Ron DeSantis,  the current governor of Florida, is a fascinating person to look at and has been making the news a lot recently. He is one of the bigwigs in the Republican party and is thought to be the best chance to beat Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary. He won his second term during the 2022 midterms by a sizable margin, receiving 59% of the vote to Democrat Charlie Crist’s 19%. Before this election, Florida was considered to be a swing state. When DeSantis first got elected, he won by just 2%, but in this most recent election, he won by 19%! That is huge; that change does not usually happen in 20 years, let alone in the span of just four. DeSantis was able to win by a significant margin during the midterms when Trump’s main candidates did not do a very good job. After the midterms, DeSantis started to be seen as the Republicans’ best chance to beat Trump and reclaim the Republican Party from his influence.

DeSantis has tried to brand Florida as the place that woke goes to die; he is one of the republicans that is fighting the culture war the hardest. He has tried to brand himself as the politically incorrect candidate that embraces his political incorrectness because he believes the democrats have taken wokeness to an extreme and are overly sensitive. So DeSantis is trying to push back against that narrative and say that it is okay to say “non [politically correct] things”. DeSantis has made his beliefs clear by creating laws that directly fight against the more progressive social issues,  creating laws like the Don’t Say Gay Law to try to keep the topics of LGBTQ out of the school system, while also attempting to restrict what can be taught in all Florida schools, including the state’s liberal universities. He has also been pushing laws to try to restrict abortion in the state of Florida. DeSantis is trying to restrict the books that can be read in schools in the state as well. DeSantis has also been recently fighting against Disney and trying to make it so that they can not govern themselves. 

I think that DeSantis will be announcing whether or not he will run for president in the next  three weeks or so. I think that if he does not declare in that time then he will have missed his window and won’t succeed in the election.