We’ve been told often enough that the plural of anecdote is not data, but, wow, is Florida ever testing that theory. What was, in early October, a single — perhaps the first — declared DeSantis Democrat, has exploded with force sufficient to influence the 2024 presidential race.
We all saw him, the nameless black gentleman in the white tank top, pointing toward the gasoline truck that brought a vital energy source to his tiny town in rural Southwest Florida pummeled by Hurricane Ian, its way cleared, presumably, on orders of the governor.
“They’re s***ting about DeSantis, but that gas is here in Arcadia,” the man said, pointing to a tanker truck that the camera then panned to. “I don’t know about the rest’a y’all, but it’s here in Arcadia.
“So y’all know who we voting for,” he added, accompanied by laughter from his companion. “I don’t know an awful lot about the rest of you … but I’m voting for DeSantis. … And I’m a Democrat.”
Five weeks later, Florida’s midterm election results proved the unnamed gent was not some outlier, a one-off in a forgettable backwater. Instead, he was both oracle and the tip of a mighty iceberg.
Tuesday, in an entertaining and deeply researched piece for The Free Press, Olivia Reingold identifies much of the mass that lurked beneath the surface, revealing its astounding might on Election Day. The Rise of the DeSantis Democrats collects anecdotes of epiphany from a sprawling cross-section of otherwise left-leaning Floridians who found themselves compelled to vote for their party’s emerging worst nightmare.
Forty-odd years ago, in the tranquil, pre-internet, morning-in-America days of the 1980s when the last, best hope for freedom found limitless renewal in one man’s smile, there emerged a term for traditional rivals who were captivated by the other team’s leader: Reagan Democrats.
Three generations later, in thrall to a digital religion that mocks traditional values while we bash around in bubbles and the slightest mistyped word is cause for getting the author banned from civilization, in Florida, at least, everything old is new again.
It’s unclear how many DeSantis Democrats there are: DeSantis’ vote count jumped from roughly 4 million in 2018 to 4.6 million in 2022. Lots of those voters are presumably independents or Republicans who didn’t vote last time.
But some are disaffected Democrats alienated from the party they once belonged to. That’s evident from the longtime Democratic strongholds that DeSantis flipped, including Hillsborough, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, where DeSantis skyrocketed from a 21-point loss in 2018 to an 11-point win in 2022—a net gain of more than 30 percentage points.
That’s astonishing in and of itself. But we’ve only just begun peeling the onion. Where Reagan Democrats were cut largely from the same cloth — white, working-class voters with high school degrees — Reingold found DeSantis Democrats, while numerous, to be less easily pigeon-holed.
Unquestionably, though, a substantial portion of them are simply well-nigh over it: The signaling, the preening, the condescension, the chastising, the scolding — indeed, the wokeness of it all. And in Ron DeSantis, they have found their vessel of traditional resolve.
Democrats began to lose Carolina Castillo, a progressive activist and the child of waiters, when colleagues at hard-left Florida Rising advised her to check her privilege, apparently for looking too white: “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’m Latina—what are you talking about?’ ”
“You have to have a big tent that’s actually diverse, and you don’t do that by calling people with different viewpoints evil,” Daren Dillinger, 54, an IT specialist from Jacksonville, told Reingold.
Others focused on DeSantis’ faithfulness to pragmatism. He reopened Florida businesses and schools at the first opportunity, and kept taxes low while presiding over the largest budget surplus in state history.
Democratic Palm Beach County Commissioner Dave Kerner says he identifies as a DeSantis Democrat, “and I can tell you I’m not the only one.” …
“It wasn’t necessarily about partisan identity but the man himself—even if you didn’t agree with his policies, the way that he was so effective,” he says.
But how will (OK, would; the man hasn’t declared anything … yet) DeSantis play in a Republican primary campaign and, perhaps, beyond? Where will those DeSantis Democrats be then?
“He’s the good parts of Trump without that cockiness,” says Andres Arcila, who was born in Colombia but has been here for the past three decades. For the last 26 years, Arcilla has run a pawn shop called Daddy’s Cash, in hip, colorful Wynwood. “He defends his priorities,” Arcila continues. “It may not be the ones that some people like, but he has those priorities.”
Even now, Republican voters are actively considering whether they might prefer Trumpism without the daily Trump drama. As the presumed campaign nears, one factor worth considering is the one signaled by Democrats who aligned with Trump in 2016, but abandoned his wearisome, petulant ego in 2020.
If DeSantis Democrats can be found, and cultivated, beyond the Okefenokee Swamp, as Reingold suggests, 2024 cannot get here fast enough.
