This spring, positioning yourself as the anti-mandate governor probably seemed a pretty safe bet to Republican governors mulling a presidential run. They’d already come out of one round looking pretty good — despite accusations that they belonged to a “death cult,” Florida and Texas are solidly middle of the pack when it comes to per capita death rates. Sure, much of that is good luck: Florida and Texas had their first waves relatively late, thanks in part to warm weather that kept people outdoors. Although they suffered when summer heat drove people inside, they were never hit as hard last year as New York or New Jersey, and they obviously expected that this year would be better still (didn’t we all?).

Presumably, Abbott and DeSantis — and a whole lot of other Republican politicians — assumed their states were already close to herd immunity between the people who’d been vaccinated and the residents who had already had covid-19. So barring mask mandates or vaccine requirements probably seemed like a cheap way to score political points, without much risk that a state would experience anything more serious than a few mini-outbreaks among young people who wouldn’t get very sick anyway.

The delta variant is now rewriting those expectations. But DeSantis and Abbott, having made themselves the heroes of the anti-vaccine right, are not in much of a position to do anything stronger than urge people to get vaccinated, or beg for help — at least not without angering their supporters. So now their best hope is for their state to be saved from this folly by outsiders: health-care workers, or even a federal judge who overrules their more extreme decisions.