Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that the people who have moved to his free state—including disaffected Democrats who abandoned locked-down blue states—are “overwhelmingly” registering as Republicans, according to the Epoch Times.
“The media, at the beginning of this, said Florida’s bad, and I think it’s because they want to damage Trump in Florida—they want to damage me,” DeSantis told Fox News on May 26.
“So, they just kept saying it was bad,” he continued, “and even though the facts didn’t say it, like literally last April, they’re saying Florida is doing worse than New York.”
Even as the media lied, many Americans showed that they knew the truth by leaving their homes in California, New York, New Jersey and other states with endless lockdowns and theatrical restrictions, like mask mandates and physical separation.
“New York was like 10 times worse,” DeSantis said, describing what many New Yorkers witnessed firsthand.
He said the fake-news propaganda benefited Republicans in his state by frightening away low-information leftists.
“[T]he people that buy those phony narratives for these media, they probably aren’t coming to Florida,” DeSantis said.
“… [T]he people that see through it, they think like us,” he continued. “And so, I think a lot of these people are coming. I think they are registering as Republicans overwhelmingly.”
Meanwhile, COVID fatigue and a growing pile of evidence to expose the irrationality of Democrats’ dictatorial response may have led some swing voters to reject its agenda.
“I also have come across a lot of people who, quite frankly, were Democrats,” DeSantis said. “The lockdowns turned them into Republicans.”
DeSantis issued a stay-at-home order as the media-induced hysteria set in last spring, but he quickly acknowledged that the Wuhan virus posed an insignificant threat to the vast majority of the healthy population.
He said that he would not not have issued even the limited order if he could do things again.
Restrictions on in-person education—or the complete absence of it—was one of the major factors that drove many to abandon their Democrat-run states.
That gave Republicans the advantage on a kitchen-table issue in which Democrats had long leveraged the inside track.
“People say, ‘I was a Democrat because of education, and I’m in California, and they’re locking my kids out of school,'” DeSantis said.
“‘I come to Florida, they’re in school,'” he added. “People are free. People are happy.”
While the education sector—driven by powerful labor unions—has long been a reliable Democrat voting bloc, parents’ patience quickly began to wane as fully-funded schools relied on remote instruction.
“If you have a political party that puts the interest of teachers’ unions over the interest of kids being able to just access an education at all, that tells you all you need to know about the modern Democrat Party,” DeSantis said.
