Gov. Ron DeSantis said many of the people who fled to Florida to escape strict lockdown measures in blue states have registered as Republicans, even if they were previously Democrats.
“So it’s interesting with Florida, like, the media at the beginning of this said, ‘Florida is bad,’ and I think it’s because they wanted to damage Trump in Florida, wanted to damage me, so they just kept saying it was bad, even though the facts didn’t say it,” he said during a town hall event on Fox News’s Hannity.
<mediadc-iframe data-state="{"cms.site.owner":{"_ref":"00000161-3486-d333-a9e9-76c6fbf30000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b93390000"},"cms.content.publishDate":1622218601100,"cms.content.publishUser":{"_ref":"00000170-3008-de77-ad7c-b14811210002","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"cms.content.updateDate":1622218601100,"cms.content.updateUser":{"_ref":"00000170-3008-de77-ad7c-b14811210002","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"iFrameEmbedCode":"rnrn","_id":"00000179-b3c3-d45b-a3fd-b7df65000000","_type":"00000161-b425-d761-a563-f7e77e270000"}”>iFrame ObjectDeSantis then recalled how Florida was portrayed as handling the pandemic worse than states such as New York, where lockdowns were strict, yet people fled those blue states for the Sunshine State with the intention of voting there as Republicans.
“And so I think what it did is, the people that buy those phony narratives for these media, they probably aren’t coming to Florida. But most people see through it, but the people that see through it, they think like us. And so, I think a lot of these people are coming. I think they’re registering as Republicans overwhelming. And I also have come across a lot of people who, quite frankly, were Democrats,” he said.
“The lockdowns turned them into Republicans because they say, ‘I cannot fathom,’ people say, ‘I was a Democrat because of education, and I’m in California, and they’re locking my kids out of school. I come to Florida, they’re in school, people are free, people are happy.’ So, I think this whole process has caused some people to reevaluate some of their prior commitments. And if you have a political party that puts the interests of teachers unions over the interests of kids being able to just access an education at all, that tells you all you need to know about the modern Democrat Party,” the Republican governor added.
DeSantis has been hit with criticisms from Democrats and the media for reopening his state and vowing never to lock it down again. But in recent weeks, he has been lauded by both Stanford medical professor Jayanta Bhattacharya and Bloomberg columnist Joe Nocera for his handling of the pandemic.
“He could go up against an epidemiologist,” Bhattacharya said of DeSantis.
“I mean, most, most epidemiologists don’t know the literature as well as he does. I mean, I just, I don’t have the words. … I’ve just been, I’m still stunned by it. I didn’t know anything about him, actually, before, you know, basically before September, really. I’ve just been very impressed.”
Nocera, meanwhile, said DeSantis is the “pandemic winner” for reopening his state and leading other states to do the same.
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The Florida governor’s comments on people registering as Republicans come after a sheriff in the state warned new residents not to bring their “stupid” politics with them.
“We’re a special place, and there are millions and millions of people who like to come here. And quite frankly, we like to have them here,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said last month. “So we only want to share one thing as you move in hundreds a day: Welcome to Florida, but don’t register to vote and vote the stupid way you did up north, or you’ll get what they got.”
