The two-term Florida governor discussed the state’s rightward movement under his leadership, attributing the shift to tax cuts and his fight against lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Josh Blake
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On Friday evening, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (YC ‘01) delivered the keynote address at the Buckley Institute’s fifteenth annual conference. In his speech, DeSantis emphasized the need for bold leadership on issues like education and taxes, and reflected on his state’s recent electoral shifts to the right.
DeSantis, who was first elected to governor in 2019, has repeatedly stirred national controversy for his conservative reforms in the state of Florida. His tenure has featured limiting classroom instruction on issues of sex and gender, suspending progressive prosecutors from their posts, and banning gender-affirming care for minors. DeSantis is ineligible to run for reelection in 2026, though he is eligible for a nonconsecutive return to office.
To open his speech, DeSantis touted Florida’s economic growth since his ascent to the state’s governor in 2019.
“We’re ranked the number one economy in all fifty states three years in a row,” DeSantis told the crowd. “Since I’ve been governor, we’ve had more adjusted gross income move into the state of Florida than has ever moved into an American state over a similar period of time in the history of the United States of America.”
In the past decade, interstate migration has left Florida with an additional $196 billion in adjusted gross income, while states like California and New York have lost a combined $213 billion—with experts attributing much of the migration to states like Florida to their lower taxes. Shortly after his election in 2019, DeSantis proposed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax cuts.
DeSantis also recounted his decision to fight against mandatory stay-home orders at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. “As a leader, there’s only certain times where it really matters,” DeSantis said. “And Covid was one where it really mattered. Is someone gonna fight for you? Is someone gonna stand up for you when the chips are down?”
According to a 2023 analysis by the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, Florida’s pandemic response ranked nineteenth nationally in the health sector (as determined by deaths and infections per capita) and fourth in economy and education. “I cared more about preserving [Floridians’] jobs than I did about preserving my own,” DeSantis added.
In addition to keeping schools open, DeSantis’ record on education includes conservative reforms like Florida’s 2022 Parental Rights in Education bill, which limited K-3 instruction on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2023, DeSantis banned public colleges and universities in Florida from spending money on DEI initiatives.
“We were the first state to eliminate DEI from our public higher education institutions. We don’t need discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination in Florida, and we don’t need it anywhere in the country,” DeSantis said.
In Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial election, Florida Democrats led Republicans in voter registration by over 263,000. In 2025, Republicans hold a steady lead of approximately 1.35 million—a shift DeSantis argued wouldn’t have happened under “squish” leadership.
“I may have earned fifty percent of the vote, but I earned one hundred percent of the executive power,” DeSantis said of his 2018 victory, in which he held a slim margin of only 30,000 votes. “There is no way you would’ve gone from three hundred thousand in the hole to 1.4 million in the black in voter registration if you were some squish Republican. That would not have happened, and most of the successes we have had would not have happened.”
In his speech’s closing, DeSantis also called for a return to traditional conservatism in the face of modern politics.
“Is conservatism relevant or not?” DeSantis asked rhetorically. “They’ll kind of caricature it as like, ‘this policy from the 80s,’ this or that. I’m talking about an underlying set of values. I’m talking about principles that are enduring. … No matter where the winds of public opinion blow, north is still north.”
This year, the Buckley Institute’s annual conference recorded a record 400 registrants, up from last year’s 310. In addition to DeSantis, the conference featured CNN senior political contributor Scott Jennings and the American Enterprise Institute’s director of domestic studies Matthew Continetti.