RON DESANTIS is never the most charming man in a room but he is usually the most formidable. Speaking at a political club in Naples in February, Florida’s governor reflected on his two terms. “I sat there on the first day as governor, I looked around the empty office and I was just like, listen I don’t know what SOB is going to succeed me but they are not going to have a lot to do because I’m going to get all the meat off the bone that I can,” he said. Nearly eight years later, as Mr DeSantis prepares to leave office, he reckons he has delivered. “That’s what we’ve done.”
On August 18th voters in Florida will choose the Democrat and Republican who will battle to become that “SOB” in November’s general election. Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman, leads his primary opponents by more than 30 points in the polls and is expected to win his party’s nomination handily. If elected governor in November, as pollsters expect he will, Mr Donalds will inherit a state that looks little like it did a decade ago. What was once America’s quintessential swing state has become a bastion of Republican power.
That is in part due to Donald Trump, who has chosen Floridians as some of his top advisers and made his Mar-a-Lago resort the White House’s unofficial southern annex. (The president even oversaw the first air strikes on Iran from a makeshift “situation room” there.) Mr DeSantis and Mr Trump have had a tumultuous relationship, not least because the governor had the gall to run for president in 2024—Mr Trump dismissed him as “Ron DeSanctimonious”. Still, the rivalry has not stopped Florida from becoming the beating heart of MAGA-land. While Mr Trump has raised Florida’s profile, Mr DeSantis has transformed the state itself.
Before the covid-19 pandemic, Democratic voters outnumbered Republican ones, barely, and elections in Florida were nail-biters. When Democratic governors enforced restrictive covid policies in 2020, that began to change. Mr DeSantis declared Florida open for business. In just two years Florida gained nearly 1m net residents, at a pace of 1,500 a day.
Remaining open, particularly in a state with so many old people, had a cost. During a wave of covid from July to November 2021, Florida’s per-capita death rate was more than triple the national average. But Mr DeSantis faced little lasting backlash. Most new residents were registered Republicans in the habit of voting. The state’s Democrats atrophied, failing to recruit candidates or attract donors. In a sign of the party’s decline, local party leaders replaced the Democrats’ familiar donkey with a panther, meant to project a new fighting spirit but soon mocked for being an endangered species. In 2022 Mr DeSantis was re-elected by 19 points, the biggest margin for a Republican in state history, and flipped Miami-Dade County, a blue bulwark. His party swept every statewide office and won a supermajority in the legislature.
One-party rule unleashed a policy blitz. Mr DeSantis enacted a six-week abortion ban, prohibited transgender medical care for children, created the biggest school-voucher programme in America and kneecapped state universities by rewriting curricula and weakening tenure protections. After Mr DeSantis signed a law dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” that banned teachers from discussing gender and sexuality, Disney came out against it. Rather than cave to one of the state’s largest employers, Mr DeSantis revoked Disney’s special tax treatment. The fight became a cautionary tale for big firms across the country, whose public statements on social issues became suddenly more muted.
To cement the state’s new political identity, Mr DeSantis rejected the legislature’s congressional map and drew his own, sacked two elected Democratic prosecutors and called special sessions to force lawmakers to act on his priorities. To shield against legal challenges he remade the judiciary, appointing six of the Florida Supreme Court’s seven justices and nearly 200 appellate and local judges. Lawmakers did not always welcome his demands, but the governor was quick to veto their projects or back primary challengers when they crossed him. “DeSantis is the 800-pound gorilla in Florida,” says Nick Iarossi, a Republican strategist who worked on the governor’s campaigns. “No one wants to be on his bad side.”
The disposition that made him effective in Florida became a liability when Mr DeSantis ran for president in 2024. At meet-and-greets with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, he came across as prickly and awkward. Back home, however, he remained a success. Other Republican states wanted to emulate his policies and Florida itself thrived. This year the state’s $1.8trn economy became the world’s 14th largest, surpassing that of Australia and Mexico. During Mr DeSantis’s tenure GDP growth outpaced the national average (see chart). Big firms such as Citadel and Palantir moved their headquarters to Florida. Mr DeSantis leaves office with an approval rating of just over 50%—higher than Mr Trump’s in the state.
Mr Donalds is nothing like Mr DeSantis. A congressman raised by a single mother in Brooklyn, he was arrested for possessing marijuana as a teenager. His life turned a corner, he says, after he committed himself to Jesus in the car park of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. He had a career in banking, then was elected to Congress. When insurgent House Republicans moved to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker in 2023, they rallied around the affable Mr Donalds, elevating him as a national MAGA figure. Mr Trump is a fan and backs his bid for governor. “RUN, BYRON, RUN!”, he wrote on social media in February of last year.
Although Mr DeSantis quipped that Mr Donalds “hasn’t been a part of any of the victories that we’ve had here over the Left”, the congressman only has nice words in return. “He’s done a phenomenal job,” he told voters at a livestock arena in Ocala in early August. On policy, he says, there is no daylight between them. His only public break with Mr DeSantis came over revisions to Florida’s African American history curriculum, which asserted that slaves “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit”—a claim Mr Donalds, a rare black Republican, called “wrong”.
The next governor will have to focus more on costs than culture. Since 2020 Florida’s home prices and insurance premiums have surged by 50% and 75%, respectively, faster than in most other states. Incomes have only risen by 30%. That is creating a crunch for ordinary people. Population growth is dramatically slowing. Mr Donalds says “affordability” is his top priority. Governors across the country say the same, and are mulling policies to bring costs down. If Mr Donalds can show them how, his effect on Florida could surpass even that of Mr DeSantis.
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