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 * Ron DeSantis

November 10, 2022


DESANTIS’ POLICIES ARE TERRIBLE FOR MOMS. HE CONVINCED THEM OTHERWISE.


FEAR TRIUMPHED OVER FACTS.


 * KIERA BUTLER
   
   Senior EditorBio | Follow


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On Election Day, the much-hyped red wave didn’t crest quite as high as some
polls predicted it would, with Democrats scoring key victories in several
states. Yet it was far from a total wash for Republicans—and in a few places,
they made historic advances. In Florida, for instance, incumbent Governor (and
likely presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis crushed Democratic opponent Charlie
Crist, winning the Republican vote even in traditionally deep blue counties.

The forces behind DeSantis’ victory are many and complex. The fact that he was
an incumbent naturally gave him an edge. In addition, he spent much of the last
four years positioning himself as the more-MAGA-than-Trump candidate. He jeered
at the Biden administration, railed against pandemic protections, and made an
over-the-top and roundly criticized show of cracking down on migrants from the
southern border (who were from Texas, not Florida). With these strategies, he
has broadened his Republican base and made inroads into previously
Democratic-leaning blocs, including Latin Americans and millennial and Gen-Z
Floridians.

But another group of Florida voters he has strategically cultivated may have
been especially significant. In the online Florida politics journal Sayfie
Review, political analyst Susan McManus noted that in the last year, more than
twice as many Florida women have switched parties from Democrat to Republican
than the reverse—some 51,000 in the former category, compared to 20,000 in the
latter. Florida’s First Lady Casey DeSantis boasted last week that 1.1 million
women had signed on to her Mamas for DeSantis campaign group. “If that number’s
correct,” says Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University
of Central Florida, “that’s pretty impressive.” Especially considering the fact
that by many measures—maternal and child health, family leave, and pay equity,
to name but a few—life for women and children in Florida is not going
particularly well. Ron DeSantis has managed to convince women that his brand of
family values is good for them—despite abundant evidence to the contrary.


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A central—if not the central—part of DeSantis’ approach has been to cater to the
growing number of women who have demonstrated their support for what they call
parents’ rights. The sheer numbers involved in this movement are difficult to
estimate, but the 1.1 million Floridian women who reportedly signed on to Mamas
for DeSantis suggests a critical mass. The organizing principle behind this
movement is to attack public schools for indoctrinating children into a
progressive worldview by teaching about institutional racism and sexual and
gender identity.

While these ideas took root before the pandemic, the movement accelerated when
parents protested school closures and then mask mandates for students and
teachers. Since then, parents’ rights advocates have also vowed to keep schools
from mandating Covid vaccines and mobilized to run for and radicalize school
boards. DeSantis passed several laws around parents’ rights signature
issues—most notably, the “Don’t Say Gay” law strictly limited how teachers can
discuss sexual orientation and gender identity; another of his measures bans
Covid vaccine requirements at schools. He made the unusual move of endorsing
school board candidates—of the 30 parents’ rights candidates he backed, 24 won
their races.

This summer, I attended the annual conference of the parents’ rights group Moms
for Liberty, where DeSantis gave the keynote address. I watched as the moms
waved “Mamas for DeSantis” signs and whooped when he referred to Biden as
“Brandon blundering around every time you go get gas.” During his speech, he
portrayed Florida as the last bastion of parental freedom. “We’ve had families
move across the country,” he boasted, “because they wanted to make sure that
their kids wouldn’t be denied an education based on whether or not they took an
mRNA vaccine for their minor.”

We’ve had families move across the country because they wanted to make sure that
their kids wouldn’t be denied an education based on whether or not they took an
mRNA vaccine for their minor.”

But what benefits are those families actually receiving when they move to
Florida? The state doesn’t offer any parental leave beyond the federally
required 12 weeks of job security. Its Medicaid income cutoff is downright
Draconian—a family’s income must be 30 percent of the federal poverty level,
currently $26,500 for a family of four. Florida households receiving SNAP
benefits get less than the national average. It’s one of only a handful of
states that do not provide extra funding to schools with large populations of
students from low-income families. A 2021 report by the Annie E. Casey
Foundation ranked Florida a mediocre 35th in children’s wellbeing—it found that
kids in the Sunshine State were substantially less likely than the national
average to have parents with secure employment, to have health insurance, and to
graduate from high school on time.




Mothers in Florida aren’t doing so well, either. Between 2018 and 2020, the
state had the second-highest number of maternal deaths in the country, behind
only Texas. In 2020, just two-thirds of babies in Florida were born to women
receiving adequate prenatal care, compared to three-quarters nationally.
Florida’s women lack health insurance at a rate of 16 percent, well above the
national average of 11 percent, and more than two-thirds of them experience
domestic violence, compared to the national average of about 25 percent.

Paradoxically, those societal disadvantages actually may be a powerful driver
for women to participate in the parents’ rights movement. The day before the
election, I spoke with Rachel Moran and Taylor Agajanian, political scientists
at the University of Washington who focus on how disinformation campaigns target
communities of women. They’ve studied how multi-level marketing companies use
what Moran calls an “idealized versions of femininity” to court stay-at-home
moms with few resources. “First and foremost, your character is defined by
motherhood,” Moran says. “And supporting that is this idea of freedom, whether
that’s financial freedom and entrepreneurialism, or political freedom, which is
what a lot of a lot of the misinformation narratives around the election try and
tap into.” In the social media spaces she studies, “It’s all trended towards
this sense of female empowerment being the power to resist the government rather
than empowerment in sort of more traditional senses of the word.”

Not all DeSantis Mamas are stay at home moms. But those observations square with
what I’ve noticed in my own reporting on disinformation in women’s spaces.
“Protecting kids from dangerous things like forced masking, traumatizing
isolation, toxic injections, harmful foods & oppressive government isn’t a
#conspiracy theory, that’s just called good parenting,” one post in a Facebook
group called Natural Parenting Mommas read. The moderator of a moms’ Facebook
group in California told me, “To our detriment, the isolated, exhausted mamas
who look to these groups for support at all hours of the day and night may be
susceptible to internalizing misinformation that is being shared by armchair
experts.”

The parents’ rights movement, the researchers said, does something similar: In
its appreciation for the fact that mothers don’t have much agency—and by
offering them a sense of purpose—they also seem to promise their families would
be protected in an increasingly frightening world. DeSantis and his supporters
play to this dynamic when they warn parents that schools will turn their
children against them. At the Moms for Liberty conference, I watched
conservative podcast host James Lindsay whip up the crowd. Schools, he said,
will “make your kid a little sexual weirdo, they come home, they talk to mom, to
you. And you’re like, ‘What? I don’t want you to talk like that.’ And it’s,
‘Mom, you don’t understand me. You don’t know, things are different now.’”




The parents’ rights campaign against Covid vaccine mandates, too, plays to
parental anxiety. DeSantis Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has repeatedly
made misleading statements about the safety of Covid vaccines for kids. “Based
on currently available data, the risks of administering COVID-19 vaccination
among healthy children may outweigh the benefit,” Ladapo said. (That’s not
true.) For parents who desperately want to protect their children, refusing a
vaccine may feel like a way to exert a modicum of control, Moran and Agajanian
note. This trend is already hastening serious public health consequences: As I
reported last week, Florida’s rates of routine childhood vaccination—think
measles and polio—are now also beginning to decline.

As DeSantis eyes a presidential run in 2024, he will almost certainly attempt to
translate his parents’ rights victory in Florida onto the national
stage—although that strategy could backfire. After all, members of the parents’
rights movement don’t care about all parents’ rights—say, parents’ rights to
reduce the number of firearms available to potential school shooters, to keep
trans kids safe from harm, or to ensure that their children have access to books
about a wide range of human experiences. Several months back, I spoke to a North
Carolina mother who watched in horror as Moms for Liberty candidates attempted
to take over her local school board. “I’m not worried about someone grooming my
son to be a drag queen,” she told me. “I’m worried about someone grooming my son
to be a White nationalist.”

Yet DeSantis clearly believes that in these anxious times, his version of
parents’ rights will prevail, no matter the costs to marginalized groups. “If
you just show people that you’re willing to fight for them,” he observed at the
Moms for Liberty conference, “man, they will walk over broken glass barefoot to
have your back.”


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