Florida Democrats Have A Plan To Defeat DeSantis In November

The state of Florida is becoming one of the most expensive places to live in America, with rents increasing at a higher rate than any other state. And even though Ron DeSantis is the most popular Republican governor in the US (among Republicans) he isn't as unstoppable as Republicans would have you believe. Democrats believe that they can hammer him on the economic issues and possibly use it to beat him in November, so Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins lays out the realities of this plan.

Become a member today!

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Find our merchandise at Teespring

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

Follow more of our stories at

Subscribe to our podcast

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Republican governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is in fact, one of the most popular, if not the most popular Republican governor in the entire country, among Republicans. And that little part of that is exceptionally important. He is the most popular, but only among Republicans. In the state of Florida, he has a massive approval rating with Republicans. I think it's somewhere close to 90% of Republicans approve of the job that he has done. Statewide however, he has an approval rating, according to the latest polls, which are actually about a month and a half, two months old, he has an approval rating of about 58%. Still good, but not impenetrable and Democrats in the state of Florida now see an opening, or at least they think they see an opening, on how to unseat DeSantis in this year's gubernatorial election.

And they're gonna do it by actually focusing on real issues that actually affect Florida residents. Number one, of course, being the skyrocketing housing and rent prices here in the state, which have risen faster than any other state in the country. As the entire nation witnesses housing and rent prices continuing to increase, nobody has seen it worse than the state of Florida and that's all under Ron DeSantis. And Democrats believe that they can hammer him on this issue and of course, hammer him for focusing on idiotic culture war nonsense, while ignoring this massive issue that is literally affecting the wallets of residents here in the state of Florida. Many of whom are being priced out of the housing market entirely. In fact, in the state of Florida, we have the worst housing cost burden for residents.

Which means that 30% of people in this, or no, excuse me, of the people in Florida, 30% of their income has to go to housing costs alone. That is higher than anywhere else in the nation. 30% of our income is just to have a roof over our heads. And that's very bad, right? That, that hurts low income people the most. And so Democrats think that if we hammer on this enough, we can convince enough people that Ron DeSantis and more than 23 years of Republican rule in the state of Florida has screwed us over. And it has. Now here's something I didn't realize. Now I have spoken plenty of times in the past about the fact that Florida has been under Republican control for more than 20 years. In fact, the state of Alabama has had a Democrat as governor more recently than the state of Florida has. Our last Democratic governor left office the first days of January of 1999. Ever since then, solid Republican state.

But that last governor also did something else. He signed into law the, what is it, the Florida affordable housing act. And what the Florida affordable housing act did was it enacted a small tax on all real estate transactions and that small tax was then put into a trust fund to provide housing assistance for Florida residents. So we're taxing all of these real estate transactions. All the money goes into the big pot. The big pot gets spent to make sure that people don't end up living on the streets. But then in the early two thousands, when we switched to a Republican governor, Jeb Bush at the time, they noticed that we're having some budget shortfalls in some areas because the, the .com bubble bursting. So what they did is they robbed the trust fund, essentially. So they took all.