U.S. Congressman Ron DeSantis of Florida speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Courtesy of Gage Skidmore
By Dylan Hart
It’s election season, which means we are under attack by America’s greatest threat: political ads on TV.
Perhaps no election will produce as brutal commercial breaks as 2016’s presidential boxing match, but the biennial barrage of political advertising isn’t going anywhere soon.
However, one candidate has utterly confused me with his advertising campaign: Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis.
I’m not talking about the simultaneously hilarious and terrifying TV spots where DeSantis indoctrinates his young daughter into some sort of President Donald Trump cult and directs her to build a border wall out of foam bricks, although I think that is incredibly concerning and bewildering as well.
What really bothers me is DeSantis’ odd environmental platform.
DeSantis has been running TV ads that promote his conservationist stance and pose him as “standing up to the special interests to clean up our waterways,” despite refusing to call himself a “climate change believer.”
But his voting record has been less than stellar on the issue. He has a 2 percent lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters, who rate politicians on their environmental voting record. He’s par for the course as far as the Republican party goes, voting hard against the Environmental Protection Agency and for industries like coal and fossil fuels.
I think one reason for DeSantis’ environmentalist push is that conservation of the environment is particularly popular in Florida because of our unique geographic and natural features.
With the Everglades in the Southwest, beaches surrounding our peninsula and waterways flowing through the center of our state, Florida has a strong identity as a nature lover’s state, thanks in part to activists like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who actually defended the Everglades with all she had.
But tied to that identity is Florida’s largest industry: tourism. When snowbirds and spring breakers alike flock to our state to lounge on our beaches and maybe see a few alligators, it’s no wonder that even those who would ordinarily fight conservation are pushing to protect the environment in this state.
Many here still remember ecological disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Because of this, it’s no surprise that DeSantis voted for a bill to prevent offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. But the same day, DeSantis voted for a bill allowing drilling in the Arctic Ocean, about as far away from Florida as you can get without leaving the continent.
His few other pro-environmental votes relate to flood insurance, farming and, for some reason, a singular EPA spending bill, despite attacking it relentlessly before and since.
I don’t mean to say that protecting Florida’s economic interests through environmentalism is a bad thing. It’s certainly a way to kill two birds with one stone (okay, maybe a bad idiom to use here, but you get the point).
My concern is that DeSantis is completely disingenuous. As soon as there is no Floridian economic interest in protecting the environment, he and his party will try their hardest to exploit it for all it’s worth and destroy a lot of it in the process.
Florida isn’t going to stop getting hit by ecological disasters anytime soon, and our current issue with red tide is a perfect opportunity for DeSantis to feign concern about the issue –– it’s a situation where the average Floridian actually has their everyday life affected.
Another reason for this confusing conservationist push is that it will give some leeway to Republican voters closer to the center without really compromising anyone on the extreme right end.
DeSantis can say he’s a conservationist who will fight for Florida’s interests on an airboat in the Everglades, and then turn and wink at his anti-environment support base to let them know nothing is really going to change.
The campaign is really just a push to grab up the votes of those who won’t do their research and will just take commercials at face value. It gives talking points to die-hard supporters without actually doing anything of substance, and it lets people who are on the fence say “At least he loves the environment!”
We saw a lot of this sort of thing in the 2016 election, with DeSantis’ close friend Trump pledging to be pro-LGBT and then immediately surrounding himself with shockingly homophobic figures like Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions, while doing nothing to offset their appointments. It makes a good sound bite to rub in the faces of naysayers, but it’s not worth anything more than that.
Essentially, what we can take away from this is that DeSantis really wants to be Teddy Roosevelt – he’s said as much before. But if he wants to be anything like Teddy, not only will he have to put on a few pounds, grow a nice mustache and become a war hero: DeSantis will actually have to do something to prove that he cares about nature.
