The author argues that Florida is struggling in many ways recently. Ron DeSantis’ handling of the COVID pandemic led to many preventable deaths in Florida, contradicting early articles praising his response. Now DeSantis is known more for his anti-gay and anti-science stances rather than effective governance. His campaign for president seems doomed to fail due to his lack of charisma and poor performance as governor. The author expresses sympathy for Florida residents dealing with the fallout of climate change, disasters, and poor leadership.
Sympathy? They voted for this, twice.
Every group their administration is oppressing lives in the state as well, as well as plenty of innocent people who don’t belong to those groups. They’re all actual human beings living their lives and suffering under a government that actively targets them.
I’m sick of people damning those of us who live places with shitty governments for what they do. So many are assholes to people from the south or the midwest, when we’re the ones who suffer the most from their bullshit. Everywhere you look there’s some smug liberal talk show host or internet commenter cracking jokes about the stupidity of the people they claim to care about and how we’re all cousin-fuckers who deserve no sympathy. Instead of trying to feel superior over us because you know our states suck, have a damn heart.
35% of the population turned out to vote. Of that 35, 59% voted for desantis, or 21% of the total population. A minority of people decided for the rest of us. I voted, and got out to encourage others to vote. Attended protests, events and generally tried to be active. Florida is a big state and most of us, despite the low turnout, didn’t and don’t want this man running our government. I hate what he’s doing to the state I was born and raised in, I’m being forced out of my home by inflation and growing hostility to my values. Say what you want about our government, but there are a lot of us who didn’t ask for this and tried out hardest to avoid it.
So
65%60.35% [edited to account for the provided evidence of voter suppression] of Floridians weren’t sufficiently motivated to try to change the government after living through a first DeSantis term.Yes, yes, I know, “voter suppression”, “disenfranchised”, etc. I’m sorry if I have a hard time believing that 65% of FL really super-duper wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so by systemic corruption; that would put Florida in the same ballpark as Somalia in terms of governmental autocracy.
At some point, we just have to cut our losses and scram. That’s why I left Arkansas, and am now squished into a tiny, overpriced, neglected little apartment with a roommate in a blue state, slowly working on replacing all my stuff.
you live in the United States, where an unelected panel of partisans make binding law on completely baseless grounds all the time and where universal voter enfranchisement happened so recently there are living people who could not vote because of their skin tone. i don’t know why you out of hand dismiss this as a possibility.
Because there’s no evidence.
“65% of all the eligible voters in Florida were prevented from voting due to direct governmental interference and extreme voter suppression” is a fantastic claim. One might even call it an extraordinary claim. One for which I would expect to see some fairly extraordinary evidence. I can’t just wake up in the morning and decide to believe something because it fits with my preconceived biases, especially not something directly involving almost 14 million people.
Are you actually expecting me to believe that 14 million people tried to show up at the polls and were turned away, without any evidence whatsoever? That’s a Q-level conspiracy.
beyond felony disenfranchisement, Florida has legally prosecuted voters for crimes they did not commit, which the state cannot prove they committed, and which the state would have “facilitated” them doing by giving them false information and is currently targeting voter registration groups for facilitating nonexistent voter fraud
from felony disenfranchisement alone, Florida legally disenfranchises 15% of its total black population and approximately one million (possibly more, we don’t have exact numbers and that’s by design) otherwise eligible voters statewide—an estimated 10% of the otherwise-eligible citizen population. turnout in 2022 was 7,796,916 voters.
1 million voters is just under
half of onefive percent of registered voters. That’s a far cry from 65%.Edited to correct my stupid math.
Edit 2: Edited my original post in this thread to reflect the provided data.
the state of Florida: extrajudicially prosecutes voters; arbitrarily fines voter groups; disenfranchises at least a million people in contravention of an overwhelmingly-supported referendum to legally enfranchise them
you: this isn’t autocracy because that’s only 5% of the total population of Florida (even though the affected demographics are disproportionately pro-Democratic and that’s the point of the disenfranchisement), there isn’t systemic corruption (even though the state of Florida is explicitly attempting to override the will of the people), Floridians did this to themselves (even though they’ve done everything in their power to not be run by inhuman ghoul Ron DeSantis)
is this seriously what we’re arguing? because if you’re going to do this i’d rather you be honest with yourself and just say you don’t care what happens to the millions of people in Florida who fought against and continue to fight against this despite people like you writing them off as basically subhuman.
42.2%, or 3 million people, didn’t. You always have to remember that there are literally millions of people who desperately didn’t want this.
6 million registered voters didn’t even bother. One could argue that they’re just fine with, if not enthusiastic about, the current state of affairs. 4 million votes for, 3 million against, 6 million “Meh.”
You’re missing a whole lot of people who don’t approve but are not served by the alternatives enough to get out there. You may disagree and say they should just vote for the lesser evil, but we see time and time again that just presenting people lesser evils is not effective. They need to have a positive reason to go vote FOR someone, not just negative ones to vote AGAINST someone.
This is just an extended rationalization for apathy. I’m sorry to say, but government is boring. Politicians are boring. An exciting politician is probably trying to sell you a line of unrealistic, unachievable bullshit, and in the system the US has, by the time it gets down to the general election, your choices are Donkey, Elephant, and several flavors of Don’t Care. You can have more excitement and a greater sense of choice in the primaries, but voting twice in a year is too much work for even many ‘political’ people.
If positive messaging got people to the polls, I guarantee you would see positive campaigning: even 10% of the non-voters would be enough to swing any competitive race.
That’s absurd. Political apathy doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Nearly everyone who doesn’t vote will tell you it’s because both of their realistic options are out to fuck them, and in most locales they’re right. Give them something to hang onto, have a candidate that offers them literally anything other than not being the other guy or not actively making things worse, and a whole lot more will bite. You might think they’re wrong for having that apathy, but to be completely honest what you think about them doesn’t matter. What matters is getting people moving.
The reason they don’t campaign like that is obvious: the things the people want are not what the ruling class will allow. It’s foolish to think that politicians are simply optimizing for what gives them the best chance of winning. Those sorts of considerations only happen within the bounds of what their backers allow.
I’ve been registered to vote in blue and red states and the barriers to vote in red states are so much higher. Lines are longer, in less convenient locations, registration has to be done earlier, and sometime they might not count your vote or purge a voter directory and you have to check yourself to see if that the case so you can correct it. It’s more than people can’t be arsed to vote; it is intentionally made as inconvenient as possible.
Vote by mail?
What is that? /s
They’ve made everything else as inconvenient as possible, that extends to vote-by-mail too. To request a mail ballot in Florida, you literally have to call, mail, or fax an individual person. How fast do those requests get processed? How often do they get denied for BS reasons? What happens if the person’s voter registration gets purged between the request for the ballot and receiving the ballot? How often do mail-in ballots just ‘disappear’?
There’s just so many problems with mail-in that it doesn’t feel like a sustainable, reliable replacement for in-person voting.