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.

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.

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........

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