Florida’s ‘open for business’ stance is appealing
In late June, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker traveled to New Hampshire to be the keynote speaker at New Hampshire’s Democratic Party state convention.Unofficially, there was buzz that Pritzker could be a Democratic presidential nominee himself — in 2028, or possibly sooner.
That same weekend, 47 people were shot in Chicago.
The Windy City’s weekend shootouts are so prevalent that they’ve become hardly worth mentioning, in particular by the governor. Chicago and Illinois have become synonymous with all the bad leftist policies that are failing around the country.
After the mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Governor Pritzker finally had something to say. He took to TV to say that he was “furious,” blamed the National Rifle Association, and pushed for a federal assault weapons ban.
He also hasn’t shown the same fury regarding the deaths happening every weekend in Chicago — and Chicagoans have noticed. Radio host Kimberly Egonmwan of 1690 AM, a radio station that “chronicles the rich history of the Black experience,” asked, “Why is it not enough when it happens to us?”
A few days after the governor’s New Hampshire speech, Ken Griffin, Chicago’s wealthiest resident, announced that he and his Citadel firm would be departing Illinois. Griffin would be taking his talents to Miami.
It’s a familiar story by now. Blue states had imagined that they held businesses hostage, that these firms could simply not pick up and move. The pandemic proved them wrong.
We don’t have the data to tell whether politics play a role in people making these moves, but it’s hard not to suspect that it figures into the equation. Normalcy during Covid was clearly a draw. Florida had famously reopened, under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, far earlier than any of the blue states. With this migration has come a serious shift in the state’s politics.In March, Fox News reported “registered Republican voters now outnumber Democrats by over 100,000 for the first time in the state’s history.”
Crime as a factor is also under-examined. It’s not that there is no crime in Florida in general, or in Miami specifically. Of course there is. But there is a seriousness to Florida’s response that simply doesn’t exist in Illinois, New York, or California. Governor DeSantis is focusing on crime-fighting, hiring away out-of-state officers, and raising police pay across the board. His office touts how “Governor DeSantis signed HB 3, the strongest law enforcement recruitment and support initiative in the nation, into law.”
DeSantis, for all the 2024 speculation about his candidacy is laser-focused on making Florida better.
The big current concern in Florida is that the new arrivals will change the political landscape. Floridians are trying to preserve what they have gained over the last few years. They worry about tech bros from San Francisco “voting wrong” and disrupting their good thing.
But a firm like Citadel is a natural fit for a free-market state like Florida. The $51 billion hedge fund was founded in Chicago after Griffin got his start at a Chicago-based firm. The move to Florida, the Wall Street Journal observes, “could also be a blow to Chicago’s philanthropic scene. Mr. Griffin has given more than $600 million in gifts to educational, cultural, medical and civic organizations in the area.”
The story of Florida’s growth is best understood side-by-side with the stories of what blue states are losing. Citadel didn’t just drift away. Illinois pushed Citadel out the door.
Accompanying Citadel out of the state is Caterpillar Inc. (moving to Texas) and Boeing Co. (to Virginia). The growth of these states, too, comes at the expense of the blue states. A blue-state brain drain is happening, and states like Florida are first in line to pick up the migrators.
Pritzker has to know this. As long as Ron DeSantis remains governor of Florida, governors of failing blue states will have to worry about people fleeing for the sunny locale.