Fresh off having his clock cleaned by Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is still seeking attention with his new “Don’t Allow Florida to Become San Francisco” campaign.
You can certainly argue that failed 2024 presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ran the worst campaign in the history of presidential politics. Between he and his Super PACs, they spent $170 million on DeSantis’s campaign for president. But DeSantis dropped out after just one Iowa caucus, in which he received 23,420 votes. Several media organizations did the math and pointed out that means DeSantis spent a staggering $7,000 for each vote he got.
So maybe that obsession with calling out San Francisco did not work well for DeSantis. But in a furious bid for relevance, DeSantis had a press conference Monday at a dais with a sign reading “Don’t Allow Florida to Become San Francisco.” The press conference was on the seemingly unrelated matter of security measures over the upcoming Spring Break crowds coming to Florida.
"I mean, you look at places like San Francisco where you can rob the stores blind and they don't do anything. I've met people who've moved to Miami Beach from San Francisco who had their homes broken into and the perpetrators weren't prosecuted, even though they were caught, they weren't prosecuted,” DeSantis told reporters Monday, according to CBS News. “How's this supposed to be happening? People are, sometimes when they're charged with crimes, they just get released back onto the street. It's like a revolving door.”
He wasn’t done with San Francisco there, and appeared to make a dig at his junior varsity foe, California Governor Gavin Newsom.
"We're the third most populous state in the nation, but we don't have any of the 10 highest homeless for cities. Those are primarily congregated on the West Coast, places like LA, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, even Denver as you get into the Rockies, of course, New York City has that," he said of his state of Florida."We had over the last 10 years, homelessness has gone down in Florida, it's gone up in some of these other states.”
Okay, yes, homelessness in Florida is down in Florida compared to 2014. But it is still increasing, in a way about which Ron DeSantis is not being honest. The Florida Council on Homelessness noted a few months back that “over the past five years, Florida has seen an 9% increase in the rate of Floridians experiencing ‘literal homelessness’ (28,328 to 30,809 individuals from 2019 to 2023)."
And that date range starting in 2019 is significant. Why? Because Ron DeSantis was sworn in as governor of Florida on January 9, 2019.
Image: MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA - FEBRUARY 05: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a news conference on February 05, 2024 in Miami Beach, Florida. Among other topics, he addressed the upcoming influx of spring breakers and assured the public that law enforcement officials and resources were available to maintain order if needed. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
