VERO BEACH, Florida -- Three-quarters of a century ago, when Joe Biden and Donald Trump were children, this state was a backwater, both the smallest in the South and the smallest east of the Mississippi, ranked in the bottom half of the states by population and by home ownership. Its six members of the House -- fewer than Oklahoma -- were nobodies, representing a sprawling peninsula that was basically nowhere. It had enjoyed booms (land, citrus) and busts (land, citrus) in recurring waves of dreams and dross. The University of Florida had about the same student enrollment (2,604) as Vermont's Middlebury College has now (2,526).
The first ancient peoples flowed here 12,000 years ago. Some 600 years ago, the Spanish nobleman and explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed here, in search, like so many who followed, of eternal youth. French explorers came next. Then arrived other settlers, some in work overalls, others in golf shirts, still more in bespoke suits and carrying bulging legal briefcases.
Today Florida -- with 22 million people, the third-biggest state in the nation -- is the center of the nation's politics. Everything about it is big; the University of Florida now has more students (57,841) than the biggest city in Vermont (44,743). Its 28-member House delegation is more than five times bigger than Oklahoma's. Its hanging chads kept the nation hanging in 2000, when the disputed vote count stretched into a 36-day struggle -- just as it had in 1876, when, along with South Carolina and Louisiana, its votes were in dispute for months.
One of Florida's senators ran for president eight years ago; the other is girding for a White House campaign.
Now this: Its governor is a national figure. Its most famous resident is a former president who is campaigning to be a future president. Virginia, Ohio and New York lead the states with the most presidents -- it depends on how you count -- but the state that counts in presidential politics now is Florida.
It is the state of the future; political trends now start here, not in Massachusetts, as they did in the 18th century, nor Ohio, as they did in the 19th century, nor even in California, as they did in the 20th. It is also the state of the past. A retirement haven, Florida has the country's highest percentage of elderly; 1 in 5 Floridians is over 65 years old, including 4 out of 5 residents of The Villages, while half the residents of Punta Gorda are senior citizens.
It boasts of both its weather (it's drizzly and overcast in Pittsburgh as I type this, clear and warm here in Vero Beach) and its status as a bellwether of the South. For 140 years, it was reliably Democratic, as was all of the Old Confederacy. Now 20 of its 28 House members are Republicans, along with its two U.S. senators, its governor and its state legislature, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2-to-1 in both chambers.
Like the rest of the country, it is becoming more diverse; in the decade beginning in 2010, the white population had the biggest drop (5.3 points down to 52.7%) and the Hispanic population the biggest increase (4.2 points up to 26.8%). Blacks today comprise 15% of the population, far less than when the enslaved comprised 65% of the population during Britain's rule of Florida after the Seven Years' War in 1763, or when the Black population counted for slightly less than half the state's population in 1900 -- a circumstance that prompted Florida's white Democratic leaders to employ a variety of ruses to assure that Black votes, almost entirely for Republicans, weren't cast or, if they were, didn't count.
Today's Republican domination is a mirror image of yesteryear's Democratic domination, as it is throughout the South. Though Bill Clinton carried Florida once (1996) and Barack Obama did so twice (2008, 2012), Florida no longer is considered a swing state. It has voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 13 of the last 18 elections -- and three of the times it went Democratic, it was for a Southern candidate (Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Clinton).
Florida has been a magnet for presidents. Five of them had retreats here -- Warren G. Harding (Bird Key), Harry Truman (Key West), John F. Kennedy (Palm Beach), Richard M. Nixon (Key Biscayne) and Trump (Palm Beach). Both Presidents George H.W. Bush (who caught a 135-pound tarpon off Islamorada) and George W. Bush ("Assume I caught a good one," he once told reporters) enjoyed fishing here. Today it is a political battleground, with DeSantis trying to edge out Trump and with the rivalry taking on an intraparty bitterness that has no equal in American politics.
The fight is generational (DeSantis is 32 years younger), temperamental (Trump is far more voluble) and personal (Trump has called his rival "Ron DeSanctimonious," demeaned him at every opportunity and repeatedly says that without his 2018 endorsement, DeSantis would not be residing in the governor's mansion today).
DeSantis has portrayed himself as Trump without the thump of crudity and possessing the skills to avoid the chaotic inefficiency that marred the Trump years in the White House. He and his staff were satisfied to be the political equivalent of a cover band, singing the master's tunes but doing so with pleasing three-part harmony and adhering to these notes in the sheet music of the MAGA movement:
Assail America's elites even while in possession of an Ivy League degree (two, in DeSantis' case). Appeal to blue-collar voters even though he's worn white collars for years. Test the limits of the main currents of American politics by inveighing against abortion rights (clear majorities of Americans in the Gallup Poll consider themselves "pro-choice") and adopting the new orthodoxies of the parents' rights movements that have been successful elsewhere (DeSantis now has exceeded Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia as the national standard-bearer in this category).
Right now, Trump, fresh from his arraignment on felony charges, has the spotlight. But DeSantis has a forum in the state capital of Tallahassee and the ability to make change rather than talk about it; he recently signed one of the biggest private-school voucher expansions in the country. Trump is on the offensive and, according to the polls, on the upswing. But there are months to go, and the Battle of Florida will have several more skirmishes.
(David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
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