Why is Florida the apple of Pennsylvania conservatives’ eyes? – PennLive
Doug Mastriano repeatedly says he’s running for governor to make Pennsylvania the “Florida of the North.”
Let’s decode that, for a minute.
That doesn’t mean palm trees in Pittsburgh, or Eagles Mere becoming the new Key West. And we’ll keep our long heating seasons over their hurricane season, thank you very much.
But to Mastriano’s conservative base, becoming more like Florida is truly a form of political catnip.
It means, in a light most favorable to two of the nation’s most conservative governors – Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis – striving to become a place where the taxes are a little bit lower, the government is a little bit less intrusive, and most people have a little bit more control over their own lives.
As DeSantis put it in his opening address to the Florida Legislature this year: “The Free State of Florida… has become the escape hatch for those chafing under authoritarian, arbitrary and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions.”
So what’s that got to do with Pennsylvania?
For Jeffrey Lord, a national conservative commentator based in Camp Hill, it’s the economy, stupid.
“Republicans and conservatives look at Florida as an economic model,” Lord said, and that’s primarily because of lower taxes and a sense that there are fewer regulations.
The coronavirus pandemic became a high-profile example, Lord noted. Florida went into a lockdown like most of the nation in March 2020, anxious to not let its hospitals and health care systems get overrun with a virus the people were still figuring out how to treat.
DeSantis was one of the first of America’s governors to challenge the top-down closures. His wasn’t a straight-line success story — by mid-summer 2020, Florida was among the states with a huge resurgence of the virus on its hands.
But DeSantis was resolute, saying there were steps that could be taken to protect the vulnerable while the rest of the state got back to business. And people were back in Disney World, and even the Republican National Convention moved to Jacksonville.
Here’s how Mastriano, a conservative state senator from Franklin County who drew his first significant statewide attention by serving as one of the early voices for reopening Pennsylvania’s economy, hopes to channel that spirit.
“Our vision for Pennsylvania is very clear; to restore our basic freedoms,” Mastriano told a recent rally crowd in Perry County. “Freedom is the motto and model of our campaign… Individual freedom. Personal freedom.
“You know, under the Wolf and Shapiro administration, it’s about control, and telling you whether your business is essential or nonessential, telling you that your kids should be masked up… Telling you it’s OK for boys — men — to dominate female sports.
“My goal, of course, with our freedoms and policies is to turn Pennsylvania into the Florida of the North,” Mastriano said.
The line drew an extended round of applause, before Mastriano transitioned into his vision for priming Pennsylvania’s economy on its fossil fuel resources, and giving parents more control over how, and what, their kids are taught.
“I look forward to that day. We’re going to be the place where folks want to come to now. You know, Florida for the weather. Pennsylvania for everything else. Right? I look forward to sharing that glory,” Mastriano said.
It’s worth remembering that Florida and Pennsylvania are dramatically different places.
Florida does not have Pennsylvania’s rich industrial heritage and all that sprung from that, like a strong organized labor sector that, even if less dominant today, has left a lasting legacy on work rules, expectations of employers and the like.
And we all know that Florida has gained, at the expense of states like Pennsylvania, from the steady migration of people to Sun Belt states since World War II.
(Thanks Willis Carrier, inventor of the first electrical air conditioning unit. “If we didn’t have air conditioning, we’re not here,” quipped Michael Binder, faculty director of the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida. “I don’t care what policies DeSantis put in place.”)
But there is also plenty of data that suggests good times are very real in the Sunshine State:
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Florida has been a top five state for job growth in seven of the last 10 years. Pennsylvania has never ranked higher than 20th in that time, and has averaged 29th among the states during Gov. Tom Wolf’s eight years in office.
Taxes, generally, are lower: The Tax Foundation ranks Florida as having the 11th-lowest state and local tax burden this year, with an effective rate of 9.1 percent; Pennsylvania comes in at 28th, with a rate of 10.6 percent.
Looking just at business taxes, the gap is greater: Florida is said to have the fourth best tax climate for businesses; Pennsylvania is 33rd.
Even in K-12 education, long held as one of the Southeast’s weak spots, the most-recent “Grading the States” report published by Education Week magazine ranked Florida slightly ahead of Pennsylvania for student achievement in 2021, giving the Sunshine State a ‘B-’ to our ‘C’. (Pennsylvania still scored higher than Florida when other categories, including school funding, were factored in.)
And, according to recent public opinion polls, a whole lot more Floridians seem to feel their state is on the “right track” than in Pennsylvania.
In similar statewide surveys conducted in late September, Florida “won” the right track / wrong direction question by 55-34. In Pennsylvania, the script was flipped with 28 percent seeing the state headed in the right direction, and 59 percent saying we’re on the wrong track.
Ouch.
Finally, Florida stands as the political crystal ball of many Pennsylvania Republicans’ hoped-for future. Once held up as the ultimate swing state, (SEE: hanging chads and the 2000 presidential election) it’s had exclusively Republican governors and GOP-controlled legislatures since 1998.
“We voted for Barack Obama, but I think the state really is becoming much more red,” aided by what many see as a deepening affinity between Hispanic voters and the GOP, said Carol Weissert, a just-retired political science professor at Florida State University.
“Whatever it is the Republicans are doing” — the “Don’t Say Gay” law, gerrymandering, using state funds to send Venezuelan migrants to Massachusetts — “they’re doing it pretty easily, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a backlash,” Weissert said.
Of course, none of this is to suggest Florida is perfect.
According to a three-year look at poverty rates from the U.S. Census Bureau, Florida’s average poverty rate of 14.0 percent from 2018-20 trailed only Washington D.C., California and Mississippi. (Pennsylvania was 9.5 percent, below the 11.0 percent U.S. average.)
Called the Supplemental Poverty Measure, it takes into account both household income statistics and governmental measures designed to help low-income families.
And while Florida celebrates its diversity — in fact, it literally is the freedom refuge for more than 1.5 million Cuban-Americans — the state’s leaders were criticized this year by gay rights advocates for trying to “erase” gay culture with the new “Don’t Say Gay” law that bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in the primary grades.
And, over the long term, Floridians may face a real moment of reckoning with climate change.
Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, had little to say about Florida for this story, but he’s made clear he believes Pennsylvanians already have a better form of freedom than either Mastriano or DeSantis espouses, and it’s his aim to keep it that way.
“Real freedom comes when we trust Pennsylvanians to make their own decisions about who they love, who they pray to, and how and when they start a family here in our Commonwealth,” Shapiro often says in his general election stump speech. “That is real freedom, and that’s what’s on the ballot right now.”
Whatever the outcome of the election, it’s safe to say Pennsylvania is not going to “be” Florida anytime soon.
But more Florida-like? Conservatives like Lord say that’s a very appropriate goal.
“You could make Pennsylvania sort of a northeast paradise, particularly because you’re not going to see that done in New York — which still bans fracking for natural gas — or New Jersey,” Lord said, referring to our Democratic-led neighbors to the east and the north.
“If there is a sense of urgency out there, I think these things can pass.”