'Culture wars are getting us nowhere': Florida lawmakers tiring of DeSantis’ 'war on woke'

09 March 2024

Ever since scuttling his presidential ambitions, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) has been slowly losing influence in the Florida legislature.

The Sunshine State's annual legislative session gaveled out this week, with several of DeSantis' major culture war priority bills failing to advance through Florida's far-right Republican supermajority legislature. The Washington Post reported that one of the two-term Florida governor's biggest obstacles was Republican state senate president Kathleen Passidomo, who declined to bring up several hot-button bills for a vote.

One of those bills would have penalized municipal officials in towns that removed Confederate monuments. One speaker at a committee hearing reportedly extolled that bill to "push white culture, white supremacy." That legislation was praised by DeSantis, who said it was "totally appropriate," and likened efforts to remove Confederate statues to a "hyper-woke 21st century test." The bill advanced through its respective committee, but Passidomo never brought it up in the full senate, calling it "so abhorrent to everybody."

Another bill that would have banned public buildings from displaying rainbow flags — as some do during June, when LGBTQ+ Pride Month is celebrated — didn't even make it past the Florida House subcommittee where it was introduced. Other culture war-related bills suffered a similar fate: Legislation that would have forced transgender Floridians to use their assigned sex at birth on their driver's licenses didn't make it, nor did a bill that would have penalized public employees from using transgender individuals' chosen pronouns. A separate "fetal personhood" bill was also killed this session.

The Post reported that the Florida governor loudly supported all of those bills as part of his "war on woke," yet despite his party having a solid 86-34 majority in the house and a 28-12 majority in the senate, he wasn't able to sign them into law this session. Democratic state senator Shevrin Jones told the Post that "a lot of [DeSantis'] influence and power died" after DeSantis suspended his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

"II think that people in Florida and across the country, including Republicans, are starting to see that the culture wars are getting us nowhere," Jones said.

Politico reported that DeSantis' grip on the legislature has waned considerably since he was swept into a second term in the 2022 election, and subsequently rammed numerous far-right bills through the statehouse in the 2023 session. Republican state representative Paula Stark remarked to the outlet that "everything was just crazy" in last year's session.

"You had all these things that everybody wanted you to stand up and support because it was a governor’s initiative … Now this session has been calmer," she said.

DeSantis' presidential campaign sputtered out after the Iowa Republican Caucuses, in which he failed to win a single one of Iowa's 99 counties despite visiting all of them ahead of the 2024 nominating contest (colloquially known as a "full Grassley"). The Florida governor spent millions of dollars courting Iowa Republicans, only to come in a distant second place to former President Donald Trump. His prolonged absence from Tallahassee during his presidential campaign angered some of his constituents — along with his campaigning against the former president.

"He backstabbed our president," GOP voter Sally Maltais told NPR in November. "And now I have no respect for DeSantis. I'm sorry. I don't."

Trump also frequently mocked DeSantis, particularly amid the so-called "bootgate" controversy in which the Florida governor was accused of wearing inserts in his boots to appear taller. A Trump campaign press release suggested DeSantis' boots "are more appropriate for America’s Next Top Model than the campaign trail."

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