The rise of Ron DeSantis

Finally, DeSantis’s rise is a story about his Republican-trending state. Florida is an immigration magnet; it ranks fourth in the nation in foreign-born population. Miami-Dade County is home to more immigrants than any other U.S. county except Los Angeles. By conventional political belief, right and left, this immigration should be pushing Florida into the blue column. Instead, Florida Latinos swung hard to Trump in 2020. And DeSantis is even more popular among his state’s Latinos than Trump was—DeSantis enjoys a 47 percent approval rating with them. The themes that have animated the most liberal Democrats may actually be producing an antagonistic recoil among many new voter groups. The Democratic focus on structural racism, the antagonism toward policing, the university-incubated theoretical jargon—all are proving off-putting to many of the voters who were supposed to be wowed by them. The shock of events forced a reckoning with America’s legacy of anti-Black racism to the center of U.S. politics—and to the top of Joe Biden’s agenda. Not everybody has welcomed that reckoning, and not all those who react against it are conservative white people. In 2020, 57 percent of California voters rejected a ballot proposition to restore racial preferences in state universities, state employment, and state contracting. Preelection polling indicated that more Asian and Latino voters opposed the measure than supported it.