I currently split my time between my off-grid life in the Appalachians that we're working on making a real full time homestead and suburban Florida. Every time we take a little time up north and then come back south I swear it's noticeably further to the political right. I'm going to preface this with the fact that I am vehemently anti-DeSantis, so don't come at me with any "DeSantis apologist" crap.
This is going to be unpopular amongst most of the people that I follow on here, but, I think it needs to be said, so I'm going to say it.
I see a lot of posts about Florida teachers here, and understandably so, there’s a lot of wild stuff coming from the Governor’s office. Unfortunately probably 99% of those posts come from outside of the state and I’m here to tell you something.
I don't know exactly how to say this, so I usually stay outside of political conversations here, but, calls for a teacher strike or all of the "I'm outraged at Florida" posts really reek of outsider echo chamber. I don't want to be the "Sure that sounds great, but" guy all the time, so I just don't get into it. They just aren’t representative of the people in Florida, though.
I mean, I agree with the outrage and all, but, look, the reality on the ground here is that even the majority of teachers love DeSantis across the state. I say this as the husband of a longtime teacher here who’s no longer in the classroom, but stays plugged into the local community of teachers. She's in a lot of teacher chat groups. There's no mass outrage. This morning the biggest discussion I saw amongst teachers was them talking about how kids are "rightfully angry and lashing out these days because the government came in and locked them down in their homes" years ago....for all of like two weeks, but, honestly, that’s the predominant discussion here.
The last data that I saw from the Florida teacher's union was that about half of teachers voted for Hillary and only about 30% of them identify as Democrats. There's not a ton of ideological outrage about any of this, frankly, and it's hyper localized. Know how many counties voted against DeSantis all of three months ago? 5. Out of 67. Two around Tallahassee, one at Jacksonville, one at Orlando and one north of Miami. Even Tampa voted for DeSantis this time.
@BE I'm really sorry to see that they all got it wrong
@BE Yikes.