Floridians getting tired of winning the pandemic

Local schools are fighting back against Harvard Trump:

Ron DeSantis is a governor uninterested in actually governing, a lawyer with little respect for the law, an anti-elitist with an Ivy League education and a hypocrite unbothered by inconsistency. Populist politics, not public policy, is his long suit.

So it is not surprising that he has made a monumental mess of masking in public schools. When it became apparent that many of Florida’s 67 local school boards intended to require students, teachers and staff to wear masks based on the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, plus the clear consensus of health care professionals generally, DeSantis did not see a serious public health issue. He saw an irresistible opportunity to pander to the MAGA peanut gallery on a grand scale.

Through a combination of executive orders and emergency rule making by a docile Department of Health and a spineless state Board of Education, DeSantis forbade mandatory masking in public schools and made private school vouchers available to the parents of every child in any school district with a mask mandate. This cowed almost all of the recalcitrant district school board members and superintendents, who tried to save face and have it both ways by requiring masks but allowing parental opt-outs.

Almost all. The Broward and Alachua school boards spit the bit, defying DeSantis and digging in to fight for the safety of those for whose safety they are responsible. They adopted mask mandates without parental opt-outs.

And things have gone downhill for DeSantis from there. He and whoever gives him what passes for advice in such matters realized the voucher threat was not going to get the job done. Not enough parents in Broward and Alachua were going to take advantage of the vouchers to make a difference, as evidenced by the low percentages of parents who have opted out of the quasi-mask mandates in the compliant school districts.

The next threat was to cut state education funding to Broward and Alachua, which would be disastrous. But because it would be disastrous, the threat was not credible, and it was quickly abandoned.

Not that I would bet against him winning re-election, but making anti-anti-COVID his political brand isn’t exactly doing wonders for his popularity either.