DeSantis pauses campaign amid Florida weather crisis, low ratings

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) has officially “paused” his campaign and returned to deal with two crises affecting his State. But that pause might be due more to his low ratings and slippage in the polls than to genuine concern.

The DeSantis pause

American Briefing and Politico tell us that DeSantis, in a news conference yesterday, announced he would stay in Florida. Florida did have a mass-murder event in Jacksonville; apparently a white shooter shot and killed three black people, then himself, near the historically black college, Edward Waters University. More pressing, Tropical Storm Idalia, which could achieve hurricane strength, is steadily approaching Florida.

But Ron DeSantis might have other reasons to stay in Florida. For one thing, his Presidential run has been controversial. Resentment against him for running for President after promising to serve out a second governor’s term, and being absent from the State while it faces crises in addition to these two, outweighs the Favorite Son advantage in his case. Furthermore, Laura Loomer charged today that the governor is “bribing” Iowa politicians for endorsements. One poll allegedly shows that the governor got a small “bump” from the August 23 debate. Worse still, Fox News gives every impression of withdrawing their support of DeSantis and supporting Vivek Ramaswamy instead.

Platform X briefly suspended the account of Never Back Down, the governor’s Presidential super-PAC, last Wednesday. Allegedly the Artificially Intelligent automatic moderation monitors flagged the account for spam. X restored the account not more than 75 minutes later.

Perspectives

This year has seen more than the usual share of tropical cyclones making landfall on both U.S. coasts. However, the usual pattern with these storms is to take on a lot of moisture from the ocean, then make landfall, weaken, and dump that moisture as rain. In the most serious event connected with these storms thus far, the Dodger Stadium parking lot retained several puddles. This happened after the rains from Hurricane Hillary, which weakened to tropical storm strength, then made landfall, bringing torrential rains. One wag swore the stadium itself had flooded, but that turned out not to be the case.

As to the Jacksonville event, Erick-Woods Erickson pointed out that several other mass shootings have occurred in other States. The attention this event got was due entirely to the respective races of shooter and targets. The other events – one in Georgia, one in Alabama – had more targets but almost no media attention.

Politico has this video showing DeSantis taking some heckling at a “vigil” for the three victims of the Jacksonville shooting. It would appear to show that local residents are not impressed, and regard their governor as an “absentee governor.”