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More people live in Florida than in New York state, where the budget is nearly twice as big. From kindergarten through high school New York spends more than twice as much as Florida to educate each pupil, yet eighth-graders in both states score comparably on standardised tests, and Florida achieves higher high-school graduation rates, particularly for black and Hispanic students. Florida is building homes faster and, along with cheaper housing, it has a higher rate of home ownership and a lower incidence of homelessness than New York. At 3.1% in December, the unemployment rate was a third lower in Florida.
Florida has its relative demerits, including more people without health insurance and a higher rate of homicide. But for its services the state charges its citizens no income tax, whereas New York imposes some of the highest rates in the country. Corporate taxes are also lower in Florida. Overall, Americans are concluding the balance favours Florida: its population grew by another 365,000 last year, while New York’s shrank by 102,000, continuing a four-year trend.
All of which is to say that Democrats should be grateful that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, for reasons of conviction or perceived political interest, proved to be such a ferocious culture warrior. Had he been capable of running his state, and running for president, as a sunny champion of low-cost, effective government—the kind of candidate for whom reasonable people in both parties yearn—who knows how far he might have gone, and how little hope Democrats in Florida might have of ever clawing their way back to political daylight.
True, they are in a deep hole. From an advantage of 260,000 registered voters when Donald Trump took office in 2017, Democrats were trailing by almost 800,000 by December. That swing came thanks to bad candidates and feeble organising in the face of a disciplined Republican operation. Failure begat more failure as donors closed their chequebooks. Republicans now hold all elected statewide offices and a supermajority in the legislature.
But Florida politicos of both parties think Mr DeSantis weakened himself with his oafish presidential bid. Because of Florida’s term limits, he cannot run for governor again and so has less political leverage than he once did. In January Democrats flipped a state-House district in central Florida that a Republican carried easily in 2022. The Democrat there, a navy veteran, stressed bread-and-butter issues and protecting the right to abortion, whereas his opponent inveighed against “the woke mob”. Democrats also did the hard work to turn out the vote that they had been neglecting.
Democrats were further heartened by the uproar last month after a teacher in Miami-Dade County sent a permission slip home asking parents to authorise the reading of “a book written by an African-American”, as part of Black History Month. Mr DeSantis testily insisted no such slip was required under his parental-notification law, known as the “Stop WOKE Act”. But other news reports have described the frustration of teachers and parents over having to fill out new forms for pupils to hear from speakers such as a Holocaust survivor.
The politics of abortion will supply the surest indication of whether one-party rule has led Mr DeSantis to overreach, as Democrats have at times in Democratic states like New York. In his first term Mr DeSantis signed a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. After he got the supermajority in 2022 and set his sights on the White House, he signed a six-week ban. Neither is in effect because the state Supreme Court is reviewing the 15-week ban. If the court upholds it, the six-week limit would take effect a month later. Polling suggests even most Republicans oppose it.
Early this year opponents of the ban produced the 891,000 signatures required to put a referendum on the ballot this autumn to protect abortion until about 24 weeks. They overcame new obstacles imposed by the legislature by mobilising some 10,000 volunteers. The referendum is also before the state Supreme Court.
Florida is not a swing state this year, though President Joe Biden will probably try to bait Mr Trump into spending money there. State Democrats are looking beyond Mr Biden and Mr Trump. (Isn’t it reassuring that some people are?) They want to rebuild their voter base and political bench with an eye to 2028 and beyond. With north Florida solidly red, the state party is focusing on central and south Florida, in particular the most populous county, Miami-Dade. In a sign of how serious the Democrats’ problems are, and of how seriously the leadership takes them, the state party leader in early March suspended three local party chairmen she thought were underperforming, including in Miami-Dade.
Night and Dade
The party is embarking on a voter-registration drive in Miami-Dade. Operatives point to one Democratic candidate for county office there whose father was kidnapped by leftist Colombian guerrillas, and another whose family fled from Cuba, as evidence that Democrats have learned from their damaging dalliance with Bernie-Sanders-style “socialism”. They are also resisting putting causes like LGBTQ rights front and centre, having seen how that can backfire. “All we’ve done in the last two years is take the trans community and, worse, trans kids, and put them on the radar of Republicans to be shot at,” says one experienced Democratic strategist. He says Democrats instead need to emphasise protecting freedoms for everyone—and stop using terms like “LatinX”, which irritates many Latino voters, among others.
Republican electoral successes in New York have prompted Democratic leaders to press back against some excesses of their own one-party rule. Whether or not Florida ever becomes a presidential swing state again, its citizens would benefit from a return to the intense, respectful partisan competition that provided Mr DeSantis with the happy story he did such a poor job of telling. ■
HOW REPUBLICANS will find enough budget savings to pay for tax cuts is the political maths question of 2025. One of the most important calculations involves Medicaid, a government health programme for poor and disabled Americans. The problem is that Donald Trump has promised not to touch it, pledging to protect it for “the most vulnerable, for our kids, pregnant women.” On May 12th he also promised to lower prescription drug prices, although his plan is vague. Mr Trump’s populism on health benefits complicates the work of congressional Republicans hoping to slash spending. The committee that oversees Medicaid has finally released its proposal. Its outline steers clear of the deepest cuts that had been debated in Washington, but it nonetheless seeks large savings by imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients who are unemployed.
Shipping containers are seen at the port of Oakland, as trade tensions continued over U.S. tariffs with China, in Oakland, California, U.S., May 12, 2025.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
Receipts from U.S. tariffs hit a record level in April as revenue from President Donald Trump’s trade war started kicking in.
Customs duties totaled $16.3 billion for the month, some 86% above the $8.75 billion collected during March and more than double the $7.1 billion a year ago, the Treasury Department reported Monday.
That brought the year-to-date total for the duties up to $63.3 billion and more than 18% ahead of the same period in 2024. Trump instituted 10% across-the-board tariffs on U.S. imports starting April 2, which came on top of other select duties he had leveled previously.
While the U.S. is still running a massive budget deficit, the influx in tariffs helped shave some of the imbalance for April, a month in which the Treasury generally runs a surplus because of the income tax filing deadline hitting in mid-month.
The surplus totaled $258.4 billion for the month, up 23% from the same period a year ago. That cut the fiscal year-to-date total to $1.05 trillion, which is still 13% higher than a year ago.
Also on an annual basis, receipts rose 10% in April from 2024, while outlays declined 4%. Year to date, receipts are up 5%, while expenditures have risen 9%.
High interest rates are still posing a budgetary burden. Net interest on the $36.2 trillion national debt totaled $89 billion in April, higher than every other category except Social Security. For the fiscal year, net interest has run to $579 billion, also second highest of any outlay.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that the trade agreement reached over the weekend represents another stage in the U.S. shaking its reliance on Chinese products.
Though the U.S. “decoupling” itself from its need for cheap imports from the China has been discussed for years, the process has been a slow one and unlikely to ever mean a complete break.
However, Bessent said there are now specific elements of decoupling in place that are vital to U.S. interests. The U.S. imported nearly $440 billion in goods from China in 2024, running a $295.4 billion trade deficit.
“We do not want a generalized decoupling from China,” he said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “But what we do want is a decoupling for strategic necessities, which we were unable to obtain during Covid and we realized that efficient supply chains were not resilient supply chains.”
When the pandemic struck in 2020, demand in the U.S. shifted from one reliant more on services to a greater focus on goods. That meant greater difficulty in obtaining material for multiple products including big-ticket appliances and automobiles. The technology industry, with its reliance on semiconductors, was also hit. What followed was an inflation surge in the U.S. not seen in more than 40 years.
The details of the U.S.-China pact are still sketchy, but U.S. officials have said so-called reciprocal tariffs will be suspended though broad-based 10% duties will remain in effect.
“We are going to create our own steel. [Tariffs] protect our steel industry. They work on critical medicines, on semiconductors,” Bessent said. “We are doing that, and the reciprocal tariffs have nothing to do with the specific industry tariffs.”
The agreement between the two sides is essentially a 90-day pause that will see reciprocal duties halted though the 10% tariff as well as a 20% charge related to fentanyl remain in place.
Bessent expressed encouragement on the fentanyl issue in which Chinese officials “are now serious about assisting the U.S. in stopping the flow of precursor drugs.” Bessent did not indicate a specific date when the next round of talks will be held but indicated it should be in the next several weeks.