LAUNCH ANGLE — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis filed his paperwork to run for president today and kicked off his campaign tonight on Twitter’s audio platform, Twitter Spaces (after some technical difficulties), alongside owner Elon Musk. It’s a sign his 2024 campaign will be waged as much online as in the town halls of Iowa or on cable TV. But the odds are stacked against him. No Florida politician has ever been elected president. A half-dozen have run in the last 50 years — essentially the period in which the state evolved from political backwater to electoral powerhouse — but all have ended up in the same place, dead in the water long before the nominating convention. Most never even made it past New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. The curse of Florida Man — and to date, every Florida presidential candidate has been male — lingers despite the fact that the state is an ideal proving ground for a White House bid. Winning statewide office requires campaigning in two time zones, 10 TV markets, and across 66,000 square miles. It is home to more than 22 million people — many of them arrivals from other states, which gives Florida politicians exposure to a wide range of political customs and styles. It’s a curious predicament for the nation’s third-largest state. Florida does have some White House connections, of course. Presidents have retired there. They’ve owned vacation homes there. Trump himself moved there midway through his first term as president, changing his official residence from Manhattan to Palm Beach. But in the nearly 180 years since Florida was admitted to the Union, it has neither produced a president nor had one born within its borders. (No, Andrew Jackson’s pre-statehood stint doesn’t count.) It is the lone state among the nation’s 10 most populous that has never sent anyone to the White House. Texas, which became a state nine months after Florida, can point to three presidents — four, if you count Dwight Eisenhower, who was born in Denison. California, which achieved statehood five years after Florida, has produced two. Even Hawaii, the last state to be admitted to the Union in 1959, can boast a presidential pedigree, with the birthplace of Barack Obama. The absence of Florida’s presidential bragging rights shouldn’t be a complete surprise. It stems, at least in part, from the low esteem in which Florida — and its politicians — were held for the first century of its existence and perhaps beyond. By the 1970s, though, that began to change. Decade after decade of runaway population growth had swelled the state’s population; in the 1950s alone, Florida’s population nearly doubled in size. State constitutional revisions in 1968 finally enabled governors to serve more than one term. Not long after, the state started producing top homegrown talent, from both parties, and sending them to the national dance. The closest any state politician has ever come to winning the presidency came in 2016, when Florida offered up two top-tier Republican candidates, former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio. Bush began as the overwhelming frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Rubio, at the time, was considered a rising party star with an unlimited future. Neither was prepared to deal with Trump’s sudden and unexpected rise. Weighed down by his establishment ties and the family name, Bush was cut to pieces by the billionaire mogul’s campaign buzzsaw. After an underwhelming performance in South Carolina, he suspended his campaign the next day. Rubio went further, becoming the first Florida candidate to make it through the early state gauntlet. But his campaign ended in mid-March, after he got plastered by Trump — in his home state, of all places. Rubio lost all but one of the Sunshine State’s 67 counties. Now, with Trump and DeSantis running first and second in the early 2024 GOP presidential polls, Florida again has a prime opportunity to place a resident in the White House. Trump’s connection to the state is, of course, more tenuous. And his view of his adopted state isn’t exactly rosy. In a March attack on DeSantis, Trump raised the notion that Florida was the kind of backward place that its critics deride and which regularly delights the internet. Trump contended that Florida ranked among the worst states in terms of Covid cases and Covid deaths. And that wasn’t all. “In Education, Florida ranks among the worst in the Country and on crime statistics, Florida ranked Third Worst in Murder, Third Worst in Rape, and Third Worst in Aggravated Assault,” the Mar-a-Lago resident said in a statement. “Jacksonville was ranked as one of the Top 25 Major Crime Cities in the Country, with Tampa and Orlando not doing much better. On Education, Florida ranks #39 in Health & Safety in the Country, #50 in Affordability, and #30 in Education & Childcare, HARDLY GREATNESS THERE!” A true Florida Man’s endorsement. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmahtesian@politico.com on Twitter at @PoliticoCharlie.
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