National Review has paid special attention to Florida as it has risen in political prominence. Help us keep it up.
National Review may be based in New York City, but its eyes roam all over the country. Our name says it all: We are not New York Review, or Capital Review, we are National Review, and being so demands that we cover all areas of this extraordinary country with interest and care.
One of those areas is Florida. Over the last decade, Florida’s importance within American politics and culture has increased dramatically. It has moved from the fourth- to the third-most-populous state. It has gone from “swing state” to “red state.” And it has become a beacon for Americans — and businesses — who have grown dissatisfied with life in California and the Northeast. Throughout, National Review has made sure to examine Florida in the same way — and with the same enthusiasm — as the rest of the press covers Manhattan and Washington, D.C. If you have enjoyed reading that coverage, we ask that you contribute so that we can keep it up.
Our analysis has been comprehensive. From examining the state’s unique appeal, to debunking those who have spread conspiracy theories about its response to Covid-19, to explaining the landslide Republican win in 2022, to covering local political stories that are being distorted in the national media, NR has been on the ball. We have even hosted in-house debates (pro, con) about the state’s more controversial actions.
Going forward, this focus will become even more important. Why? Well, because, at the precise moment that Florida has become one of the most crucial stories in America life, the mainstream press has decided to treat the state and its residents as pariahs. In 2021, the media bought Rebekah Jones’s lies about the state’s Covid-19 numbers wholesale because the media wanted to believe that what she was saying was true. Florida, you see, was full of irresponsible “Floridiots,” who were following their governor into a “death cult.”
Even now, the idea that Florida’s system might actually work does not seem to occur. The Democratic Party may have been wiped out in Florida at the last election, Michael Grunwald wrote last week in the Atlantic, but that is because the Democrats insist upon responsibly “offering broccoli” when Floridians just want to eat “ice cream.” Florida may not have been the abattoir that many predicted, his colleague Helen Lewis proposed, but that was only because of “confounding factors” that allowed Governor DeSantis’s “gamble” to “pay off” and “denied liberals the smackdown they craved.”
This sort of analysis is simply not good enough. Florida is not going away. Its status as a — perhaps the — model of red-state governance is not going to disappear. And, in the short run at least, its importance to the nation’s politics will only increase. The next GOP primary seems likely to be dominated by Floridians. Nearly one in ten of the Republicans’ caucus in the House is from the state. Both Rick Scott and Marco Rubio are growing in influence within the Senate. And Governor DeSantis occupies the unusual, and welcome, position of having become a national lightning rod while winning reelection in a landslide. Interrogating all this will take diligence and consideration, of the sort that National Review is uniquely placed to provide.
If you’d like to see more of our review of the nation, and especially of Florida, please consider donating here.
