As I outline on the [still-growing] site COVIDSuperSpreaders.com, Trump is not the only reason we are in this miserable place. The abject lies and knowingly careless and callous decisions made by a number of Republican governors and state legislators have also played an outsized role in the death of 210,000 Americans, the illness of 7.3 million, and the tens of millions of people who have lost their jobs, healthcare, and loved ones.
Chief amongst those governors has been Florida’s devastatingly irresponsible Gov. Ron DeSantis. He has never mandated masks, refused to shut the state down for over a month, reopened it far too early in both May (when they were at 11k new cases a day!), did little nothing to stem the skyrocketing caseload this summer, and just reopened it again despite ongoing trouble.
While Florida Republicans have ignored science every step of the way, Kayser Enneking has been helping as many people in the state as possible since the virus first emerged. She’s not only a Democratic candidate for a super-flippable seat in the Florida State House, but Enneking is also a doctor who teaches at the University of Florida and practices at its medical center, Shands Hospital. In March, Enneking converted her campaign into an information center for COVID-19, including weekly webinars that continue to this day.
I first spoke to her back in May, right when DeSantis reopened the state, which Enneking correctly predicted would lead to a spike in cases. We recently reconnected to discuss the situation in Florida as it stands, now that DeSantis has again prematurely reopened the state. Enneking is dealing with her own fair share of COVID-19 cases as a physician, which combined with her campaign gives her a unique insight into the problems plaguing the state.
I asked Enneking to go through the biggest mistakes made by DeSantis and his GOP cronies. She offered three major indictments.
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“They completely dismissed it and never made sure that places had appropriate amounts of PPE,” she explains. “Testing has been a disaster. In July, when the cases were just skyrocketing, you could not get a test. And if you could get a test, you didn't get the results back for two weeks, so it didn't really do a whole lot of good anyway.”
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“To me, the number two thing in the shop of horrors that we’ve had here was the whole effort to make schools reopen before we got any indication that cases were going to abate at all,” Enneking says. “The head of the Department of Education basically threatened the schools and said, ‘if you don't open brick and mortar schools, you'll lose your funding.’ They said the only way you could get out of that was if you had a pass from your local health officials, and then directed the local health officials to not speak to the schools.
“Richard Corcoran, the education commissioner, has been trying to get rid of public education in Florida for 10 years,” she adds. “And I think he saw his opportunity to do it with this.”
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“We still have no official mask-wearing policy, so it's been this complete patchwork of different regulations in different places,” Enneking says. “It’s just shameful how we've not had any real leadership on that, because clearly, we would have saved lives had we done that.”
Instead of fighting to stop Florida from becoming the biggest COVID hotspot in the country this summer — the state has soared past 14,000 dead and 700,000 cases overall — Republicans in the state have instead put all their effort into simply denying people the right to vote.
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For those who haven’t followed the saga, buckle up and get a pillow to scream into. Floridians voted by an overwhelming margin to restore the voting rights still taken away from the whopping 1.4 million people who had completed prison sentences. Given the corruption and racism of police in Florida, Black and brown people had been disproportionately impacted and stripped of their democratic rights, so it was a massive victory for civil rights.
Then Republicans in the state hijacked the new law. Instead of implementing what people voted for, they added an egregious poll tax to it, requiring the paying back of entirely unrelated fines and fees. It not only made it likely impossible for 800,000 to register, the subsequent legal battle over the law saw the GOP pause all voter registrations even from those who paid fines. That alone was over 85,000 voters.
It was a back-and-forth legal battle, but by September, a federal court — dominated by Trump appointees — ruled that the poll tax could stand. While Michael Bloomberg kicked in a few bucks to help a handful of people register, the reality is that about 700,000 people can still not register to vote. It was an absolute disgrace, and one that Enneking is keen to reverse when she gets to the legislature.
“The fact that the Republican Party of Florida has followed through with their modern-day poll tax is just another example of how they are not interested in following the will of the voters, and would rather suppress voters than try to earn the votes of former felons by running on the issues,” her campaign manager told me in an email. “This attack on the will of Florida voters reinforces how important it is to flip the Florida legislature, and House District 21 is key to flipping the Florida House.”
As if a deadly pandemic and direct assaults on democracy weren’t enough, Enneking noted some of the other things that desperately need to change in the state. High up on that list was the deliberately broken unemployment system, as was expanding Medicaid in the third most populous state in the country. She was always in favor of Medicaid expansion — she’s a doctor, after all — but now more than ever, she feels momentum on the side of providing healthcare to more people.
“Medicaid expansion is really about helping working people who don't get paid much get access to insurance,” she says. “When you lose your job because of a pandemic, that’s not a sign of being a bad person. So, I think it has made that conversation feel much more relevant to people's lives. It’s even more important when you may have to go to the hospital with this disease that may kill you and, if it doesn’t, it will certainly leave you with an enormous bill.”
Enneking is running in one of the closest districts in Florida, within a larger area that is mostly blue. She can win this race. Already they’ve made 15,000 voter contacts, and with a month to go, any and all help will allow them to talk to more voters and get out the vote despite not going door to door (a doctor is not going to put volunteers or homeowners at risk). The more voters that Democrats contact in Florida, the better chance Biden has to win there, too. So helping this campaign will really pay off.
CLICK HERE to Donate to Florida Democrats running to turn the state blue!