No One Is Talking About What Ron DeSantis Has Actually Done to Florida

[In It to Win It]

TIME

Media coverage of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s all-but-announced candidacy for president is already in full frenzy, and so far the script is exactly as his handlers would like it to be. The governor regularly opens up new fronts in the culture wars, sowing alarm over critical race theory, transgender rights, or border policies. In response, liberal pundits fall into the trap of accentuating the very issues DeSantis has chosen to fire up his base.

Omitted from the public debate about DeSantis’s policies is almost any discussion of his actual record of governance—what exactly he has delivered to the citizens of his state, especially those without seven-figure incomes and lush investment portfolios.

Even a cursory dip into the statistics of social and economic well-being reveals that Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society.

Florida may be the place where “woke goes to die”—as DeSantis is fond of saying—but it is also where teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the nation, unemployment benefits are stingier than in any other state, and wage theft flourishes with little interference from the DeSantis administration. In 2021, DeSantis campaigned against a successful ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage, which had been stuck at $8.65 an hour. Under DeSantis’s watch, the Sunshine State has not exactly been a workers’ paradise.