Governor DeSantis, taking the stage this week at a convention of conservatives in Florida, called the last few years “The Great American Exodus,” a theme it seems likely he will embroider during his potential quest for the presidency in the coming two years.

The statistics, Mr. DeSantis said in remarks at the National Conservatism Conference at Miami, “are startling.” Since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, he said, “more adjusted gross income [has moved] into the state of Florida than has ever moved into any one state over a similar time period in American history.” 

California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are the ones losing people and wealth, some for the first time, he said. “California,” he claimed, “had never lost people in the history of its state since statehood up until the last couple of years.” Part of what’s so notable, Mr. DeSantis argued, is that this time, the migration has a “political character.” 

“We’ve always had lower taxes,” he argued, “that’s not anything new.”

The result appears to have been a boon for Republican politicians. Many, he noted, feared migration to red states like Florida and Texas from blue states would turn those states purple or blue. The opposite, at least in Florida, appears to have happened. 

In 2018, Mr. DeSantis explained, “there were close to 300,000 more registered Democrats in the state of Florida than Republicans … now [we] have 271,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.” 

Mr. DeSantis also touted his pandemic record, citing as a guide President Eisenhower, who warned that “public policy could be held captive by what he called the scientific and technological elite.” 

Eisenhower, Mr. DeSantis said, argued that “a statesman’s job is not to subcontract out your leadership to a very narrow minded elite. The job of the statesman is to harmonize all the different competing interests that are in society, weighing different values, and then coming up with the proper policy.”

During the pandemic, Mr. DeSantis said, he was right where the experts were wrong — on schools, lockdowns, epidemiological models, hospitalization models, forced masking, the existence of natural immunity, and the efficacy of, among others, the Messenger RNA vaccines. 

Opening schools, he claimed, “was not a very difficult decision” from “a perspective of evidence and data.” It was only a very difficult decision politically, because they “were opposed by almost every major health bureaucrat.”

People moved to Florida, in part, he said, because “they wanted to live in a place that was rational,” poking fun at the “bizarre” outdoor dining enclosures that were considered “safe.”

“The Great American Exodus” has been fruitful for Florida, he proclaimed, and demonstrates why low taxes work. Florida now has “a $22 billion surplus, the largest in the history of the state of Florida,” and it gained that surplus with “no income tax.”

Mr. DeSantis also touted Florida’s education system as a draw. “We have more choice in our K through 12 system,” he argued, “than any state in the country … and our choice is not limited to just private scholarships, but also includes charter schools.” 

Plus, Mr. DeSantis said, “we have higher-performing K through 12 schools and the no. 1-ranked public higher education system in the country. And we do all of that with no income tax and the second lowest per capita tax burden.”

Mr. DeSantis also argued that “one of the main drivers of people wanting to come to the state of Florida was public safety as you saw safety erode in many communities throughout this country.”

“With me as governor, this is a law and order state,” Mr. DeSantis boasted. “We are not gonna let the inmates run the asylum here. We are not gonna release criminals back onto the street.”

“We’re gonna defend law enforcement,” he added. “And we’re gonna make sure that if some of these elected district attorneys put themselves above the law and don’t enforce the law, that we would take action.”

Mr. DeSantis railed against ESG as “an attempt to use corporate and economic power to impose an ideological agenda on society … that could not win at the ballot box.” He hit back against those who criticize him for being a “central planner.”

“Corporatism,” he argued, “is not the same as free enterprise…. I think too many Republicans have viewed limited government to basically mean whatever is best for corporate America is how we want to do the economy.”

The governor articulated his view that “free enterprise is the best economic system, but it is a means to an end. It’s a means to having a good, fulfilling life and a prosperous society. It’s not an end in and of itself…. The United States is a nation that has an economy, not the other way around.”

For example, he argued, giving China most favored nation trade status and letting it into the World Trade Organization may have made “some people in the United States rich, and it’s certainly made China much more powerful and much more dominant.” 

That, though, is “not the best for economics, it’s certainly not the best in terms of geopolitics,” and it’s not the best “when we have security issues,” as we did during Covid, and “almost everything we needed was in China.”

The same approach applies to Big Tech, he argued. Our critics say, “it’s private, let them do what they wanna do, but they cannot be viewed as private entities when we know without a shadow of a doubt that they are doing the regime’s bidding when it comes to censorship decisions.”

These are monopolies, he said, and “what I’m doing is using the government to give space to the individual citizen to be able to participate in society, to be able to speak his or her mind. I think that’s an absolutely appropriate use of government power.”

The governor closed by lashing out at other Republicans. 

“The frustrating thing sometimes with some of the Republicans is that they say great things during the campaign season … [but] the minute it gets tough … they kind of just scurry around to safety because they don’t want to necessarily be the person taking all the arrows.”

“Well,” Mr. DeSantis said, if “you’re not willing to take the arrows, you’re not gonna get anything done. You gotta … do the right thing and let the political chips fall where they may.”