DeSantis’ Policies Are Terrible for Moms. He Convinced Them Otherwise.

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Fear triumphed over facts.

On Election Day, the much-hyped red wave didn’t crest quite as high as some polls predicted it would, with Democrats scoring key victories in several states. Yet it was far from a total wash for Republicans—and in a few places, they made historic advances. In Florida, for instance, incumbent Governor (and likely presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis crushed Democratic opponent Charlie Crist, winning the Republican vote even in traditionally deep blue counties.

The forces behind DeSantis’ victory are many and complex. The fact that he was an incumbent naturally gave him an edge. In addition, he spent much of the last four years positioning himself as the more-MAGA-than-Trump candidate. He jeered at the Biden administration, railed against pandemic protections, and made an over-the-top and roundly criticized show of cracking down on migrants from the southern border (who were from Texas, not Florida). With these strategies, he has broadened his Republican base and made inroads into previously Democratic-leaning blocs, including Latin Americans and millennial and Gen-Z Floridians.

But another group of Florida voters he has strategically cultivated may have been especially significant. In the online Florida politics journal Sayfie Review, political analyst Susan McManus noted that in the last year, more than twice as many Florida women have switched parties from Democrat to Republican than the reverse—some 51,000 in the former category, compared to 20,000 in the latter. Florida’s First Lady Casey DeSantis boasted last week that 1.1 million women had signed on to her Mamas for DeSantis campaign group. “If that number’s correct,” says Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, “that’s pretty impressive.” Especially considering the fact that by many measures—maternal and child health, family leave, and pay equity, to name but a few—life for women and children in Florida is not going particularly well. Ron DeSantis has managed to convince women that his brand of family values is good for them—despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

A central—if not the central—part of DeSantis’ approach has been to cater to the growing number of women who have demonstrated their support for what they call parents’ rights. The sheer numbers involved in this movement are difficult to estimate, but the 1.1 million Floridian women who reportedly signed on to Mamas for DeSantis suggests a critical mass. The organizing principle behind this movement is to attack public schools for indoctrinating children into a progressive worldview by teaching about institutional racism and sexual and gender identity.

While these ideas took root before the pandemic, the movement accelerated when parents protested school closures and then mask mandates for students and teachers. Since then, parents’ rights advocates have also vowed to keep schools from mandating Covid vaccines and mobilized to run for and radicalize school boards. DeSantis passed several laws around parents’ rights signature issues—most notably, the “Don’t Say Gay” law strictly limited how teachers can discuss sexual orientation and gender identity; another of his measures bans Covid vaccine requirements at schools. He made the unusual move of endorsing school board candidates—of the 30 parents’ rights candidates he backed, 24 won their races.

This summer, I attended the annual conference of the parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty, where DeSantis gave the keynote address. I watched as the moms waved “Mamas for DeSantis” signs and whooped when he referred to Biden as “Brandon blundering around every time you go get gas.” During his speech, he portrayed Florida as the last bastion of parental freedom. “We’ve had families move across the country,” he boasted, “because they wanted to make sure that their kids wouldn’t be denied an education based on whether or not they took an mRNA vaccine for their minor.”

But what benefits are those families actually receiving when they move to Florida? The state doesn’t offer any parental leave beyond the federally required 12 weeks of job security. Its Medicaid income cutoff is downright Draconian—a family’s income must be 30 percent of the federal poverty level, currently $26,500 for a family of four. Florida households receiving SNAP benefits get less than the national average. It’s one of only a handful of states that do not provide extra funding to schools with large populations of students from low-income families. A 2021 report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation ranked Florida a mediocre 35th in children’s wellbeing—it found that kids in the Sunshine State were substantially less likely than the national average to have parents with secure employment, to have health insurance, and to graduate from high school on time.

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