Professor: Going after 'woke' could lead Florida to going broke in wake of hurricanes

This commentary is authored by John A. Tures, a professor of political science at LaGrange College

It’s hard to believe that in late 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis looked like the strongest challenger to former President Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race. Now DeSantis may be slipping behind Vivek Ramaswamy and has dropped to third place in South Carolina polls.

At the same time, Hurricane Idalia tore across his state on Wednesday, and the insurance market is in a lot of trouble. Between last year's devastated story, Hurricane Ian, and Idalia, the state had a chance to solve the problem, but instead chose to “fight the woke.”

Almost a year ago, I was interviewed about the Florida governor’s response to Hurricane Ian. I gave DeSantis high marks for the relatively bipartisan tone of the event with President Joe Biden, or as much as professionalism across parties can be accomplished today.

DeSantis handily won reelection in 2022, albeit against a tired candidate offered up by the Democrats. But he looked to be a candidate with a better record of success than Donald Trump, who several of his handpicked candidates went down to embarrassing defeats in 2022.

DeSantis then pursued Trump’s most die-hard supporters, instead of demonstrating a policy agenda that could appeal to a majority of the country. He basically made “fighting woke” the centerpiece of his primary run, and attacked businesses, colleges, schools and libraries by signing social policies well outside the mainstream.

His truly cringe-worthy school curriculum defending slavery will be hard to run on in 2024, and he's another GOP candidate calling climate change a hoax, when in fact 69% of Americans believe it, having seen the evidence for themselves.

When I went to Ft. Myers earlier this year to help with the Hurricane Ian clean-up with our chaplain and students, I thought there wouldn’t be much left to do. Instead, it looked like the hurricane had hit the day before. I heard horror stories about dropped insurance, folks out of money, price gouging, and no ability to rebuild.

Indeed, we now know that in Florida, inflation remains high though it’s come down in the rest of the country. Housing prices are skyrocketing. Insurers are leaving the market. Fed-up residents in Jacksonville, a GOP bastion, elected a Democratic mayor; she defeated a prominent local politician and DeSantis supporter.

Rather than trying to help the residents of the Sunshine State by addressing the crisis, a member of Florida’s government decided to label Farmers Insurance “woke.” DeSantis' CFO called the insurer “The Bud Light of the insurance industry” hoping to tap into “conservative anger” over transgenderism to scare Farmers into coming back to the state to lose billions more.

In fact, the whole insurance industry has been losing billions and hasn’t had a positive financial outcome since two years before DeSantis was first elected Florida’s governor. Now Florida's leaders want to boycott insurance companies when the state's residents need them the most. The audacity is incredible.

The facts show that a number of other insurers stopped writing policies in the state, or went insolvent, and other insurers have cut back, including AAA. Farmers Insurance also stopped writing policies in areas of California prone to wildfires, which makes it harder to go with the woke argument.

Florida homeowners pay the highest insurance premiums in the nation, with an average premium of $6,000 per year versus the U.S. average of $1,700 per year, according to Mark Friedlander, Florida-based director of corporate communications for the Insurance Information Institute. That’s 42% higher than the year prior, Frielander added, according to Fortune Magazine. The number of uninsured properties is double the national average, according to ABC News.

You’ve heard the phrase “when the only tool in your box is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” It’s time for Republicans to find a problem solver whose solution to a crisis isn’t to call it “woke” or link it to Bud Light, or to have another GOP candidate call the climate change agenda “a hoax.”

Suspending his campaign to deal with the hurricane would be a good start for DeSantis, but helping the average Floridian find affordable insurance should have been the priority a long time ago.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Hurricanes Idalia Ian costly disasters for DeSantis, Florida insurers