Once widely considered to be courting disaster with its coronavirus response, Florida may soon be touted as a success story and President Trump’s model for reopening.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a Trump ally, and as his state’s coronavirus numbers improve, he is telling the national media, “I told you so.” In a press availability, he said, “I was the No. 1 landing spot from tens of thousands of people leaving the No. 1 hot zone in the world to come to my state. So we’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative, it challenges their assumption, so they’ve got to try to find a boogeyman.”
DeSantis had been panned as too slow to close down the state and for waiting until April to issue a stay-at-home order as the pandemic spiked nationwide. Florida was portrayed in the national media as a backwater of packed beaches with young spring breakers throwing crowded parties and licking doorknobs as the government dithered ineffectually.
But Florida’s death rate of 10 per 100,000 is well below New York’s 147 or New Jersey’s 122, just barely above blue-state success story California’s death rate of 9 per 100,000. Florida is among the states where the number of new coronavirus cases is stabilizing. And though a state filled with retirees, Florida’s nursing home deaths are below 700, while they have topped 5,000 in New York.
DeSantis has emphasized that far from being lackadaisical about how Florida would handle the pandemic, his team carefully studied South Korea, Hong Kong, and other international examples of managing the outbreak.
As Vice President Mike Pence looked on Wednesday during the press availability, DeSantis launched into an impassioned defense of Florida’s management of the coronavirus outbreak. “You’ve got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York, wait two weeks, and Florida’s gonna be next, just like Italy, wait two weeks,” he told reporters. “Well, hell, we’re eight weeks away from that, and it hasn’t happened. Not only do we have a lower death rate than New York — well, we have way lower deaths generally — we have a lower death rate than the Acela Corridor, D.C., everyone up there. We have a lower death rate than the Midwest — Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio. But even in our region, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida has the lower death rate.”
From the beginning, DeSantis prioritized at-risk populations, banning both visits at nursing homes and the reintroduction of residents who were positive for the coronavirus. Fifty National Guard teams were deployed to these institutions to conduct testing. Coronavirus-only nursing homes were established, and surveillance of long-term care facilities was set up. A decentralized, county-by-county approach was taken to government-enforced social distancing.
“He’s really empowered local officials to make decisions,” said Florida-based Republican strategist Jamie Miller. “Other governors kind of ruled from their ivory tower.”
DeSantis is now fighting back against the negative perceptions, dining on cheeseburgers in public with Pence, and without masks, and giving interviews to national conservative publications.
“The national media will largely pretend that Gov. DeSantis and his successes in responding to the Chinese virus thus far never happened because it is inconvenient to the media’s narrative of fear and challenges their assumptions about how a chief executive should respond to a global pandemic,” said Republican strategist and former Florida congressional candidate Ford O’Connell. “How else does one explain Gov. Cuomo’s superior standing in the polls in relation to DeSantis’s present standing given that, prior to COVID-19, DeSantis was the most popular big-state governor in the nation? Results and death rates are inconsequential to the national media at this stage; their chief concern is obedience to their established agenda.”
The political implications are also clear: Florida is a must-win state for Trump, and he has been trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden there, part of his larger problem with senior citizens since the outbreak started. If Florida’s current coronavirus trends hold, DeSantis’s success could help Trump rebound. Either way, DeSantis’s high approval ratings after a close election in a swing state could be a sign that Republicans pursue Trumpism without being as polarizing as the president himself.
“There’s no question that his relationship with Donald Trump is the root of all his negative publicity in the national press,” Miller said. An ousted Florida health official has encouraged speculation that DeSantis is somehow cooking the state’s coronavirus data.
“The best lesson our leaders can take from DeSantis’s efforts is to experiment with what works best for their respective constituents,” said O’Connell.
[Opinion: It’s time for media to say ‘We’re sorry’ to Ron DeSantis]
