Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Critics: DeSantis turned into a ‘mini-Trump’
Accused of downplaying virus like president
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a tumultuous 2020, with his response to the coronavirus pandemic eating into his once-high approval numbers.
And now the Republican governor faces 2021 without his stalwart ally President Donald Trump in the White House and Democrat Joe Biden taking over.
Most Republicans defended DeSantis throughout the year as he kept businesses open so owners and workers would get paid and made sure children were able to continue their education face-toface in schools. But critics blasted him as a faithful follower of the president’s playbook of downplaying the COVID-19 crisis. At the end of 2020, more than 20 million Americans had become infected and nearly 350,000 had died of the highly contagious disease. In Florida alone, 1.3 million were stricken, with more than 21,600 fatalities.
“When the going got hard, beginning with COVID, he just tucked in behind Trump and drafted behind Trump all year long,” said Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee consultant and anti-Trump Republican. “Whether it was not paying a great deal of attention to potential initiatives to reduce the spread [or] echoing Trump’s dismissive attitude about it all, he quickly reverted to a cartoon of a right-wing, populist ideologue, a mini-Trump, where he finds himself now.”
Yet, when case and death numbers were soaring in New York and other Northeast states in the spring, DeSantis was praised by the conservative news media for Florida’s relatively low numbers.
“Where does Ron DeSantis go to get his apology?” the National Review wrote in May.
But as cases exploded in Florida over the summer and fall, Democrats and other critics increasingly blamed him for refusing to impose any new restrictions to stem the pandemic.
The liberal New Republic magazine gave DeSantis a new title on Tuesday: “Scoundrel of the Year,” for his “depraved indifference to human life.”
’Significant health threat’
DeSantis was somewhat of a divisive figure when he ran for governor, jumping past establishment GOP favorite Adam Putnam for the nomination thanks to an endorsement-by-tweet from
Trump. During the general election, he was accused of racist dog-whistling in his campaign against Democrat Andrew Gillum.
But once in office, “he was somewhat of a pleasant surprise to Democrats and moderate Republicans,” Stipanovich said.
He pressed forward with environmental initiatives, accepted medical marijuana and successfully pushed for a law to allow patients to smoke it, and he delivered on higher teacher salaries. But then came COVID-19. DeSantis called the virus a “significant health threat” in January, but downplayed the chances of it spreading in Florida just before the state’s first cases were confirmed on March 1.
The governor quickly banned visitors from nursing homes, but he held off on issuing a statewide shutdown order for weeks as more cities and counties started doing it themselves.
In the meantime, he imposed quarantines on travelers from New York, beginning a yearlong feud with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. DeSantis’ office did not respond to requests for an interview or for any other comment. Alia Faraj-Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Republican Party of Florida, said DeSantis “swiftly put a plan into motion that immediately began with the closure of nursing homes and long-term care facilities to visitors to protect Florida’s most vulnerable residents. This proved to be a very bold and lifesaving measure.”
Eventually, i n April, DeSantis ordered a 30-day shutdown, weeks after Walt Disney World and Universal Studios closed voluntarily.
But once businesses began opening back up again at limited capacity, including restaurants and retail stores in May and bars in June, DeSantis began opposing any new shutdowns or restrictions, even as Florida saw a massive surge in cases in June and July.
Only bars were shut down a second time, in a decision DeSantis said was made by Halsey Beshears, head of the Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
Faraj-Johnson said DeSantis took a “thoughtful approach to reopening the state, allowing businesses to operate safely while ensuring Floridians stayed employed.”
The summer wave
But then Florida’s summer wave began, topping out at 15,000 new daily cases on July 12 alone.
DeSantis began to be criticized for his continued positive spin of COVID-19 news, highlighting low death counts when cases were on the rise and then lower hospitalization numbers when the death toll caught up.
DeSantis also downplayed the risk to younger people, a policy that continued in his latest decision to move seniors ahead of essential workers in getting the vaccine.
He also held events with Scott Atlas, a controversial medical advisor to the Trump White House.
By Christmas, DeSantis was stressing his opposition to even locally imposed mask mandates and pledged to stop any city and county from putting any new shutdown or restriction in place.
Faraj-Johnson defended DeSantis’ handling of the vast federal, state and hospital bureaucracies, saying the governor “worked hand in glove with Florida hospital leaders and health care experts to ensure that their needs were met and that federal resources were identified, acquired and used for maximum benefit during the pandemic.”
Stipanovich acknowledged DeSantis’ quick action on nursing homes, as well as his decision to reopen schools to in-person classes, which has so far not been a major source of spreading the disease.
“I think that it is unrealistic, and would be incredibly blindly partisan, to fault DeSantis for everything he did,” he said. “My father is in an assisted living facility. And so I’m very appreciative of the care that was taken earlier to protect those populations.”
And, he added, “it turns out he was right about schools. I don’t think he was right about schools because he’s smarter than anybody else. I think he was right about schools because he was lucky.”
’Partisan lenses’
Susan MacManus, a professor emerita of political science at the University of South Florida, also pointed to the failure of the state’s unemployment system in the spring, which delayed benefits to hundreds of thousands of suddenly jobless Floridians.
DeSantis called it a “jalopy” and blamed the system’s developer and, indirectly, former Gov. Rick Scott for the system’s development during his term in office. But he and Republicans in the Legislature rejected Democrats’ call for a special session to fix it.
“I’m looking to see whether the Legislature, and [DeSantis] ... can fix some of these technological problems that have been plaguing Florida for a while now, with their websites and equipment which need to be fixed,” MacManus said. “And certainly, the employment system was the biggest indicator of that.”
But, she said, much of DeSantis’ unpopularity amid the pandemic stems not from any specific policy but from the increased partisanship over the course of the year.
DeSantis’ approval rating dropped from +20 in a Quinnipiac University poll in April to -11 in its July poll. He also dropped to -5 approval in a Florida Atlantic University poll in October, after having a +11 approval in its May survey.
As COVID-19 response became more partisan, she said, “so did people’s views of him. … His approval ratings just track almost perfectly with that change, people seeing him through the lenses of the pandemic and their partisan lenses.”
‘A two-way street’
DeSantis’ next challenge will be his working relationship with President-elect Biden, who takes office on Jan. 20.
“I may not be a phone call away from getting everything done soon,” DeSantis said on Dec. 15, highlighting his close bond with Trump. “It’s unfortunate, I think, for Florida.”
Stipanovich said DeSantis, whom he called “a creation” of Trump, “is not going to have the access he had before. He’s not going to be able to engineer the media events and the public declarations that he benefited from before that made him look good. And it benefited Floridians.”
But, he added, “I do not believe that Joe Biden is going to punish the people of Florida for who Ron DeSantis is. So I think that his access and his profile will suffer. But I do not believe that the people of Florida will suffer as a result.”
MacManus cautioned that the Biden-DeSantis relationship will have to be “a two-way street.”
She said Biden is “claiming and projecting that he can bring the country together because of his experience and working both sides of the aisle. So I think there’s a lot of pressure on the governor and the president to work in tandem because Florida still is very important to Biden. … Biden’s not going to turn his back on Florida.”
Gwen Graham, a former Democratic candidate for governor who has become a fervent DeSantis critic, agreed.
“President Biden and his administration will work with all of our country’s governors, including DeSantis for the next couple years, in a positive, supportive federal/state partnership,” Graham said. “All DeSantis has to do is put on his big boy pants, stop whining and respond in kind.”