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Joy Reid not even hiding discontent, invents reason why DeSantis, Rubio did so well in Miami-Dade

November 9, 2022 | | Print Article

MSNBC host Joy Reid elicited some mockery Tuesday when she sought to blame Florida’s Miami-Dade County falling to Republicans on the county allegedly having been trending Republican for “a very long time.”

“Miami-Dade has been trending Republican for a very long time,” she said during a panel discussion.

Listen:

The problem is that Miami-Dade County has NOT been trending Republican. Indeed, incumbent Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who just won Miami-Dade in Tuesday’s election, lost the same county by 20 points during his first run for the governor’s office in 2018.

Likewise, then Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton won Miami-Dade County by 30 points in the 2016 race.

So what changed? The state of Florida, say conservatives, who argue that DeSantis has performed so well as governor these past four years that he’s managed to convert a bunch of Miami-Dade’s Democrat residents in to full-throated Republicans.

But the key there is that they weren’t originally Republican, as Reid appeared to suggest. DeSantis had to earn their votes through excellent performance.

The same, it would appear, with Sen. Marco Rubio, who also lost Miami-Dade County in the 2018 race.

“On Tuesday, Miami-Dade also backed incumbent Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban American from Miami. With 92 percent of the vote in, Rubio earned 54 percent of the vote in that county. Comparably, the senator was defeated in that same county back in 2018, when only 43 percent of Florida voters in Miami-Dade cast their ballot for him,” according to Newsweek.

Again, the fact that both DeSantis and Rubio lost their 2018 races means that Miami-Dade has NOT “been trending Republican,” as Reid suggested.

Reid wasn’t the only one at MSNBC with a bad take.

“The GOP’s dominance in Florida is all about gerrymandering,” MSNBC’s official Twitter account wrote around 8:30 pm late Tuesday evening.

The tweet provoked massive, massive, massive mockery, because it’s impossible to gerrymander a senate race or governor’s race.

Plus, conservatives believe the real reason Republicans performed well in Florida was not because of gerrymandering or “voter suppression” — another complaint from the left — but because DeSantis has performed so well as governor.

Well enough, in fact, that he’s converted plenty of Hispanic Democrats into Hispanic Republicans. And indeed, in the days preceding the election, the left had been fretting over this exact issue of the governor being popular among Hispanics.

“Florida Democrats are fretting over Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ popularity among Latinos, saying they are boosting his chances of becoming the first Republican governor in 20 years to win traditionally blue Miami-Dade County and therefore propelling his chances of a successful presidential run in 2024,” NBC News reported on Oct. 21st.

“If Ron DeSantis wins the Latino vote in Florida, which has been a GOP project now for the past decade, Ron DeSantis is going to go directly to his donors and say, ‘I can win the presidential nomination and I can beat the Democratic nominee in 2024 because I can win the Latino vote,’” Devon Murphy Anderson, the co-founder of the voter registration organization Mi Vecino, said to the outlet.

With DeSantis having successfully converted both a purple state and a blue county red, many on the right are now looking to him to lead the Republican Party forward going into the 2024 presidential election.

Especially in light of former President Donald Trump’s alleged failures in the 2022 race. Critics say he chose bad candidates, and that those candidates may have potentially cost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate.

Incidentally, DeSantis performed so well in Florida in spite of Trump having trash-talked him in the days leading up to the midterms.

Vivek Saxena
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