Is Ron DeSantis the Republican Michael Dukakis?

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023/03/21/is-ron-desantis-the-republican-michael-dukakis/

by Bill Scher
March 21, 2023

Excerpt:

. . . DeSantis wants you to believe people are newly drawn to Florida because, under his leadership, it’s “where woke goes to die.” But it’s still the same old Florida where people go to die. (“God’s waiting room,” goes the old joke.) In 2010, 17.3 percent of Florida’s population was 65 and over. By 2021, the senior citizen share of the population had grown to 21.3 percent, while the share of people under 65 went down 2.2 percentage points. This longer-term trend has continued through DeSantis’s reign. Since 2018, the senior citizen share has gone up 0.63 percent, and for other adults, down 0.45 percent.

Even DeSantis’s claim that Californians are dramatically rushing into Florida is suspect. The Los Angeles Times recently found, “The total of all those moving from California to Florida amounted to 29,000 people, based on changes in driver’s licenses. IRS data suggest that the total might be a few thousand more.” That’s “not even one-tenth of 1 percent of California’s population of 39 million.” And it’s largely offset by Floridians who move to California: “For every six Californians who left for Florida last year, five moved into the state from Florida, according to data from Moody’s Analytics and the credit firm Equifax.” And as with Florida’s overall graying population, “Almost one-third of Californians who moved to Florida were 50 years or older, compared with about 20 percent for those moving to all other states.”

Unless younger workers relocate to Florida at a similar pace as retirees, the state’s economy will likely get squeezed. University of South Florida economist Michael Snipes told the Tampa Bay Times in December, “We have all these (older) people coming in from out of state with new income that’s been driving a lot of growth. But if you don’t have workers available to meet that growth, that’s going to put pressure (on the labor market) and cause prices to increase at a really high rate.”

If DeSantis actually cared about governing, he would put effort into making his state attractive to younger workers. But what he really cares about is pandering to rabid right-wingers in early presidential primary states. So, he cooks up culture war stunts designed to attract Fox News coverage and light up conservative social media accounts, even though that makes Florida repellent to many voters from Generations Y and Z. . . .