The DeSantis policies threaten to trigger chaos as kids go back to school in Florida. Several school districts are considering defying the governor, even at the risk of losing funding. One school superintendent, Leon County’s Rocky Hanna, wrote to DeSantis, pleading for a temporary mask requirement. He said that he supported a previous decision by the governor to let parents decide on masks but that the highly infectious Delta variant had changed the situation.
“I’m asking you to allow us the flexibility and the autonomy to make the decisions for our schools that best fit our local data and information in Leon County,” Hanna wrote.
“It is the challenge of every leader to not allow pride or politics cloud our better judgment, and to be guided by community input, science and experts in the field,” Hanna wrote.
One Republican leader who has allowed worsening circumstances to change his mind is Arkansas
Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who said on Tuesday he regrets signing a state law banning mask mandates earlier this year.
But unlike DeSantis, Hutchinson has the luxury of a political career that is winding down, since he is term-limited and cannot run for reelection.
A political future on the line
To make good on pre-game talk of being a top-tier GOP primary contender, DeSantis must first secure his reelection next year, one reason why his strategy on the virus is risky. If the current surge in cases and jammed hospitals in Florida is matched by a subsequent towering wave of deaths, he could be cast by rivals as a leader who knowingly let Floridians die to advance his own political career. In 2018, DeSantis only beat Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum by just over 32,400 votes, so winning a second term in Tallahassee is by no means certain, and small shifts in support could define the race.
DeSantis is arguing, however, that his approach — prioritizing vaccines for seniors — will ensure that deaths in the current Covid wave will not reach catastrophic levels. If he is right, his political strategy may work, albeit at the cost of more suffering in his state. His rhetoric alone about the pandemic is likely to endear him even further to Trump’s base, which twice drove the ex-President to fairly clear victories in Florida in 2016 and 2020, despite its reputation as a perennial knife-edge swing state.
The impression is that DeSantis thinks his more confrontational posture on the pandemic will bolster him in a future Republican primary.
At an event in Utah late last month he mocked new CDC mask guidance, for instance. His hardening of tone followed an accusation by South Dakota’s Republican
Gov. Kristi Noem — another potential 2024 contender — that some of the governors she could face in a presidential primary lacked the “grit” to face down federal health officials.
“We’ve got Republican governors across this country pretending they didn’t shut down their states; that they didn’t close their regions; that they didn’t mandate masks,” Noem said at a Conservative Political Action Conference event in Dallas last month. Her comment was a clear swipe at DeSantis and Abbott, who have been among the most unenthusiastic adherents of CDC advice, but cannot match her pandemic denialism.
The decision of DeSantis to challenge Covid protocols as the pandemic returns with a vengeance has dismayed health experts.
Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the US Food and Drug Administration vaccines advisory committee, said on CNN “Newsroom” on Tuesday that decisions by DeSantis were “inexplicable” and that he was “a friend of the virus.”
Admiral Brett Giroir, the Trump administration’s coronavirus testing czar, said on CNN’s “New Day” on Wednesday that he didn’t agree with restrictions put in place by DeSantis and Abbott on preventing school masking requirements.
“I do support a lot of what Governor DeSantis and Governor Abbott do, but I don’t align with them on this,” he said.