It feels way too soon to say of 2024 “it’s on.”

But it is. It’s on — if Trump doesn’t run.

The word “DeSantis” isn’t uttered here but it’s clear whom her comments are aimed at. He’s her only prospective rival for the Republican nomination who’ll be looking to run on his record of having kept his state open for business during the pandemic.

Mostly open for business, I should say.

Noem: Let’s talk about rewriting history. We’ve got Republican Governors across this country pretending they didn’t shut down their states.. that they didn’t close their beaches…. pic.twitter.com/LE16B2f680

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 11, 2021

If you’re looking for a zero-lockdown candidate in your next nominee then Noem is correct, DeSantis is a nonstarter. He issued a statewide stay-at-home order on April 1, 2020, then began rolling it back by the end of that month. It wasn’t until late September of last year that he issued orders authorizing bars and restaurants to fully reopen. DeSantis also gave local authorities significant freedom to impose their own restrictions like mask mandates, waiting until May of this year to rescind that authority. Noem let local leaders take the lead on restrictions as well. But unlike DeSantis, she never issued any statewide orders.

How have their two states fared during the pandemic? Economically, as you might expect, South Dakota has managed to keep a greater percentage of people on the job than Florida. Their unemployment rate swelled to 9.2 percent in April of last year but began to decline afterward, eventually slipping below five percent again by August 2020. The state’s labor force participation rate also fell only a bit more than two points last spring and has since recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Florida’s unemployment rate reached 14.2 percent in May of last year and finally dipped below five percent again this past January. Their labor force participation rate dropped five points in 2020 and still hasn’t gotten back to where it stood before COVID’s arrival.

So Noem has an argument that her state did better than DeSantis’s — economically. On the pandemic itself, DeSantis has the better argument. South Dakota has had the third-highest number of cases per capita among the 50 states and the tenth-highest number of deaths per capita. Florida ranks 17th and 25th in those metrics, respectively, despite the fact that the state has an unusually large number of vulnerable elderly residents. And although he governs a population more than 20 times the size of Noem’s, DeSantis has also managed to get a first dose of the vaccine into a larger share of his constituents. Florida stands at 55 percent today, the one and only Trump state from last fall to have reached the national average. South Dakota is a few points back at 51 percent.

DeSantis and Noem each have easy ways to spin the less flattering numbers here. Noem could argue that it’s easier to get people vaccinated in Florida because there are many major population centers; in South Dakota, residents are more spaced out. Florida also has weather amenable to activities outdoors, where the virus doesn’t spread, all year round while South Dakotans have to shelter indoors during the winter. DeSantis could counter that his state relies more heavily on service industries than South Dakota does, and service industries were the hardest hit by the catastrophic decline in consumer demand during the pandemic’s earliest months. He was also at the mercy of Democratic local officials in his major cities to some extent, as they’d be more likely to lock down than the sort of uniformly Republican locals whom Noem gets to work with in S.D.

It really can’t be emphasized enough how different their two states are, not just in size and geography but political orientation. Noem is in charge of a blood-red jurisdiction where residents are apt to be right-wing and rural and therefore more risk-tolerant when it comes to COVID precautions and staying open. DeSantis governs a cosmopolitan swing state with lots of senior citizens and therefore has to account for greater risk-aversion in his policies. Still, it’ll be fascinating to see her come after him in 2024 over lockdowns because it risks forcing him to take the uncomfortable position in a GOP primary that keeping the economy open during a killer pandemic shouldn’t be the governor’s top priority, saving lives should be. But if he makes that move, Noem will accuse him of believing that lockdowns actually did anything to help save lives at all. If DeSantis concedes that they didn’t, she’ll say, “Then why did you issue a stay-at-home order?” If he argues that they did, then he becomes the pro-lockdown governor to GOP voters, a total inversion of his brand.

I don’t think he’ll have much problem finessing this, though. He can always hide behind Trump, who also supported lockdowns early in the pandemic before reversing course. And of course he can point to his record of keeping public schools in his state open, one of the most significant political victories of the pandemic. I’m curious, meanwhile, whether he’ll dare accuse Noem of having managed her state poorly because of its outsized death rate, particularly by not doing more to discourage people from attending the Sturgis motorcycle rally last August. Noem is sensitive about that subject, pushing back frequently when the event is blamed for seeding cases in her state, but some believe there’s no getting around it given the steady uptick in cases in the months following. Time will tell whether DeSantis intends to make an issue of it. More likely, he’ll stick to attacking her for being weak-kneed when it came to banning trans women from college sports.