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As a RDS voter, I’m pretty much RDS or bust (covid heavily influenced my political choice coupled with RDS’ general competence such as in Ian).
I have a decent preference for Trump over Haley mainly because while I think both would suck Haley reminds me too much of Bush. So maybe I fall in that camp?
As a "COVID Voter" (for lack of a better term), what is it about Desantis that makes you like him so much? Yes, I understand that at a superficial level he waged the most opposition to restrictive COVID policies among politicians who had actual influence over those policies (i.e. not Trump, who was powerless at the state and local level), but I didn't really see any fundamental differences between him and anyone else. Insofar as I can tell, there are two categories of COVID skeptic:
The kind of person who believes restrictions such as stay at home orders and broad business closures are antithetical to basic principles of liberty and shouldn't be on the table in a democratic society, and
The kind of person who thinks that the response was overblown in proportion to the threat, i.e. that there may be some circumstances where restrictive interventions are justified, but COVID wasn't one of them.
In my admittedly limited experience, the kind of person who is still bitter enough about COVID restrictions in 2023 is the kind of person who fits more into camp #1 and believes that the restrictions are evidence of our tolerance for creeping authoritarianism. To that end, I don't see what Desantis has to offer. He had no problem issuing stay-at-home orders and business closures early in the pandemic, and he didn't change his tune until six months in. By that point, existing restrictions in Florida were more of a mild annoyance than anything else, and loosening restrictions was the norm in most places, even those with Democratic governors.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that his anti-restrictionist sentiment always came across to me more as political posturing than as an expression of underlying principal. If that were the case, he'd never have implemented any restrictions in the first place and would have stood firm when there was pressure from practically everywhere in the country. But he didn't. He was certainly smart enough to realize that the existing restrictions were more theater than anything else, and that there was widespread recognition that they were such and there was corresponding pressure to get rid of them, and he responded to that pressure because he also recognized that it was unlikely to lead to the disaster some were predicting. But that's not principle, it's politics. It doesn't make him any different than governors of more restrictionist states who were walking back the restrictions more slowly because they knew they needed political cover in the event cases spiked.
By comparison, I live in Pennsylvania, and Tom Wolf took a lot of heat for the restrictions he implemented in March of 2020. But the more rural areas of the state were fully open by the middle of May, and the more urban areas were open by early June (except Philadelphia, but Philadelphia is kind of its own thing so we don't talk about it). After that, the only serious restriction was a bar and restaurant (and, oddly, courthouse) closure from early December to early January, which was implemented when cases were out of control and things were expected to get worse around the holidays. But once that expired things were pretty much over. Other restrictions lasted into spring of 2021, most of them dumb, most of them more annoying than restrictive, none of them seriously enforced. Like capacity limits. Restaurant owners bitched about these to no end, but if you went out you weren't waiting for a table. People who were concerned about the virus weren't going out, period; the capacity restrictions did nothing to allay their fears, but they also did nothing to restrict actual business.
Yes, a lot of this stuff was dumb to the nth degree and largely unnecessary, and I assure you that a lot of people on the left who were otherwise concerned about COVID thought that at the time. But that seems more like an argument that would work on someone who falls into camp #2, i.e. the problem with the COVID restrictions was that they were dumb and unnecessary. This is where Desantis seems to fall, but it seems odd to me for this to be the main reason to vote for the guy. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of dumb and unnecessary laws on the books in Florida right now that Desantis isn't exactly making a priority out of addressing, so I don't know that his stance on COVID speaks to some greater strength regarding dumb laws. And it's not like COVID-style pandemics are expected to come around every few years where he can put his opposition to specific dumb laws in action. All it really shows is that he took a particular stance on an issue that was relevant for about six months, and not that relevant in most places. It doesn't say anything about his stance on fundamental issues of freedom, because we know he had no problem implementing the restrictions when he thought they were necessary. Sorry, this went on longer than I expected it to, I'm just confused by how someone can think Desantis's stance on COVID is relevant in 2024 and not be concerned that for fully half the time his stance on COVID actually was relevant it wasn't any different from anyone else's.
Count me as C, I believe that selection pressure from more potentially fatal disease are good for the surviving population's health. I would have liked to mandate COVID spreading parties once the disease crossed the border. 2 weeks to speed the burn.
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I’m a type B of the ‘the Covid reaction was so utterly retarded that keeping restrictions past may is simply evil in keeping with my malice and stupidity are the same thing post earlier’, and it seems understandable that there might have been political restrictions on governors opening up, but governors who didn’t push right up to the edge of what they could do were simply wrong.
Yes, there is a counter factual scenario where Covid restrictions were justified. We had enough information in march or maybe even February to know that it was just that- a counterfactual, and that information was confirmed by the end of April. The science advisors who advised longer lockdowns and restrictions should all be shot out of hand, because they were lying when they claimed this was the Black Death 2.0.
Look, by all accounts emperor moctezuma really believed the world would end if he didn’t rip out enough human hearts in sacrifice to the sun god. He was blatantly wrong, and so I have no qualms calling him evil. The lockdowners were either lying or delusional in a way that really mattered, and I have no qualms calling them evil because they smashed the world rather than admit they might be wrong.
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Just to add to this, see https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29928/w29928.pdf
Florida had almost 100% in person schooling during the pandemic. Compare the only states that did better were Wyoming (super rural) and Arkansas (which basically had the same percentage as Florida). No other states were close. PA in contrast was at 50%.
In addition, Florida desire slow down in tourism still did better than many on economic matters.
This shows contra your claims that Florida was much more open and much sooner than say PA.
The person most responsible for that difference was RDS (the large city democrat mayors in Florida fought him).
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I don’t think liberty is absolute. It is possible that a pandemic could in theory justify things like stay at home orders.
Florida may not have gone “open” right away but they shifted policy two months in once they realized covid was not one that justified the extreme restrictions — 2 months was extremely quick and showed (1) an understanding of the virus and (2) a presumption more in favor of freedom instead of safety. Florida basically adopted the GBD specifically focusing on targeted protection noting the differential death rate. There is a reason he was labeled Deathsantis. Also, if you go back and listen to RDS during this time you’ll realize he actually had a deep understanding of the facts. He wasn’t just making a political decision.
DeSantis within six months prohibited local restrictions and had kids back in school. That was very different compared to most of the country.
Re PA, I can’t speak to every day life. We were looking at buying a house in eastern PA / NJ early 2021. Due to covid restrictions we weren’t allowed to physical view houses in PA since we weren’t PA residents. Philly schools didn’t return to in person learning until Aug 2021 and then were required to mask. That is a full one school year later and with stupid masks compared to Florida. So no, it was not basically the same. It was much worse. I think you live in the Pittsburgh area. They didn’t unveil plans to go back to in person learning until June 2021.
There is a weird revisionist history where people pretend all states were pretty much the same. No. Florida was much more open and much sooner compared to most states. I was in Florida multiple times during the pandemic. It was entirely different compared to the northeast. There is a reason there was a mass exodus to Florida. Where I am in NJ didn’t get “normal” until 2022. That is at best basically 1.5 years after Florida. Look I was deep into covid policy at the time. You can’t make me misremember what happened. I know you are on the left and the left was terrible on covid so the left is trying to retcon all of this (see Gavin Newsome). Won’t work on me. I lived and live in NJ. I visited Florida a lot (almost moved there despite buying recently in NJ). It was radically different.
Trump wielded a lot of power since a lot of nonsense derived from the CDC. Trump could’ve fired Collins. He could have fired Fauci. He could’ve not side lined Atlas (if you read Atlas’s book, you’ll see that Trump seemed to agree with Atlas but lacked the courage to implement his messaging in full).
Finally crisis reveals character. I don’t need to know about how a leader does when the sun shines. I need to know how he does in crisis. DeSantis wasn’t brash but at the same time was willing to take a very different tact compared to the narrative based on a clear understanding of the facts and a freedom oriented perspective. He passed the test with flying colors when many others failed (if you want happy to pull up detailed stats on it).
Trump didn't sideline Atlas, Trump brought in Atlas to attempt to moderate of the ridiculous loons in Birx, Fauci, and Collins; Atlas tried, he ran into the the decades-long constructed bureaucratic wall that was Fauci, Inc., in NIAID and associated agencies not to mention their ability and willingness to leak and scheme to media mouthpieces to lie and manipulate against him and any moderation of their approach (something Birx details in her own book), and realized he couldn't make a dent and he left to do other things.
while we're pointing out some context to avoid rewriting history, let's remember Donald Trump was being impeached in early 2020 and was being threatened with removal by Mitch McConnel if he "fired" or removed Fauci, a man who was almost universally revered in DC at the time who quickly became a cult-like figure in the media
so, Trump's strategy was to undermine or work-around fauci, collins, and birx because he couldn't do more due to opposition by his own party let alone the entirety of corporate media and his other political opposition
desantis wouldn't have fired fauci, collins, or birx; we know he wouldn't because he appointed Florida's own "Fauci" in Scott Rivkees and refused to fire him, despite his ridiculous guidance throughout 2020 which closely mirrored Fauci and didn't end until his contract expired in 2021
and even if fuaci, collins, and birx, were removed and scott atlas was the CDC spokesperson, the media wouldn't have magically got behind his guidance because he's the expert, they would viciously attacked and ridiculed him and ignored his guidance while having fauci, birx, and collins on tv nightly to give their sermons to fawning media personalities
no one was good on Covid, but Trump and Desantis were better than most with Trump being equal or better than Desantis on pretty much every single covid topic during 2020
Trump criticized Fauci before Desantis while Desantis was fawning over him in presser after presser. Desantis only broke with Fauci after Trump called for states to reopen and Desantis was one of the first governors (not the first) who locked their states down (multiple other governors never did) to issue a plan to reopen. Desantis didn't harshly criticize Fauci, something Trump was doing in March 2020, until 2021.
I liked Desantis despite reservations about my memory of him being a forgettable neocon/neolib dork Congressmen from Florida who idolized George H.W. Bush not to mention his military record of providing legal guidance for torturers at Gauntanamo. I grew to really like him throughout the Covid hysteria because post summer 2020, he was willing to be front in center and perform well in front of media about the various hysterics constantly being pushed. I was pretty disappointed when he decided to engage in this kamikaze campaign against Trump, but his doing so and the laughable train wreck which has been his campaign and campaign tactics have soured any positive appreciation I had for the guy. Despite some alleged vaunted "competency," he has outdone even Scott Walker in how to shred a promising political career in short-order. It's a shame. Was it always going to happen given his neocon/neolib dork tendencies being surrounded by bushie consultants? Perhaps, but in any case it shows very poorly on Desantis and his competency and decision-making.
I wish Desantis did the things him and his supporters have attempted to retcon into history, but he didn't.
There is a reason he was foremost in the summer of 2020. It is because Trump abandoned the perch.
Yes, you can point out rural states like South Dakota but I lived during covid. Florida was open early and faced heavy criticism for it. Georgia opened around a similar time (and hell I’d go to bay for Kemp as well) but Kemp didn’t go as hard in the paint to prevent local government from enacting certain policy (and you may recall Trump tried really hard to prevent Kemp from doing what he did).
Hell, I provided the receipts from Mulligran. Florida had schools open in person pretty much more than every other states (it is basically tied with Arkansas and Wyoming with a pretty big gap until Utah).
Also this whole “neoliberal” smear. Any guy that says “Coolidge” when favorite president isn’t your bog standard neo lib. Add to it his attacks on ESG and feud with Disney. He isn’t another GWB or Romney.
Finally, judging someone for a bad campaign is a poor way for how somehow would run the federal government. Instead I would say the way he handled covid in Florida (which despite your retcon was excellent) or the way he handled the hurricanes (which again were excellent). The guy is a great executive who is not a natural politician. I’d prefer the former to the latter.
He wasn't foremost in summer of 2020. Trump was always foremost throughout all of 2020. He wasn't even the foremost governor. Kemp was because he opened weeks ahead of Desantis, just not fully. Desantis only came out with reopening once Trump called for all states to reopen. Trump didn't "try really hard" to stop Kemp, he made some statements in response to questions from the media. That is nonsense. Trump criticized Kemp because Kemp was in front of Trump and Desantis. Desantis came to be the forefront governor because he engaged with the media and I was grateful for that.
I can point to more states than South Dakota. There were multiple governors who didn't lockdown at all (Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and more). There were over five governors who never issued stay-at-home orders. There were multiple other governors who opened quicker and with fewer restrictions (Texas, Georgia, and others). There were governors who cracked down on localities attempting lockdowns quicker than Desantis, who put out an order in like October and didn't enforce it with Floridians still getting tickets and summonses afterwards.
Desantis was not good on Covid. He was better than most, but that's not saying much, and he wasn't the best. He wasn't better than Trump on any issue during 2020. And he was worse than at least five+ other governors.
In addition, my anecdotal experience in both Florida and Texas in ~May-June was Texas was more open with fewer mask weirdos irrelevant of whatever was on the books or in press conferences.
Your memory of Desantis during COVID or his PR campaign to retcon his record, much like many of his other PR stunts, are rewriting history about what he actually did during Covid. Early Desantis was mister tough guy sending staties to arrest teenagers on beaches he closed. Let's stop lying about it or mischaracterizing the landscape of the Covid hysteria in 2020.
then you should look at Desantis's record and statements when he was a Congressmen before he rebranded himself to run for Governor let alone he has repeated multiple times his politician idol is George H.W. Bush
I was in this stuff day in and day out. It isn’t PR. Maybe you’ve been buying into the Trump nonsense (like Cuomo being better).
where? I don't remotely recognize you and I was pretty involved, including in lobbying governments and in multiple lawsuits and your comments make me think you came late to this like in 2021
you've let post-2020 behavior affect your memory of the timeline and specific behaviors of Desantis during 2020, the relevant time period where Trump was in office
you're participating in the retcon which is why instead of talking about specific behaviors of Desantis and their timeline during 2020 which I've pointed out, you want to use poor proxies like "% in-person schools available" in 2020 and 2021
in most states, schools and school policies are mostly controlled very locally; state governments can and do intervene but rarely did in 2020 (at least to open them), including in Florida which is why it's a goofy proxy for the point you're trying to make but it's pretty typical for the goofy PR derps desantis hired who helped him shred his political career in record time
Okay bro. I’m sure Bleep filed a lot of law suits.
Here is a WaPo article from mid 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/08/18/florida-education-chief-tells-districts-dont-rush-close-schools-when-covid-19-cases-appear/
And from the times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/coronavirus-schools-florida-local-control.html
RDS used the power of the purse to keep schools open in mid 2020. So don’t give me your revisionist history nonsense.
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As to PA, I don't know what you're real estate agent told you but I can assure you there were no restrictions on looking at houses, excepting during the initial phase when everything was shut down, but certainly not by 2021. There may have been people who didn't want to risk showing houses to people from out of state and made up laws to avoid an argument, but PA never jumped on the train where they restricted anyone from out of state. In May 2020 they put out guidelines for the real estate industry in accordance with their reopening plan, but it didn't say anything about out of state travel. It also only applied to counties in the red and yellow reopening phases, and every county was in the green phase by the end of June, and they ditched the color system after that.
I also mentioned it in my initial post but it doesn't hurt to repeat it here: Philly doesn't count. This is often more of a joke at their expense but during the pandemic they were literally on a separate system that meant statewide guidelines didn't apply to them. I don't know the exact distinction or reasoning behind this, but enough things are different about Philly that I don't bother asking questions.
As for the school thing, the school system here is different than in the South (and a lot of other places). School districts here are independent government authorities that don't always follow municipal boundaries. School boards aren't subject to the same level of centralization as they are in places like Florida. School districts here were free to set up their own COVID guidelines, and most of them were back in-person at the beginning of the school year. Some delayed a few weeks, but were otherwise in-person. The exception was the City of Pittsburgh itself, which was ostensibly in-person but seemed to regularly be reverting to online after the latest scare, but the governor had nothing to do with that, and DeSantis couldn't have done anything about it if he wanted to because the PA governor doesn't have the power to tell local governments what to do. The exception to that was the 2021 mask mandate you were referring to, but there's more to the story than that. It was initially supposed to be the district's prerogative to make the decision, but as the summer wore on, school boards and superintendents were dealing with angry parents on both sides of the issue. Wolfe couldn't tell the schools that they couldn't implement a mask mandate, but he could require them under the emergency health powers. So he required it, but the purpose of it was to deflect the criticism towards himself so the schools could get on with their business.
I got a similar impression, but I think it was less due to the laws that were in place than it was the general attitude of the people. Yeah, the further south you drove the fewer masks you saw and the more people were in bars and restaurants. But there were never any real restrictions anyone took seriously. There were some stupid rules involving bars but nothing that would really stop you from drinking there (and some of the harshest lockdown critics in my social circle actually long for those days because they inadvertently made things more social). Aside from people occasionally talking about the virus, things were pretty normal for most people by the time vaccines were widely available in the spring of 2021. I'm not saying some places weren't more restrictive, I'm just saying that having traveled to PA, OH, WV, VA, MD, and NC at the time I didn't notice too much of a difference.
It wouldn't have mattered. Trump handpicked these people as experts for his task force early in the pandemic, and it had become apparent that he found what they said politically inconvenient. They never had any real power, just a microphone and the credibility of being the nationally known authorities. By the time Atlas came on the scene it was already clear to everyone that he was hired because he said what the president wanted to hear. If he fires Fauci it doesn't stop Fauci from going on TV every 5 minutes saying the things he would have said anyway, and from still being treated as an expert by anyone who was still doing so at that point. The media would have treated Atlas as a hack and probably had Fauci on after every press conference to tell you how much of what he said you should actually believe. It's one thing to disagree with the policy implications of the information your experts provide. It's quite another to say you want to rely on expertise but then replace your guys with yes-men when they don't tell you what you want to hear. Trump already had a problem with this in his cabinet, but at least it was behind-closed-doors stuff that came out later in tell-all books. This would have been public, and in the midst of an election season no less. He made the right decision in keeping Fauci, however grudgingly, and distancing himself from Atlas.
Aside from those points, though, thanks for clarifying. If I have anything to add, I think that Desantis's gambit was less a stroke of personal genius than more of a risk/reward decision that worked out in his favor. If you really believe he did a significantly better job than other governors, one has to ask why other governors didn't follow in his footsteps? I doubt he had access to information the others didn't. He was able to tap into a growing anti-restriction sentiment by becoming the face of it, and by actually using his power to not only remove restrictions, but keep localities from enforcing them. But I think he overplayed his hand and got away with it. Most governors quietly let restrictions expire and kept up the messaging about personal responsibility because they knew that in the event of a catastrophe they wanted those powers in their back pocket. Even if they thought such a catastrophe was unlikely, they weren't willing to bet the farm on it. Desantis made that gamble, and while it may have paid off, I don't know what it shows about the man other than that he's willing to take unnecessary risks if he thinks it will earn him political points. What would have happened if COVID started spreading through Florida's retirement communities and nursing homes like wildfire after September 2020, to the point where the statistics were unequivocal? Would he have had the courage to go back on his policy? Would he claim the numbers were wrong (Even if they were pretty conclusive)? Would he say that the deaths were an acceptable cost for removing the restrictions? Luckily he was never in this position.
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So instead of trying to build a coalition of like-minded scientific advisors in the administration, it sounds like Atlas just threw up his hands and refused to play ball. One might even say that Atlas shrugged 🤷♂️
It seemed he started out trying to do so, but it became obvious others weren’t interested.
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Almost everyone is obviously type B. If Covid had 30% mortality rate among young and healthy people then the constituency opposing lockdowns would be limited to ancaps and the most extreme accelerationists.
Even most type A in your taxonomy would become type B if the mortality was high enough.
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I’m a type 1 who was a bit late to figure things out. But the thing is that once he got it, he got it, and he was loud and proud of being the voice of that movement. I’ve no problems with recommendations, but what flipped me was just how cruel these things were and how much they harmed the middle and working class to assuage the fears of pampered PMCs who got to work from home (something they wanted anyway and are now demanding as a condition of employment) at the expense of the rest of the economy which was torched by SAH orders. If you had any sort of retail, restaurant, or construction business, you were outright fucked. The big chains were fine because of online delivery, but no small businesses could survive, especially once their customers began shopping online.
Desantis likely saved a lot of those small shops in Florida.
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The actual reality is that 95% of "COVID voters" that existed in any large numbers were type B, and that's one of many reasons DeSantis died on liftoff - people don't want to think about COVID. That's why the Loudon County School Board went back Democratic and Moms for Liberty types have been largely failures outside already bright red areas. If the Virginia Governor race had been in March of 2022 instead of Novemeber of 2021, Youngkin probably loses, and he's basically the only real right-leaning victory that ran on COVID stuff, when it came to school closures and the like. The temporary allyship they had with center-left to center-right parents upset over school closures ended when the schools basically all reopened by fall of 2021, and life was back to normal for the vast majority of people, outside of the 5% of always maskers and 5% of people who think being forced to make sacrifices for other people you disagree with is the same as a concentration camp.
It is crazy to me that these people didn’t realize “stress reveals character.”
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