All the Governor’s Men

Ron DeSantis suspended Tampa’s elected prosecutor over abortion rights. What does it mean to run for office in Florida if the governor’s whims can turn even a win into a loss?

But in August, after Hillsborough County (Tampa) State Attorney Andrew Warren signaled he would decline to pursue abortion cases should Florida’s 15-week ban go into effect, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis suspended and replaced him with a member of the conservative Federalist Society. (Warren has sued to get his job back; a judge has said the case should be decided at trial, but hasn’t set a date.) 

The governor’s move, part of his broader push to undermine voting rights and override democratic results to install conservatives in local offices, summons an existential question for the shape of democracy in Florida. In the face of a governor willing to overturn an election to achieve his own ends, the familiar playbook of fighting for social change at the ballot box—organizing the grassroots, galvanizing young people and people of color, elevating candidates who will fight for reproductive justice—is under siege.

The threat of further undemocratic moves by DeSantis now hangs over Miller’s race—and by extension, any election in the state. What does it even mean to run for office when the governor’s political whims could turn a win into a loss? Miller compared running in DeSantis’s Florida to the myth of Sisyphus: the boulder rolls back down the hill every time, but he pushes it up again anyway. 

Meanwhile, DeSantis has also recently replaced four Democratic members of the Broward County school board with Republicans. The members were recommended for suspension by a grand jury for failures related to school safety, but the opportunity to install more ideologically aligned successors was not wasted on the governor.  Now the chair of the Florida Board of Education, who is himself a DeSantis appointee, has suggested that the Broward County school superintendent—who didn’t even join the district until well after the grand jury had finished its deliberations—should be suspended, too. 

ARTICLE HERE