Why the Left Needs Ron DeSantis to Fail

T here is a reason why the Left needs Governor Ron DeSantis to fail. And it isn’t just about the 2024 presidential election.

Sure, given that DeSantis has the potential to unite the Trumpist and traditional Republican wings of the party, Democrats would much rather have him go down in flames in the 2022 governor’s race. Otherwise, they may have to take their chances against him with a nearly 82-year-old President Joe Biden or a deeply unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris. But politics alone cannot explain the level of hysterical obsession that out-of-state liberals have developed for the Florida governor.

Since early in the pandemic, liberals have been eager to portray DeSantis as a reckless sociopath — warning that he was the Grim Reaper, the kind of charlatan who puts “owning the libs” ahead of protecting people’s lives. When predictions of mass death arising from opening schools or the beaches did not materialize last year, his critics resorted to promoting the lies of a former health department dashboard manager, Rebekah Jones, to claim that the state’s COVID-19 statistics were manipulated.

So if not for politics, what explains the overblown reaction to DeSantis?

The deeper reason the Left is so eager to see DeSantis fail is that they don’t want to believe that they disrupted over a year of their lives following restrictions that may turn out to have been unnecessary. It’s comforting to believe that all of their sacrifices — forgoing vacations, missing meetings with friends and family, depriving their kids of in-person school, masking, and so on — served the noble goal of saving lives. It’s much harder to accept that it may not have made much of a difference. In an age when a crazy virus can come out of nowhere and wreak havoc, it’s human nature for people to want to feel as though they can assert control over it.

After the initial wave in the spring of 2020, DeSantis reached the conclusion that outside of some basic prudent measures, it made sense to allow people to get on with their lives and trust them to make the best decisions for their own health and well-being. He allowed businesses to thrive and schools to open, and created an environment in which kids could be kids.

Despite dire warnings, in terms of deaths as a share of the population, Florida ranks 27th in the United States, below the national average. It has been much better off than many liberal states that have imposed more stringent restrictions, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Illinois.

Critics argue that Florida is at an advantage, because its warmer weather enables people to keep more activities outside for a longer period of the year. While true to an extent, it also means that during brutal summer months, people must remain in air conditioning for longer periods. And the weather theory also neglects other factors that work against Florida. The state is home to one of the largest over-65 populations in the country, has dense urban areas with demographics susceptible to COVID-19, contains busy airports, and is one of the most popular destinations for international travelers.

In truth, we’ll never be able to isolate enough variables to resolve the debate over whether Florida would have had fewer deaths were DeSantis to have imposed more restrictions. But it would be wrong to view things myopically through the prism of the coronavirus. The relevant question is whether a small change in the trajectory of COVID-19 would be worth the consequences for other non-COVID societal priorities. Coming out of the pandemic slightly below average in deaths while limiting the impact to children, businesses, and everyday life seems like a trade-off that a lot of people would be willing to accept.

Following the advice of Anthony Fauci and other public-health officials to the letter, meanwhile, might not sufficiently mitigate COVID-19 — but it does mitigate media criticism. When states such as Michigan, California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts have gone through surges, their governors have avoided the sort of criticism that DeSantis has been subjected to. Instead, the spikes are treated as evidence of how wily, infectious, and hard to control the virus is.

Of course, right now, Florida is in the midst of a surge in COVID-19, so liberals are pouncing on the news to revive their attacks on DeSantis. But the DeSantis decisions that have generated the most controversy cannot explain the current surge. I happen to think that his ban on cruise ships requiring proof of vaccination was an overreach that should be struck down by the courts, but it’s hard to argue that that is what is driving the statewide increase. Giving all public-school parents the choice of whether or not to send their children to school in masks is much more defensible. But whatever one’s position on masking children, schools have been out of session, so that clearly isn’t the source of the spread, either.

It’s also hard to argue that the spike in Florida is due to DeSantis’s being some sort of anti-vaxxer. He went to great lengths to make sure that the vaccine is distributed widely across the state and has urged people to get it, emphasizing that being vaccinated reduces the chances of death from COVID-19 to near zero.

Though Florida isn’t the top-performing state in terms of vaccination, it’s far from a terrible outlier. The vaccinated share of the population in Florida (59.9 percent having had at least one dose, 49.7 percent being fully vaccinated) is nearly identical to that of the U.S. as a whole (59.1 percent, 50.5 percent). DeSantis has made it a particular priority to vaccinate the most vulnerable, and 99 percent of the over-65 population has had at least one dose, with 86.1 percent being fully vaccinated (which is higher than in California).

DeSantis has clearly decided on the strategy of riding out the current surge as opposed to giving in to the pressure to impose new restrictions. He is acting under the assumption that cases will peak in the coming weeks and that schools will prove that they can open safely without the need for masking. Los Angeles, it should be noted, reinstituted a mask mandate last month, and, after three weeks, cases are four times what they were when the mandate went into effect. More importantly, DeSantis recognizes that the whole point of having a freely available vaccine is to reduce the likelihood of death or severe disease to a low enough level so that everybody can get on with their lives — not to chase after COVID Zero.

The Left is desperate for DeSantis to be proven wrong, not just so he is weaker politically, but so they can feel better about their own decisions to lock down and mask up.