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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
No one shows up to primaries
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.