Sometimes Republican, sometimes Democrat, Florida was always the most important swing state in US elections. Not anymore.
Donald Trump first and especially now the current governor, Ron DeSantis, have turned this relevant state into a Republican and conservative stronghold.
DeSantis, backed by a large majority and by his executive branch and that of the local legislature, has approved in recent months a series of laws that restrict rights and freedoms and that they have turned Florida into the greatest success and example of governance for the most ultra-conservative wing of the Republican party.
So much so that his management is the main asset and letter of introduction to compete with Trump for the Republican candidacy for the presidency in the 2024 elections.
“The governor is convinced that his successful agenda in Florida can be transformed into a successful presidential agenda. This is his bet,” Eduardo Gamarra, professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University, told BBC Mundo.
To give his first speech as a candidate for president of the United States, DeSantis chose a meeting of parents who decided to educate their children at home instead of sending them to public schools. Many of these parents have a strongly conservative ideological position.
There, two children held a blue and red flag with white letters: “Make America Florida.”
The education of children, the prohibition of what he calls “indoctrination” is one of DeSantis’s great weaponswhich feeds on the growing suspicion – fueled by the pandemic and the use of masks in class – of conservatives towards schools.
It is one of the many “culture wars” with which the governor has turned Florida – the third state with the most electoral votes in the presidential elections – into a laboratory of conservative politics in the last year.
DeSantis, who won the governorship by a narrow margin in 2018, reconfirmed it in 2022 with an overwhelming majority thanks mainly to his management of the pandemic, in which he privileged the economy over health and presented the state as the “beacon of freedom.” “. The governor even prevailed in Miami Dade County, the great Democratic and progressive stronghold.
Validated, it consolidated a conservative turn in a state in which Barack Obama won the presidential elections but in 2016 and 2020 Trump, who resides and has part of his businesses in Florida, won.
And he has done it with laws and, above all, prohibitions that make his administration an example to win the support of the Republican majority in the rest of the country, although at the moment it is Trump who leads the polls.
From the prohibition of abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy to the restriction of content taught in schools and universities, the long list of new regulations promulgated in recent months by DeSantis confirm the speed that the political turn has taken in Florida.
“DeSantis’s candidacy symbolizes that Florida has become the most reactionary law-enforcement state in the country,” says critic William Smith, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Miami.
“Florida is experiencing a shift unprecedented in modern political history,” DeSantis boasts in his latest The Courage To Be Free book.
And this transformation is based on some of the prohibitions that we count below.
miscarriage and heartbeat
Milo Evan Dorbert was born on March 3. He died that same day. In the 16th week of her pregnancy, Deborah Dorbert learned that Milo would not live. Potter’s syndrome would not allow him to expand his lungs or live outside the womb.
While Florida law allows pregnant women to abort for fatal fetal anomalies, fear of jail time for performing an abortion has set in among local doctors.
Because Milo Evan’s heart was still beating, no doctor dared to terminate the pregnancy, Deborah told The Washington Post.
In the last year, DeSantis went from banning abortions after 24 weeks to 15, and then from 15 weeks to just 6. Thus, Florida became one of the most restrictive states in the country regarding access to voluntary termination of pregnancy. Abortion, already in the hands of the states after the Supreme Court ruled a year ago that it is not a right in the country, is one of the great issues that divide Republicans and Democrats.
DeSantis also signed the Heartbeat Protection Act, which prohibits abortions if the fetus has a detectable heartbeat. He seeks to prevent what the Florida government calls “infanticide.”
We enacted the Heartbeat Protection Act to promote life,” DeSantis said.
After her son’s death, Deborah has not returned to her job. She is battling anxiety and depression brought on by the tragically expected death of her son less than two hours after her birth.
75% of state residents oppose the six-week ban, including 61% of Republicans, according to data from the University of North Florida.
“Don’t Say Gay”
“Kill all the gays.” The homophobic message appeared on a traffic sign in the early hours of the morning in Lake Nona, a low-rise town in Orlando.
Almost at the same time, gay activists from Saint Cloud, Orlando, an hour away from Lake Nona, announced that they would cancel the events planned for Pride Day on June 10.
“This decision has not been made lightly. We have been working hard to plan this event for months. However, of late we have identified a number of factors that make it unsafe to hold the event at this time,” he wrote. on social networks one of its organizers.
What happened in Orlando, where in 2016 there was a mass shooting at the Pulse gay club in which 49 people died, reflects the fear of this community.
The spearhead of the governor’s policy on this issue is HB 1557, called by its critics “Don’t say gay” (“Do not say gay”), which restricts sex education in schools, the use of inclusive language and limits the use of bathrooms for boys and girls with the sex with which they were biologically born.
“There may be no classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity,” says the rule, which empowers parents to determine how to talk about sexual diversity to their children and prohibits teachers deal with those issues.
DeSantis defends it as a way to avoid “indoctrination” and to leave these types of issues in the hands of parents and not schools.
“Parental rights have come under increasing attack across the country, but in Florida we stand up for the rights of parents and the vital role they play in their children’s education,” DeSantis said.
The Florida Department of Education last December extended the application of this rule to the libraries that teachers have in their classrooms, which ended up removing some books from schools.
A few weeks ago, the governor also signed a new law that complicates special healthcare for transgender people and prevents public entities from spending state funds on gender reassignment programs.
DeSantis also chose to rival the “progressive” sectors he believes have hitherto dominated Florida’s state schools and universities.
For DeSantis, “dangerous political and social activism” is promoted at universities.
For this reason, the governor signed legislation that, according to his critics, imposes a gag on the teaching of certain subjects of American history, forcing it to be done along conservative lines.
“There is fear. There is a deep feeling that academic freedom of expression is at risk, particularly for those who teach social or political issues,” Professor Gamarra, from Florida International University, told BBC Mundo.
“All discipline has been seen under the magnifying glass of the new dogma of the Commissioner of Education and the governor. At the same time, we already have several cases of teachers who have either gone to other states or who express their intention to do so,” says Gamarra.
Florida for Americans
DeSantis also presents himself as a standard-bearer for the fight against illegal immigrationdespite the fact that his adversaries assure that putting more obstacles to the undocumented affects the economy of Florida, whose labor market employs hundreds of thousands of them.
A few months ago, DeSantis was the protagonist of a great national controversy when his government decided to transfer dozens of undocumented migrants from the Texas border to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, a destination for wealthy Democrats in the northeast of the country.
The intention, he said, was to force leftists to live with the consequences of not adequately controlling the country’s borders, something of which he accuses the federal government of Democratic President Joe Biden. And now He also passed a strict new law that makes Florida especially hostile territory for the undocumented..
“I am not going into Florida. Neither is my truck. Let’s not take loads to Florida, let’s see what it feels like, in support of the immigrant. What they are doing in Florida is not right,” Manuel said last week inside his vehicle Sánchez, a large load transport driver.
In recent weeks, dozens of truck drivers have called out protests against the new immigration law DeSantis signed into law in May, which will go into effect on July 1, 2023.
This legislation imposes, among other things, penalties for those who employ undocumented aliens, in addition to requiring hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status before providing medical care.
For the Florida government, this new chain of regulations serves “to combat the dangerous effects of illegal immigration caused by the reckless border policies of the federal government.”
In this way, DeSantis seeks to imitate Trump’s characteristically harsh immigration position and place himself in front of the government of President Biden, who will seek re-election and which DeSantis wants to face in 2024 with the intention of making the United States look like Florida.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-65817436, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-08 21:10:33
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