The author argues that Florida is struggling in many ways recently. Ron DeSantis’ handling of the COVID pandemic led to many preventable deaths in Florida, contradicting early articles praising his response. Now DeSantis is known more for his anti-gay and anti-science stances rather than effective governance. His campaign for president seems doomed to fail due to his lack of charisma and poor performance as governor. The author expresses sympathy for Florida residents dealing with the fallout of climate change, disasters, and poor leadership.
Sympathy? They voted for this, twice.
Every group their administration is oppressing lives in the state as well, as well as plenty of innocent people who don’t belong to those groups. They’re all actual human beings living their lives and suffering under a government that actively targets them.
I’m sick of people damning those of us who live places with shitty governments for what they do. So many are assholes to people from the south or the midwest, when we’re the ones who suffer the most from their bullshit. Everywhere you look there’s some smug liberal talk show host or internet commenter cracking jokes about the stupidity of the people they claim to care about and how we’re all cousin-fuckers who deserve no sympathy. Instead of trying to feel superior over us because you know our states suck, have a damn heart.
The problem is that a vocal minority (edit: majority, these days) of GOP voters care deeply about culture war FUD and reliably show up at the ballot box. In the meantime, large swathes of the Democratic base are just not seeing anything in the candidates who claim to speak on their behalf that inspires them to get out and vote.
Add a demographic tilt toward older voters who are easy to scare and have time on their hands to turn out and run the gauntlet of election day inconvenience, and this is what you get.
Not to mention the voter suppression.
35% of the population turned out to vote. Of that 35, 59% voted for desantis, or 21% of the total population. A minority of people decided for the rest of us. I voted, and got out to encourage others to vote. Attended protests, events and generally tried to be active. Florida is a big state and most of us, despite the low turnout, didn’t and don’t want this man running our government. I hate what he’s doing to the state I was born and raised in, I’m being forced out of my home by inflation and growing hostility to my values. Say what you want about our government, but there are a lot of us who didn’t ask for this and tried out hardest to avoid it.
This needs to be the loudest point made as part of any of it. Anyone in that state who is unhappy with how it’s going should probably vote. It’s so bizarre to me that people are watching this happen in their jurisdiction and still won’t get out there and do the bare minimum to change it. It’s beyond wild that DeSantis is being allowed to continue his destructive dealings with no notable resistance.
I remember a time when if an elected politician did something that enough of the population disagreed with, they were removed from office. I’ll have to go find the article.
I could not find the specific example I was thinking of, but the wiki on recalled politicians was good enough. It happens a fair amount. Since 2011, Florida has had 3 recalled politicians.
How Florida dems got their teeth kicked in when this is their competition is simply astounding
The Florida Dems just never stand for anything. They pick compromise candidates under the assumption that a compromise candidate will automatically equal votes, and then they don’t actually promote them because having a platform means the Republicans will call you a socialist.
2022 was a textbook example. The guy running against DeSantis was Charlie Christ, a former Republican governor that nobody liked because he was in charge during the Recession and did nothing to fix it. They got him to switch parties and made a big deal out of him being a moderate who switched parties, and then were shocked by the fact that moderate doesn’t automatically equal popular.
Meatballs opposition was former republican governor Charlie Crist. The dem candidate was about as lackluster as possible, to the point that I think it was almost intentional. At least on Crists’ part. We had Nikki Fried running for the seat too and she got pushed out in a similar fashion as Bernie did back in '16. I kind of get why many people weren’t racing to the polls last year but it still sucks and desantis was clearly an existential threat to the state. The FL Dems need to engage their younger base because this “lesser of two evils” crap is killing the country
Jacksonville recently ran an actual progressive candidate and won, so I agree.
Progressives would overwhelmingly win almost everywhere, I feel, which is why they aren’t allowed to run normally.
No one shows up to primaries
A progressive candidate for the Mayor of Buffalo who had won the Democratic primary lost to the moderate incumbent who was literally a write-in candidate.
Progressive candidates work well in some locations, but it’s simply false to say that they “overwhelmingly win almost everywhere”. Have you ever lived in a rural community, or the south?
So
65%60.35% [edited to account for the provided evidence of voter suppression] of Floridians weren’t sufficiently motivated to try to change the government after living through a first DeSantis term.Yes, yes, I know, “voter suppression”, “disenfranchised”, etc. I’m sorry if I have a hard time believing that 65% of FL really super-duper wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so by systemic corruption; that would put Florida in the same ballpark as Somalia in terms of governmental autocracy.
At some point, we just have to cut our losses and scram. That’s why I left Arkansas, and am now squished into a tiny, overpriced, neglected little apartment with a roommate in a blue state, slowly working on replacing all my stuff.
you live in the United States, where an unelected panel of partisans make binding law on completely baseless grounds all the time and where universal voter enfranchisement happened so recently there are living people who could not vote because of their skin tone. i don’t know why you out of hand dismiss this as a possibility.
Because there’s no evidence.
“65% of all the eligible voters in Florida were prevented from voting due to direct governmental interference and extreme voter suppression” is a fantastic claim. One might even call it an extraordinary claim. One for which I would expect to see some fairly extraordinary evidence. I can’t just wake up in the morning and decide to believe something because it fits with my preconceived biases, especially not something directly involving almost 14 million people.
Are you actually expecting me to believe that 14 million people tried to show up at the polls and were turned away, without any evidence whatsoever? That’s a Q-level conspiracy.
Where did I claim 65% of the population was actively suppressed? I’m assuming you’re talking about my comment. Never said that. As a matter of fact, I never said anything about voter suppression at all and neither did the comment above mine.
The Dems ran a weak campaign with the human equivalent of a wet fart for a candidate. The progressive candidate, Nikki fried, hardly received any mainstream coverage (I wonder why) and lost the primaries. You were right that people didn’t feel motivated to vote. I worked to change that but at the end of the day,.I don’t really blame anyone for not turning up to vote for a spineless, moderate, ex-republican-cum-democrate. The people want change. And that wasn’t what the Dems were offering.
However, I would like to add, that voter suppression is a much larger issue than you’re making it out to be. And not a lot of it is the highly visible forms that you’ve been describing. Just a few ways that people have been prevented from voting:
-Vote by mail ballots being disqualified
-vote by mail becoming more restricted
-Making voter registration difficult and inaccessible
-Arresting people for voter fraud on no legal basis
-voter intimidation via poll watching
-Gerrymandering
And those are just what I could think of off the top of my head. Thats just a part of a greater conversation on how our elections are poorly designed. How first past the post voting, leads to a lot of the problems we have today. How the electoral college should be abolished. How the bills our government pass don’t correlate at all with popular support/majority opinion. I could go on. The extraordinary evidence you want to see is out there. Voter suppression and terrible election practices are a blight on this country.
from felony disenfranchisement alone, Florida legally disenfranchises 15% of its total black population and approximately one million (possibly more, we don’t have exact numbers and that’s by design) otherwise eligible voters statewide—an estimated 10% of the otherwise-eligible citizen population. turnout in 2022 was 7,796,916 voters.
1 million voters is just under
half of onefive percent of registered voters. That’s a far cry from 65%.Edited to correct my stupid math.
Edit 2: Edited my original post in this thread to reflect the provided data.
the state of Florida: extrajudicially prosecutes voters; arbitrarily fines voter groups; disenfranchises at least a million people in contravention of an overwhelmingly-supported referendum to legally enfranchise them
you: this isn’t autocracy because that’s only 5% of the total population of Florida (even though the affected demographics are disproportionately pro-Democratic and that’s the point of the disenfranchisement), there isn’t systemic corruption (even though the state of Florida is explicitly attempting to override the will of the people), Floridians did this to themselves (even though they’ve done everything in their power to not be run by inhuman ghoul Ron DeSantis)
is this seriously what we’re arguing? because if you’re going to do this i’d rather you be honest with yourself and just say you don’t care what happens to the millions of people in Florida who fought against and continue to fight against this despite people like you writing them off as basically subhuman.
No.
I’m arguing that voter suppression cannot possibly account for the 65% of registered voters in Florida who did not vote one way or the other for DeSantis’s second term.
I’m arguing that a substantial portion of voters in Florida were, if not DeSantis fans, fine enough with DeSantis to not bother going out to vote against him.
I feel like you’re arguing that all of the non-voters would have voted against DeSantis, but did not because they are systematically oppressed. That 14 million citizens were actively denied the right to vote and the Florida gubernatorial election was stolen by voter suppression. If that’s not what you’re claiming, then we don’t have anything to argue about; if that is what you’re claiming, I’m going to need more substantial evidence that Florida’s democracy is in the same state as Myanmar’s and Zimbabwe’s than what has been so far provided. If anywhere close to 14 million people in one state are being actively prevented from voting for DeSantis’s opponent, that would probably be the biggest scandal, with the biggest cover-up, in American history by a wide margin. It makes the Business Plot look like the schemes of a grade-school playground clique.
1 million people being disenfranchised is awful. It does not prove that the 65% of registered voters who did not vote were directly oppressed by the government and denied their rights, and such a claim would be entirely hyperbolic, and would only serve to obscure the fact that a large majority of Floridians are fine with DeSantis and the GOP. I get that it’s more empowering to believe that we can fight a few public entities engaging in voter suppression to free Florida from their minority rule, as opposed to believing that we’d be fighting to change the opinions of over 10 million individuals who literally don’t care about us and who wouldn’t bat an eye if we were all hunted down by DeSantis’s private brownshirts.
I’m not trying to fight those people, or change them. I fled before Fox News told them it was time to “cut the tall trees”, and I advise everyone else to do the same.
beyond felony disenfranchisement, Florida has legally prosecuted voters for crimes they did not commit, which the state cannot prove they committed, and which the state would have “facilitated” them doing by giving them false information and is currently targeting voter registration groups for facilitating nonexistent voter fraud
42.2%, or 3 million people, didn’t. You always have to remember that there are literally millions of people who desperately didn’t want this.
6 million registered voters didn’t even bother. One could argue that they’re just fine with, if not enthusiastic about, the current state of affairs. 4 million votes for, 3 million against, 6 million “Meh.”
I’ve been registered to vote in blue and red states and the barriers to vote in red states are so much higher. Lines are longer, in less convenient locations, registration has to be done earlier, and sometime they might not count your vote or purge a voter directory and you have to check yourself to see if that the case so you can correct it. It’s more than people can’t be arsed to vote; it is intentionally made as inconvenient as possible.
Vote by mail?
What is that? /s
They’ve made everything else as inconvenient as possible, that extends to vote-by-mail too. To request a mail ballot in Florida, you literally have to call, mail, or fax an individual person. How fast do those requests get processed? How often do they get denied for BS reasons? What happens if the person’s voter registration gets purged between the request for the ballot and receiving the ballot? How often do mail-in ballots just ‘disappear’?
There’s just so many problems with mail-in that it doesn’t feel like a sustainable, reliable replacement for in-person voting.
You’re missing a whole lot of people who don’t approve but are not served by the alternatives enough to get out there. You may disagree and say they should just vote for the lesser evil, but we see time and time again that just presenting people lesser evils is not effective. They need to have a positive reason to go vote FOR someone, not just negative ones to vote AGAINST someone.
This is just an extended rationalization for apathy. I’m sorry to say, but government is boring. Politicians are boring. An exciting politician is probably trying to sell you a line of unrealistic, unachievable bullshit, and in the system the US has, by the time it gets down to the general election, your choices are Donkey, Elephant, and several flavors of Don’t Care. You can have more excitement and a greater sense of choice in the primaries, but voting twice in a year is too much work for even many ‘political’ people.
If positive messaging got people to the polls, I guarantee you would see positive campaigning: even 10% of the non-voters would be enough to swing any competitive race.
That’s absurd. Political apathy doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Nearly everyone who doesn’t vote will tell you it’s because both of their realistic options are out to fuck them, and in most locales they’re right. Give them something to hang onto, have a candidate that offers them literally anything other than not being the other guy or not actively making things worse, and a whole lot more will bite. You might think they’re wrong for having that apathy, but to be completely honest what you think about them doesn’t matter. What matters is getting people moving.
The reason they don’t campaign like that is obvious: the things the people want are not what the ruling class will allow. It’s foolish to think that politicians are simply optimizing for what gives them the best chance of winning. Those sorts of considerations only happen within the bounds of what their backers allow.