His record was the best of anyone up there.
That's really his biggest strength. He did best in the debate when he was pointing to the record of what he had accomplished rather than just saying what he
would do.
So on the issue of education, he was able to point to banning the teaching of critical race theory and gender studies from Florida classrooms. On the issue of crime, while everybody else just
talked about Soros' prosecutors, he pointed out that he had fired two of them who were refusing to enforce the law in Florida.
To me, that is the real difference between him and the rest of the candidates. We're all used to politicians talking about the things that they would do differently, but it is rare that they can point so specifically to actual examples of how they have done that.
This is also an area where DeSantis is miles above Trump - He has proved his willingness to take strong actions despite massive condemnation from the left. The left and MSM went after him hard for getting CRT and gender studies out of classrooms, but he stuck with it anyway. They did the same thing when he fired the prosecutors, filing lawsuits against him, etc.. But he's stuck to his guns.
The most obvious difference though, is on COVID. RiV's revisionism aside, most of us remember actually reading at the time how much flack DeSantis was taking for defying government recommendations. I remember reading all the articles from the Washington Post, from the New York times, and Fauci's own comments, saying how DeSantis was essentially
murdering older people in Florida. He took all that flak but stuck to his decisions anyway.
In contrast, the excuse we have been offered on this very site for
Trump's actions regarding Fauci and those recommendations is that he would have taken too much political flack if he had rejected Fauci's recommendations or removed him from that position. Trump shied away from that kind of political heat, and DeSantis didn't. That is the difference to me.
