How DeSantis’ struggles in presidential race could dim his clout with Florida Legislature

With Gov. Ron DeSantis on the campaign trail, how much influence will he have on the 2024 session?

In Jacksonville last February, DeSantis announced an extensive anti-illegal immigration legislative proposal that was part of his ambitious and wide-ranging slate of conservative policies that he proposed in advance of the 2023 legislative session.

The GOP-controlled Legislature approved most if not all of those goals in an agenda that was so comprehensive that DeSantis wondered if “there was any meat left on the bone” during a press conference in the Capitol’s Fourth Floor Rotunda on the day the session ended last May.

Now, less than a week before the Legislature convenes for its 2024 session, most if not all of the speeches that DeSantis is delivering aren’t in Florida but in the early-voting presidential states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and they’re about what he would do if elected president — not what he hopes to get accomplished in Florida this year.

Does that mean that his involvement will be visibly reduced in the upcoming session?

“The short answer is yes,” says University of North Florida political science professor Michael Binder. “You can only be in so many places at so many times and clearly Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina are currently his priorities right now.”

Binder added that DeSantis’ physical absence from Tallahassee shouldn’t affect the general output of what lawmakers produce this year, given that Republicans hold supermajorities in both the House and the Senate. “It’s not like you can expect to see a whole bunch of liberal stuff coming out of the Florida House and Senate anytime soon,” Binder said.

Physical absence

Some lawmakers don’t think DeSantis’ physical absence will overshadow how his administration will continue to push for the policies that he supports.

“I’m confident he will be very engaged this legislative session,” said Pinellas County House Republican Berny Jacques. “For example, I’ve been in touch with him and his team over the past several months on legislative goals that will continue to keep Floridians safe from crime.”

Mac Stipanovich. Photo provided by the subject.

Mac Stipanovich, a former longtime Florida GOP strategist who is now a political independent, argued that DeSantis won’t be as effective as in the past.

“It’s more difficult to say ‘no’ if you’re a legislator if you’re looking at the governor across the desk [as opposed to] then looking at his chief-of-staff or department head,” he said.

There’s no question the governor’s struggles on the campaign trail have reduced his popularity in the Sunshine State. After winning reelection by more than 19 percentage points in November 2022, recent public opinion polls in Florida suggest the public is more ambivalent about his status.

A poll from the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab conducted from Nov. 6 to Nov. 30 showed that 47% of Floridians held a favorable view of the governor, with 48% unfavorable. And a survey of 946 adults in Florida conducted by the Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolComLab in October and November of last year had the governor exactly even, 50%-50%, in terms of voter approval.

DeSantis trails former president Donald Trump by nearly 50 points nationally, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Monday. The Florida governor trails Trump in Iowa by more than 30 points and by more than 37 points in New Hampshire, according to an average of polls collected by RealClearPolitics.

‘Governor’s game’

Lars Hafner, a political analyst and former Democrat who served 12 years in the Florida House, said that DeSantis’ struggles in his presidential campaign will result in the Legislature “regrasping their power.”

“The House speaker and Senate president will become more powerful than they have over the last few years because they’re not going to play the governor’s game as much,” he said.

Florida state Rep. Randy Fine. Credit: Florida House of Representatives

“In the last few years, people thinking that DeSantis was going to become president — they were all jockeying for their own futures, and now that it doesn’t look so promising I think that you’re going to see them really retain power, and it will be a very different type of Legislature, even though they’re still in the supermajority.”

Some Florida Republican lawmakers have already began distancing themselves from the governor as he has struggled against Trump, at least when it comes to supporting his presidential ambitions.

Central Florida state Rep. Randy Fine was the first GOP lawmaker to switch his allegiance from DeSantis to Trump in late October. That was followed days later by five state Republican lawmakers who stood with Trump at the Republican Party of Florida’s Freedom Summit to announce that they too were now backing the former president over the governor.

It was a stunning move coming less than six months after they were part of the overwhelming number of GOP state lawmakers who had endorsed DeSantis just after the legislative session had ended. Those endorsements came just before he signed the state budget filled with projects benefitting their local districts.

Past his peak

“I think that the 2023 session was probably the peak of his power. As formidable and as frightening as he’ll ever be,” Stipanovich said.

“He was coming off a massive reelection victory and being touted as the next ‘Big Thing’ on the national stage for the Republican Party. That is all gone now. He has thrown that away with one of the most incompetent campaigns, both in terms of strategy and tactics, that we’ve seen in a very long time.

Stipanovich continued: “So much of power is a matter of perception. And you can [see] not only in the five legislators that you mentioned but policy positions taken by other legislators and legislation that he does not appear to have been consulted and detailed on. You can see some straws in the wind indicating perhaps the revival of some legislative independence. “

Hillsborough County House Republican Mike Beltran said “there was a lot of activity and a lot of alignment between legislative leadership and the governor last session. I don’t know if that’s going to continue, but there’s nothing that happened that’s going to give the governor any additional leverage.”

The 2023 legislative session saw a flood of conservative legislative proposals get signed into law, including a six-week abortion ban (which is being challenged indirectly in the Florida Supreme Court plus federal court), the anti-immigration measure, as well as bills lowering the threshold for imposing the death penalty and making it illegal for state and local investment funds to consider the environmental, social, and governance stances that companies’ support.

Binder doesn’t expect this year’s session to be as robust when it comes to passing as many major reforms to the system.

Election year

“It’s important to keep in mind that this is an election year cycle, and those legislative sessions tend to be less contentious,” he said.

“You tend to have less of the issues that you maybe saw last year, which just saw a confluence of the fact that it wasn’t an election year and you had somebody gearing up for president and wanting to check the bona fides of the policies that they passed. You can expect to see a lot more blocking and tackling this time around — funding issues, those types of things. I expect to see much less of the hot-button social issues. Not that there won’t be none of them bubbling up, but I think you’ll see many, many fewer of them.”

The official start of the legislative session is next Tuesday, Jan. 9.

Legislation pending

There’s one bill the Legislature absolutely must pass: a budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1, 2024. DeSantis has proposed a $114.4 billion budget that would peg spending nearly $3 billion below that in the 2023-24 budget but the Legislature will have its own ideas.

One measure, HB 49, sponsored by Republican House member Linda Chaney, would lift regulations establishing that 16- and 17-year-old can’t work before 6:30 a.m. or after 11 p.m., or for more than eight hours a day when they have school the next day, plus a ban on teens working more than 30 hours a week.

Another big state problem the Legislature could take up involves a sharp reduction in Medicaid coverage for Floridians.

As of November, nearly 160,000 people had lost coverage, out of more than 5 million who were eligible under federal Covid rules, with 55% aged 18 and younger.

The state’s Republican leadership have no plans to expand eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, but DeSantis has proposed spending $310 million on the Florida KidCare Program, subsidies for health care for children until their 19th birthday if the household doesn’t qualify for Medicaid. Earlier this year, the state increased the income limits for the program.

The enduring struggle over regulation of short-term housing rentals, like Airbnb, will continue 13 years after the Legislature preempted local regulation of these arrangements. Legislation by Pinellas Republican Sen. Nick DiCeglie would allow local governments to limit the number of guests to those for normal residences, and to deal with noise, parking, and trash. Local governments could charge no more than $150 to review a registration application and must accept or deny it within 15 days. The state would maintain a database of these registrations.

Passing third grade

Separate legislation would allow children to advance from grades three to four even if they don’t pass standards for reading skills. Additionally, kids could graduate from high school even if they don’t pass Algebra and English. Those students would have to participate in home reading sessions or individual instruction. The bill is intended, according to its backers, to reduce testing pressure and enhance parental rights to control their children’s education.

The Senate is advancing a plan ( SB 7016) to spend $70 million to increase the number of physicians training to practice medicine in a state where 75% of new doctors move elsewhere upon earning their credentials. The money would be divided into $100,000 per slot to create 700 additional hospital slots for medical school graduates. During 2023 year, Florida provided funding for 6,176 residents, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration.

DiCeglie has another bill ( SB 850) targeting “deep fake” political ads — requiring political a campaign to include disclaimer for ads depicting a real person performing an action that did not occur, with fines starting at $2,500 per violation. The disclaimers would read: “Created in whole or in part with the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).”

Bipartisan legislation ( HB 655) that would establish a condominium windstorm pilot program just for Floridians insured through Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-run insurer of last resort with more than 1.2 million customers. Citizens could offer coverage providing actual cash value on condo roofs damaged in a storm, instead of full replacement value. The measure follows recent legislation, inspired by the Surfside tragedy, requiring condo associations to build cash reserves sufficient to maintain building integrity, especially those near the coasts.

Court consolidation

One initiative that looks dead on the vine is House Speaker Paul Renner’s idea to reorganize Florida’s 20 court circuits, representing the trial courts that handle the bigger lawsuits and criminal cases. The Florida Supreme Court, at Renner’s urging, appointed a commission to study the idea, which drew pans from state attorneys, public defenders, judges, sheriffs, other elected officials, lawyers, and members of the public. “[W]e do not find that there is a need to consolidate Florida’s judicial circuits,” the court said on Dec. 21. Renner has indicated he would abide by the court’s recommendation, according to the News Service of Florida.

The Legislature might not be done attacking transgender people. House Republican Ryan Chamberlin has a bill ( HB 599) to bar state and local governments and contractors or nonprofits drawing state money from recognizing employees’ preferred gender pronouns if they differ from their biological sex. “It is an unlawful employment practice for an employer to take adverse personnel action against an employee or a contractor because of the employee’s or contractor’s deeply held religious or biology-based beliefs,” the bill reads. There’s no Senate companion bill, though.

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