Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis traveled to Midland, Mich. for the Midland Republican Party’s annual Dave Camp Spring Breakfast Thursday morning. The event highlighted Florida’s policies in areas like education, COVID-19 and law enforcement and was attended by Michigan Republicans such as House Minority Leader Matt Hall, R-Comstock Township.
About 50 protestors gathered across from the Great Hall Banquet and Convention Center where the breakfast was held, holding signs reading “Proud to be woke” and “Ban bigots not books.”
Kate Stymiest, who graduated from Alma College in 2022 and lives in Mount Pleasant, Mich., told The Michigan Daily she is originally from Midland and traveled to the event to protest DeSantis’ policies and beliefs.
“I believe that the policies that Ron DeSantis stands for are only going to bring about fascism and wreck our efforts to create an equal and diverse country,” Stymiest said. “I think they’re dangerous and it’s just going to lead to more death and suicide of trans kids, of gay kids, of women who carry children or don’t want to carry children.”
Inside the convention center, Cathy Leikhim, chair of the Midland County Republican Party, kicked off the programming by expressing her gratitude to attendees and DeSantis specifically for supporting Thursday’s event.
“Governor DeSantis, your presence at today’s event has elevated our local party, and it has energized Republicans from far and wide across the entire state of Michigan,” Leikhim said. “We know your time is valuable, but we thank you for sharing the blueprint that you have for your great state of Florida with us.”
Bill Schuette, former Michigan Attorney General and 2018 gubernatorial candidate, said he and Midland County Republicans are working to elect more Republicans in 2024.
“We in Midland, and across the 83 counties in Michigan, need to have principled conservative leadership,” Bill Schuette said. “And our goal, our objective, our mission is to take back the statehouse in 2024 and elect a Republican to the presidency of the United States of America.”
Currently, the state’s House, Senate and governorship are all controlled by Democrats following the 2022 midterm elections. State Rep. Bill G. Schuette, R-Midland, spoke to the audience after his father to criticize recent actions by state Democrats, including the introduction of a host of gun control bills to the legislature, as well as the repeal of the state’s right-to-work law and the “read-or-flunk” provision of the Read by Grade Three law.
“Michigan’s third-grade reading scores are ranked near the bottom of the entire nation, and the far-left Democrats and the state Board of Education solution is to remove Michigan’s third-grade reading requirement,” Bill G. Schuette said. “So instead of eliminating reading requirements, we should eliminate the state Board of Education. Parents are in charge of their child’s education, not state bureaucrats.”
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed the repeal of the “read-or-flunk” provision March 24 after it was passed largely along party lines in the state House and Senate. State Democrats have said the “read-or-flunk” policy, signed by Whitmer’s Republican predecessor Rick Snyder, harms students psychologically and disproportionately targets low-income and minority students.
DeSantis then took the stage to highlight legislation he has signed since he was first elected in 2018, saying he has and will continue to use his executive powers to further his conservative agenda.
“In 2018, I got elected the governor of Florida by 32,000 votes out of over 8 million votes cast — less than one-half of one percentage point,” DeSantis said. “A lot of people were telling me ‘Don’t rock the boat, closely divided state, you got to kind of lay low, bide your time’ and all this stuff. And I understood that advice, but I rejected that advice. My view is that I may have earned 50% of the vote, but that entitled me to wield 100% of the executive power, and I intended to use that to advance a bold agenda.”
DeSantis is widely expected to run for president in 2024 but has yet to officially announce his campaign. Former President Donald Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have all officially declared their Republican candidacy for the presidency in 2024, with Trump poised as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential primary in recent polls.
Amid speculation about his potential candidacy, DeSantis has traveled to multiple early primary states including Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as visits to New York, Chicago and Philadelphia — all Democrat-led cities — to speak about supporting law enforcement.
In his remarks, DeSantis foregrounded legislation he signed to prevent progressive criminal justice reforms like ending cash bail and reducing police budgets.
“We did legislation to prohibit local governments from defunding the police,” DeSantis said. “We recruit police officers from around the country and if they come to Florida, they get a $5,000 signing bonus but we’re proud to stand with the people who wear the uniform. We also reject soft-on-crime policies, like eliminating cash bail.”
DeSantis added that efforts to bolster law enforcement in the country must also extend to border security, citing a mass influx of migrants into states like Florida and Texas that share land and maritime borders with other countries.
“The rule of law is yes, the law and order in our cities and in our towns and communities, but it also means you need to have law and order at our Southern border,” DeSantis said. “In Florida, we’ve really led the way to combat illegal immigration. When I became governor, we banned sanctuary cities in the state of Florida. We sued Biden and won over his catch-and-release policy, which is not lawful.”
DeSantis’ ban on sanctuary cities has since been struck down by a federal judge in Miami. His ongoing lawsuit against the catch-and-release policy, which allows undocumented migrants to be released on parole from detention centers, claims the practice is not lawful. U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell sided with the state of Florida in the case, though the Biden administration is expected to file an appeal.
DeSantis also discussed Florida’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic and criticized Anthony Fauci, former chief medical advisor to the president of United States, and the Biden administration for their recommendations and policies on masks and vaccines, including the requirement that all companies with 100 or more employees require vaccines or mandate regular testing. This policy has since been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We were the first state in the country to ban COVID shot mandates for schoolchildren,” DeSantis said. “We were the first state in the country to ban vaccine passports and we were the first state in the country to call a special session of the Florida legislature when we saw corporations and the Biden administration trying to cause people to lose their jobs if they did not get a shot. So we’ve enacted protections in Florida so nobody had to choose between a job they need and a shot they don’t want.”
DeSantis also highlighted his controversial decision to reopen schools at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as a critical piece of his broader agenda on education.
“We’ve had more families move into Florida since I’ve been governor than anytime before,” DeSantis said. “And yes, we made sure schools were open, which was not true in most parts of the country in 2020 and we did a lot of things but I think it’s our approach to education that appeals to a lot of parents.”
As governor, DeSantis has signed an array of legislation related to education on race, gender and sexual identity, including a 2021 ban on critical race theory in schools — which prohibited the teaching K-12 students about the history of racism in the U.S. — and the 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its critics, which prohibits education on gender and sexuality in public schools. More recently, DeSantis banned AP African American Studies from the state of Florida, arguing that it violates the state’s existing laws on education and will soon consider a bill that would ban teaching elementary school students about menstruation.
DeSantis has also continued to restrict access to opportunities for transgender children outside of the classroom, including signing a law in 2021 which bans transgender student-athletes from competing in school sports. He highlighted this law in his remarks, as well as a policy that would revoke the medical license of any health care professional who provides gender-affirming hormones or surgery to minors.
DeSantis said he has been disappointed by Republicans’ performance in recent elections and hopes to see the rest of the country adopt campaign and legislative approaches similar to his own.
“What I see around the country with Republicans is they started to develop a culture of losing,” DeSantis said. “We saw it in Wisconsin with the Supreme Court race, we saw it with the very disappointing midterm elections. In Florida, we have a culture of winning, we have a culture of execution and we have a culture of delivering results.”
Daily News Editor Samantha Rich can be reached at sammrich@umich.edu.