Republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

When Ron DeSantis was first elected governor of Florida in November 2018, he won with a margin of just over 30,000 votes – less than four-tenths of 1% of all the votes cast in the election.

At that time, Florida was the biggest swing state in presidential politics, and DeSantis had hitched his wagon to Donald Trump, a president who had only narrowly won the state two years earlier.

Immediately after the election, DeSantis requested that his staff assemble a binder of information about the powers afforded him as governor.

I’m a political scientist with firsthand experience in state political campaigns. My research with colleagues on Florida elections will be published in a forthcoming book in January 2027.

Over the past eight years, I have observed how DeSantis has mastered the powers of his office. While the governor leaves behind countless new conservative policies, perhaps his most lasting legacy is how he wielded and expanded those powers.

Veto power

Throughout his time in office, DeSantis benefited from a Republican majority in the Legislature, which became a supermajority at the start of his second term in 2022.

But he didn’t rely on partisanship alone to ensure his legislative agenda would pass. He held lawmakers in check by wielding line-item veto power over their pet projects. This allowed him to control the legislative agenda with little pushback for most of his tenure.

One illustration of this is what happened in Republican stronghold Manatee County in 2025: The county faced DeSantis’ wrath after local officials criticized his pro-development legislation and voters rejected his handpicked candidates at the ballot box in November 2024. Months later, DeSantis vetoed all US$4 million in budget requests by county lawmakers and placed the county under a state DOGE audit.

The pandemic years

No issue has defined DeSantis’ image and political legacy more than Florida’s response to COVID-19. The governor used the pandemic to enhance his authority with emergency powers, an expanded budget with personal control over federal funds and, later, a popular reversal of pandemic restrictions on public life.

Initially, DeSantis followed the lead of the Trump administration’s public health authorities and ordered emergency lockdowns in March 2020. But by August of that year, Florida had mostly reopened. DeSantis recounted in his memoir how he concluded that reopening was safer than commonly assumed, based on his own reading of public health research.

Ultimately, Florida’s public health record during COVID was mixed. The state initially ranked 26th in COVID-related deaths per capita during the first wave, due to vaccine promotion and protective public health measures for older adults. But after the delta and omicron waves of the virus in the summer and fall of 2021, the state climbed to eighth in deaths per capita.

By 2025, Florida had recorded over 100,000 COVID-related deaths.

Many newcomers moved to Florida during the pandemic, with some seeking the state’s less restrictive COVID-19 policies and many registering as Republicans.

Expanding executive power

Partly in response to COVID-19, in 2022, the state Legislature created a special $500 million emergency fund that the governor could access in response to a declared emergency without needing to wait for legislative approval.

On Jan. 6, 2023, DeSantis declared a state of immigration emergency over an influx of migrants to the Florida coast. For the past three years, he has renewed this emergency declaration every 60 days.

During that time, DeSantis has used his emergency powers to spend more than $1 billion on federal immigrant detention centers. This includes Alligator Alcatraz, a detention center built on protected land in the Everglades, where detainees were kept in conditions that U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz, D-Fla., described as “cruel and unnecessary” after her visit to the site.

The emergency declaration allowed DeSantis to use no-bid contracts and funds that the federal government has yet to reimburse to construct the facility.

The declaration of emergency has also allowed the governor to deploy the Florida National Guard to work with federal authorities to stop immigrants from landing on Florida shores. During the second Trump administration, DeSantis has required state and local law enforcement authorities to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement officers. Immigration-related arrests have quietly surged in Florida since Trump took office in January 2025.

A conservative warrior for policy change

While speaking to conservative audiences nationwide, DeSantis has called on his audience to put on the “full armor of God.” This quote from the book of Ephesians invokes themes of Christian nationalism.

He has delivered on those priorities by enacting the enshrinement of parental rights in education, universal vouchers for private schools, a six-week abortion ban and a series of bills targeting the LGBTQ community.

He even took on the Walt Disney Co.’s private fiefdom in Florida, dissolving their special district after they opposed him on policy and creating one of his own in its place.

Higher education reform

DeSantis, who attended Ivy League universities, also used the powers of his office to remake the Florida state university system through appointments to the Board of Governors and boards of university trustees. In January 2023, DeSantis announced that he was appointing six new trustees to the board of New College of Florida in Sarasota. Several had ties to conservative think tanks. DeSantis’ commissioner of education announced his hope that they would remake the college into the “Hillsdale of the South,” referencing the conservative Christian college in Michigan.

Many of the initiatives begun at New College have become a model for the entire state university system. DeSantis has called for a less “ideological” university system, which, in practice, has meant closing diversity offices, censoring sociology courses, post-tenure reviews for professors and more administrative oversight over faculty hiring. He has also begun the process of creating a new system of higher education accreditation for Florida and like-minded states.

Partisan remake of the state – and elections

After two terms as governor, DeSantis leaves Florida much more conservative than he found it. The once-purple state is now much redder, with Republican voter registrations outnumbering Democratic ones by 1.5 million voters statewide. And the governor has taken measures to ensure that the trend will continue.

In 2022, DeSantis created an Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate allegations of voter fraud, though there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state. Voting rights groups view the office’s enforcement actions as a form of voter intimidation, raising doubt in the minds of eligible voters as to whether they can vote.

DeSantis signed legislation that tightened restrictions on voting by mail, a method that has become especially popular with Democrats since the pandemic.

DeSantis made it harder for groups to register new voters and easier to purge voters from the rolls if they do not vote regularly. In addition, he has made it more difficult for citizens to amend the state constitution by ballot initiative.

He also delivered on Trump’s demands for unprecedented mid-decade congressional redistricting. He pushed partisan gerrymandered maps through the Florida Legislature that were allowed by a Florida Supreme Court stacked with judges he had appointed. The new maps were drawn in hopes of winning Republicans as many as four new congressional seats.

What’s next for Florida

But while DeSantis’ conservative policies cement a legacy that will be difficult to overturn, the political fate of Florida remains less fixed. DeSantis has officially endorsed U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., in the 2026 gubernatorial race against Democratic candidate David Jolly, a former congressman. The rising number of independent voters, in particular, could make the election competitive. And it’s hard to predict how Republicans’ current unpopularity on the national stage will affect state and local races.

So it’s an open question as to whether Florida will remain the red “Free State of Florida,” where law and order come first and, as DeSantis put it, “where woke goes to die.”

Liv Coleman, Professor of Political Science and International Studies, University of Tampa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Disclosure: The author is affiliated with the Manatee County Democratic Party, according to the disclosure statement on the original article.