Governor DeSantis Passed the Hurricane Ian Test

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, October 06, 2022

 

At this point, it’s fair to conclude that Ron DeSantis has passed the first — and key — test of any Florida governor, and successfully led a statewide response to a major hurricane. Since Hurricane Ian hit, the mainstream press has cycled through story after story in an attempt to find major fault with Florida’s response, but nothing much has stuck. This is because Florida’s response — like the Biden administration’s response — has been excellent. Yesterday, Joe Biden told reporters, “I think he’s done a good job.” Around the same time, Donald Trump was saying from Miami: “God bless our governor and all of the mayors. They’re all working so hard, and they’re heroes, and we’re going to get through this in Florida.” Bipartisanship!

 

Earlier in the week, there was a brief attempt to hit DeSantis for his defense of Lee County, which had declined to evacuate its residents early and ended up being hit hard. (The core criticism was of Lee County not of DeSantis, but DeSantis defended Lee County, which is heavily Republican.) By the weekend, though, the sting had been taken out of that one by Biden’s own FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell, who told This Week that, “just 72 hours before landfall, the Fort Myers and Lee County area were not even in the cone of the hurricane. And as it continued to move south, the local officials immediately — as soon as they knew that they were in that threat zone — made the decisions to evacuate and get people to safety.”

 

Florida elections are never a given, but, to my eyes, the political dynamic here looks a little like a reverse-Hurricane Sandy. In 2012, Chris Christie said nice things about President Obama when Obama visited New Jersey in the storm’s wake. As an outsider who (correctly) didn’t want to politicize the storm, all Mitt Romney could do was watch. Ten years later, President Biden is saying nice things about Governor DeSantis, and all DeSantis’s opponent, Charlie Crist, can do is watch. As it happens, Crist never actually had to deal with a hurricane while he was governor of Florida, so anything he says on the topic would ring rather hollow. Smartly, he’s kept quiet.

 

Prior to the hurricane’s arrival, I said on The Editors podcast that one couldn’t really benefit from a solid response to a hurricane; one could only be hurt by a bad response. Having watched things unfold over the last couple of weeks, I’m now not sure that’s true. Per Marc Caputo over at NBC:

 

DeSantis’s 52% to 41% advantage in the Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy survey comes as Floridians began receiving vote-by-mail ballots across the state as it recovers from the ravages of Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in the southwest of the peninsula and exited its northeast quadrant last week.

 

The poll was completed Sept. 28, just as the storm struck and after DeSantis received wall-to-wall media coverage ahead of the hurricane’s landfall. Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker said the exposure fortified DeSantis’s standing with voters overall, with 55% approving of the job he’s doing compared to 42% who disapprove.

 

Competence matters.