A year ago Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd offered some advice to the newcomers flooding into Florida.
Appearing alongside Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and other law enforcement officials just as DeSantis signed Florida’s anti-rioting bill, Judd, also a Republican, noted:
“We’re a special place, and there are millions and millions of people who like to come here. And quite frankly, we like to have them here. So we only want to share one thing as you move in hundreds a day: Welcome to Florida. But don’t register to vote and vote the stupid way you did up north, you’ll get what they got.”
Now, it seems DeSantis fears the same thing.
The Recount, a news website that focuses on video clips, posted comments DeSantis made at an event Monday about the prospect of more liberals from blue states fleeing to Florida.
“There is cause for concern,” DeSantis said.
“Texas would have all these companies moved from California over the years. So you’d have companies move from San Francisco to Austin, and they’d bring hundreds of employees with them. And those employees would vote the exact same way they voted that turned San Francisco into the Dumpster fire that it is.”
“It’s like the leftism – they will not draw the connection between their leftist ideology and the destruction that’s all around them,” added DeSantis.
“It is a problem because I do think there’s a class of voters who would come to Florida, and they would continue to vote the same way.”
The Free Press has regularly documented how deep blue states – California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut chief among them – are hemorrhaging residents.
But DeSantis tried to calm the fears of conservatives who may worry that this influx of newcomers would repeat the mistakes they made elsewhere by voting Democrat.
“I’ve had more Republicans move into Florida than Democrats move into Florida, and so, that’s pretty significant,” DeSantis added, according to The Washington Examiner.
“I think what that’s telling me is that people are very sensitive to the state governments that they live under. I think COVID opened a lot of people’s eyes because, literally, who your governor was, was the difference between your kid even being able to go to school at all.”
As proof of his claim, DeSantis last fall trumpeted that for the first time in Florida’s 177-year history, Republicans claimed more registered voters than Democrats.
As evidence of how swiftly that has changed, at the end of 2020, according to the state Division of Elections, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by about 97,000 voters.
As of March 31, Republicans held the lead by almost 112,000 voters.
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