Opinion: Congratulations America, with Trump's victory, you're all Floridians now

[In It to Win It]

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/2024/11/06/opinion-congratulations-america-youre-all-floridians-now/76089646007/


(Archived)

A strange thing happened Tuesday night: As they handed the White House back to the nation's most notorious conman, voters across the country — in places like Arizona, Missouri, North Carolina and even Amarillo, Texas — also approved a raft of progressive measures protecting abortion rights, blocking the use of public money for private schools, and funding millions for transportation projects and affordable housing trusts. At first blush this seems incongruous, absurd: These are priorities the very people whom voters empowered will work day and night to erase. It reflects a curious mental trick, a kind of cognitive dissonance, that Floridians have perfected over more than two decades.

Florida was on the ballot Tuesday night in the sagging frame of Donald J. Trump, the aging fraudster who scratched America's lizard brain. The nation chose Florida, and in Florida, which has been under one party rule for more than 20 years, voters long ago severed the connection between politicians and the conditions of the state they live in.

This mental exercise is how, for example, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved restoring voting rights to people with past felony convictions but refused to hold accountable the politicians who swiftly legislated that popular measure into oblivion. Or how more than 57% of Florida voters on Tuesday night supported overturning a draconian six-week abortion ban owed entirely to Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump, whose Supreme Court deleted the right women previously held — two politicians to whom Florida voters nonetheless gleefully handed over power. It's also why that 57% support, a robust showing in this divided nation, was not enough to get abortion-rights protections over the finish line: The Legislature, which has long despised citizen-driven ballot measures, has made it comically difficult for voters to use direct democracy to express their will. Not that Florida voters will ever do anything about it.

Shrug. That's the Florida way. And now, it's the American way.

Donald Trump's third campaign was his most Florida

This third Trump campaign was his most Floridafied — his strangest, angriest, tawdriest, his most discombobulated. It was in every way the low-budget sequel to his more energetic 2016 run. But American voters, like Florida voters, have a kink for empowering showy ne'er do wells, and the diminished, sleepy Trump was able to get it together just well enough to perform one final time, powered by his deep offense at having to run against a Black woman. What was remarkable about Tuesday wasn't just that voters once again chose Trump: It's that they chose this clearly addled and worn version of Trump. This was a real endorsement.

[Cha]

1. Well said. And GD those that Enabled this.