DeSantis' policies wound Florida's economy as conventioneers flee
Friday, July 07, 2023 at 5:26:54p PDT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...ida-s-economy-as-conventioneers-flee#comments
(Keep on laughing, Mini Blubber Boy, NICE campaign you're running there, lol)
Florida has one thing going for it. People want to go there. From 2020 to 2022, some 622,476 Americans left their home states to settle in the Sunshine State. In total numbers, Florida outpaced Texas (475,252), North Carolina (211,867), and Arizona (182,362). And it ranked fourth in net immigration rate based on population, with 29 new residents per 1,000 existing residents — behind Idaho (48), Montana (36), and South Carolina (32).
Florida’s Republican government will claim credit for the inflow. Why not? It is good politics. However, what role politicians play in a state's economic success or failure is hard to say. Regardless, Ron DeSantis will take any statistic that reflects well on Florida and monotonically explain it was all due to him.
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Disinterested parties have a different view. It will take time to try and tease out the effects of the wannabe President DeSantis’s embrace of the dark side - for some reason, the Boy Blunder has decided to run to the right of Trump by trying to ride nihilism to the White House - but whatever the extent, it will be negative.
His strategy is a double failure. It has not improved his poll numbers. And anecdotally, at least, it has polished the state’s reputation for insanity. While this may appeal to local conservatives, it is a tough sell for organizations representing people across the political spectrum.
Professional groups are rejecting Florida as a convention destination. According to the tourism promotion group Visit Lauderdale, more than half a dozen organizations planning conventions in Broward County recently changed their minds.
According to the organization, one of these groups was the Supreme Council of America Inc., Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite Masons. They canceled their meeting, planned for August next year, along with 855 hotel rooms. The state has also lost the 2024 National Family and Community Engagement and Community Schools Conference — with a concomitant loss of more than 2,000 hotel bookings.
According to the tourist bureau:
Stacy Ritter, President of Visit Lauderdale, pointed out some financial truths, although she seemed to blame the skittish organizations for the revenue hit.
I suspect Ritter is a DeSantis voter in denial. The facts are obvious, but she cannot mention the cause by name.
The American Specialty Toy Retailing Association had planned a 3,000-person conference in 2026 but will instead head to Milwaukee. Spokesperson Beth Miller cited the “unfriendly political environment in Florida” and added,
Will things become less polarizing soon? Probably not. DeSantis will remain the state’s Governor, thanks to a compliant legislature that changed the law to allow him to stay in the position while running for President. Luckily for the state, he is term-limited and will be gone in 2026 — unless the state Republicans change that too.
Even if they do not, another soulless bigot could well replace DeSantis, so there would not be any noticeable change. And DeSantis, in cahoots with a compliant legislature and a conservative state Supreme Court, is lengthening the odds of a successful Democratic resurgence by gerrymandering the election map, gutting a proposition that restored voting rights to ex-felons, and terrifying minority voters. Although, a federal district court has put a hold, for now, on the election suppression law.
The damage DeSantis’s policies on abortion, LGBTQ issues, CRT, and censorship have caused in the short run are dwarfed by the potential long-term effects that Republican policies have on climate change. The state is a hurricane magnet. And with a 1,350-mile-long coastline and a maximum elevation of 345 feet (imagine a 100-meter track upright) it is the poster child for rising sea levels.
Worst of all is the joyful absolutism of Florida Republicans. It is not enough for them to ruin lives, restrict the vote, and raise ignorant kids, they do it with no acknowledgment that their policies hurt people. They portray Democrats, even conservative corporate Democrats, not as political opponents but as grooming pedophiles with a taste for genital mutilation, Satan, and Stalinism. Their hyperbole leaves decent people, some even conservatives, wondering how people get to be such shits.
These smug sadists will not even acknowledge that their policies may have something to do with national organizations looking elsewhere. A DeSantis spokesperson exemplified this by saying the convention cancelations were “nothing more than a media-driven stunt.” This misdirection may sound good to the lizard brain, but it makes no sense.
