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Hurricane Milton hit Florida real hard last night, causing great devastation in a state that hasn't recovered from Hurricane Helene yet. Good thing climate change is a hoax. Imagine what it would be like if it were real. You can find stories about the hurricane and its damage everywhere, so we'll skip those and get right to the politics of hurricanes.
Hurricanes and natural disasters are not new, of course, but in the past, during the emergency, differences were put aside and everyone pitched in to help the people who were affected. Then the political fight came later, with one party blaming the president for insufficient help and the other one praising him for doing a great job. Same for governors.
This time it is different. It is in the final month of a bitterly fought presidential campaign and the stakes are much higher than politics as usual. Kamala Harris will be expected to show empathy, which she surely will. Donald Trump will not be expected to show empathy, he won't, and nobody will think this is unusual.
During Hurricane Helene, Trump spread misinformation about government aid. He tried to make people believe that the Biden/Harris administration didn't care about them and wouldn't help them. Harris is not going to let him get away with that again. This time she is talking about Trump's position by saying: "It's about him, it's not about you." She is blaming him for politicizing the disaster and trying to use it to help his election instead of focusing on helping people. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell backed her up by saying that Trump was just trying to scare people. The White House also opened an account on Reddit to identify and combat misinformation.
Meanwhile, Trump is trying to create an alternative reality in which Biden and Harris are to blame for illegal immigration, crime, and even the hurricanes themselves. Trump has repeatedly said that Biden has refused to provide aid to Republican areas and Harris has used FEMA's budget to house illegal immigrants. He also said that the government was giving only $750 in aid to people who had lost their homes to Helene. He also claims that Harris is too mentally deficient to be president (despite his own clear decline). These are complete out-and-out lies, but to Trump, the only truth is what he says it is. Nevertheless, millions of people believe everything he says.
Harris is trying to counter this by running ads showing former Trump administration officials saying that as president Trump intentionally withheld aid from Democratic-leaning areas. The officials had to show him figures to convince him that withholding aid would also affect millions of people who voted for him. Here is one of them.
Harris is repeatedly pointing out that Trump puts his own needs before those of the American people and saying that he has no empathy at all for people in the path of the disaster.
Politically, the two most important hurricanes in recent years were Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012. George W. Bush was widely lambasted for ignoring all the suffering in New Orleans during Katrina by hanging out in sunny Arizona at John McCain's birthday party. That overshadowed his whole second term. In contrast, Barack Obama's handling of superstorm Sandy won him praise and helped him defeat Mitt Romney. During Sandy, then-governor Chris Christie worked closely with Obama and thanked him for the help to his state.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) now has a choice to make. Will he make nice to Biden, as Christie did to Obama, in an attempt to maximize the aid his state gets? Or will he spurn Biden in order to help his 2028 presidential campaign? If he embraces Biden, his opponents in 2028 will call him a RINO and a secret Democrat. If he tells Biden to keep out of the way and people suffer badly in Florida, his 2028 opponents will claim he demonstrated that he couldn't run a lemonade stand, let alone the whole country. Turns out having to actually govern is tough. Who knew? What DeSantis may try to do is somehow work with Biden to maximize aid but at the same time blame Harris for the hurricane in the first place. It won't be easy.
DeSantis is not the only Florida politician on the spot now. Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D) is running this ad against her opponent, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL):
In the ad, Mucarsel-Powell says that as governor, Scott took millions in campaign contributions from insurance companies and then let them raise property insurance rates and deny claims. Property insurance is a sore point in Florida since premiums are now so high, many people go without it. When uninsured people's homes are destroyed by a surge, they are in deep mud, literally and financially. The ad also notes that as a senator, Scott has voted against aid to impacted areas. This could be an effective ad in the aftermath of two hurricanes. Our take from the ad is that Mucarsel-Powell speaks with no trace of a Spanish accent at all, even though she lived the first 14 years of her life in Ecuador. She looks and sounds like a generic blonde suburban Florida woman, and that could help her with Republican voters. Nobody watching the ad would think "immigrant."
Also worth noting is that all but two counties on Florida's West Coast voted for Trump in 2020. The two exceptions are Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties (Tampa and west of Tamp, respectively). If voting is depressed on the West Coast but not in South Florida, that could help Harris and Mucarsel-Powell. We may know more once it is clear where the worst damage is and how bad it is. (V)