sentences. There’ll be no cofefe from him. Trump is often linguistically tongue-tied and voices truly imbecilic, utterly ignorant ideas (“inject bleach”) not to mention the 30,000+ lies he got off.DeSantis is strident and grim when expressing his evil, racist, craven positions. Trump does that with colorful flamboyance and showmanship that somehow garners him appeal despite the underlying awfulness. DeSantis is introverted and quick to be nasty and dismissive to opponents. He isn't likable and I'm not sure he can take a punch. Trump is extroverted and people who lean toward his point of view are drawn to him.
I don't think DeSantis's personality will play well on the national stage, though I imagine his handlers will try to clean up his act. Still, he won't be able to change who he truly is.
Both DeSantis and Trump are a clear and present danger. We’ve all seen the damage Trump can do. DeSantis won’t be flying under the national radar for too much longer. I have a good friend who’s a teacher in a K-5 elementary school. He can verify that in the face of the state’s crackdown on curriculum content that might make any young student uncomfortable about American history, or gender orientation, or racism (to name just a few DeSantis targets), teachers of English and social studies, together with librarians who now fear for their employment, and have begun to place books that might not meet the DeSantis censorship standards out of sight or off the shelves.
Trump's legal woes might bring him down but without those wounds I doubt DeSantis could best him. Maybe there's a skeleton in the DeSantis closet that will come out, and both will go down. Or maybe there's another Reptile out there who will emerge on top.
It's really depressing to be motivated to write a post like this after living much of life truly believing in the essential strengths of our political system and democracy. I am slowly coming to believe that there is actually a chance that the bedrock might turn into quicksand.
My favorite cousin and his wife live in Florida most of the year. They are solid liberal Democrats, union, pro labor, devout Catholics. They report among most of their neighbors delusions similar to those described here. They similarly cannot comprehend what is going on in the minds of so many Floridians.
The Democrats let DeSantis win easily by running over-the-hill Charlie Crist against DeSantis and then underfunding Crist. Val Deming was similarly underfunded by the national poohbahs in her Senate bid. She deserved better support. Bad decisions at the national level.
Still, there is something mysterious at work in FL. There is no Dem office holder in any statewide office. Dems have totally misjudged Latino and Haitian voters. Most Hispanics are repulsed by anyone proclaiming themselves to be socialist. Don’t ask people who identify as Cubans or Venezuelans to support a party that preaches a big umbrella that includes socialism. Most Haitians don’t vote period plus Democrats have never attempted to organize Little Haiti.
Finally, the retiree bloc is always going to vote conservative regardless if they are transplanted from a Blue state.