Of the 15 governors whose approval ratings were recently tracked by polling site FiveThirtyEight, DeSantis was last. He was also the only governor of those 15 to see his popularity decrease because of the coronavirus. DeSantis’s approval rating dropped 7 percentage points, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rose by 41 points.

And that was before DeSantis moved hastily to reopen beaches and other parts of Florida, an effort that appeared to be guided less by scientific thinking than a desire to please the White House, where the governor’s political benefactor resides. And it was before he was criticized for calling Florida “God’s waiting room,” a reference to the state’s elderly population that struck many as crass in the midst of a pandemic.

Florida has so far avoided the epidemiological disaster some worried was coming, but that appears to have happened despite DeSantis, not because of him. In fact, a 50-state survey by researchers at Northeastern, Harvard and Rutgers found that only 60 percent of Floridians approved of his pandemic response, 12 points below the national average.