DeSantis Reelected in Landslide, Scores Biggest GOP Win in Florida in 20 Years

0
(Ron DeSantis Twitter profile)

Florida’s incumbent Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has won landslide reelection in Tuesday’s midterms.

He surpassed Democrat opponent Charlie Crist by almost 20 points, and scored the first GOP win in populous, left-leaning Miami-Dade County since 2002.

DeSantis Conquers Decades-Old Democrat Fortress

44-year-old DeSantis delivered the most categorical Republican victory in the 2022 midterm election on Tuesday, after he defeated Democrat challenger Charlie Crist by a 19.4-point lead.

With 99% of the votes counted as of Wednesday morning, DeSantis received 59.4% of the popular vote, or almost 4,600,000 voters vs. 40% for Crist, or nearly 3,100,000 votes.

Florida’s incumbent GOP Governor also made history by becoming the first Republican in 20 hears to win the Miami-Dade County, long considered a Democratic Party stronghold, NBC News reported.

Florida’s most populous county, with 2.7 million and a very large Hispanic and Latino population, was last won for the Republicans by Jeb Bush in 2022.

On Tuesday, however, DeSantis managed to score a lead of nine percentage point over the Democrat challenger.

Race Called Early…

The incumbent’s advantage over Crist was so decisive that The Associated Press called Florida’s gubernatorial race in his favor shortly after 8 pm on Tuesday night, an hour after the polls in the state had closed at 7 pm EST.

At that moment, DeSantis’ victory was projected with a lead of at least 17 points.

His rout of his Democrat opponent has led commentaries to abound as to whether he may use it as a springboard for announcing a 2024 candidacy for President of the United States.

For the time, DeSantis, who served in the US House of Representatives for three terms before becoming Florida’s governor in 2019, has never even hinted at a presidential run.

(Fox News video snapshot)

‘Florida Held the Line’

The new-old Republican GOP governor of Florida delivered Tuesday evening a triumphant victory speech that dwelled on the coronavirus pandemic and culture war battles he fought during his first term.

“Florida held the line,” DeSantis declared, as he lamented how “so many other jurisdictions” throughout the United States allowed the liberty-focused American way of life to wane because of the COVID-19 lockdowns, mask mandates and other administrative excesses.

Saying he’d picked “facts” instead of “fear,” the reelected governor stressed with respect to his administration’s resistance to wokeism, transgenderism and other Marxist-Communist sub-ideologies that have thrived on Joe Biden’s watch as the radical progressivist left conquered the Democratic Party from within.

The left wants “indoctrination” while he wants “education,” instead DeSantis said.

In his address, he argued that the “overwhelming support” for the Republican Party from the people of Florida had gone beyond simply an election victory.

It has “rewritten the political map” of America, the governor said.

He seemed to mean in particular the conquest of former Democrat fortress such as Miami-Dade County, and the fact that a growing number of Hispanic and Latino Americans are starting to support the Republican Party.

DeSantis’ nine-point in Miami-Dade is considered particularly significant because in 2020, the county with a large Hispanic population was won by Joe Biden by a seven-point margin, and in her failed presidential bid in 2016, Hillary Clinton won it by a whopping 23 points.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR