Sunshine statement: Ron DeSantis’s Florida

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

You know, one of the perks about.

Having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to.

The big man up north.

And this year he wants you to.

Know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint.

Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month.

Now you don't even need to wrap it.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing.

You a very happy half off holiday.

Because right now Mint Mobile is offering.

You the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means half day. Yeah. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow. 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The traditions of marriage may vary, but the contours of divorce are often similar. Sometimes nasty battles over who owns what and who will look after the children. That is changing as reforms make divorce cheaper, quicker and a bit less adversarial. And demand for rhinoceros horn has pushed the creatures to the brink. But that's not just a worry for the rhinos. Researchers who studiously examined piles of dung have found why extinction would also come at great cost to rhinos. Preferred fruity snacks. First up, though, Florida is home to many exotic creatures. Perhaps most recognizably, the habitual golfer.

First on T 45th President of the United States 45th and 47th 46.

Yes, Donald Trump on the links last week once again hinted at a 2024 bid to return to the White House. His most likely competition for the Republican nomination would come in the form of another Florida resident, Governor Ron DeSantis, a role for which he received Mr. Trump's endorsement in 2018. As talk of Mr. DeSantis potential presidential run has spread, the pair aren't so cozy anymore. And what kind of leader might he be? Well, just look at how things are going under him as governor.

Florida is America's third largest state and it's arguably the most important swing state. So people spend a lot of time trying to predict what Floridians are thinking and how they're going to vote.

Alexandra Sewage Bass is our senior correspondent for politics, technology and Society.

So I've been driving around the state of Florida quite a bit and I spent some time in Tallahassee. Steve Shale, who is a Democratic operative who helped get Obama elected in Florida as president, took me around the state capitol.

Where are we standing? So we were standing right when you walk into the, what we call the new Capitol, built in the mid-70s and.

Showed me the portraits of the various governors we've had. And this state seal, it has the.

Five seals of governments. That Florida flag flew over Florida, including the American flag, obviously the Spanish, twice.

The British for a short period of.

Time, and the Confederacy, the seal, which is still here.

I came to Tallahassee to try and understand how the state's political direction when it comes to state government was likely to tell us how Florida is changing and might affect the national picture. You have Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis running for reelection this November and he certainly has his eye on the White House. This legislative session in Florida is in full swing and so it shows a lot about DeSantis political values and potentially America's political direction.

How is it that Governor DeSantis has ended up in a plausible position to run for the presidency? What's the background here?

In 2018, Donald Trump endorsed unexpectedly Ron DeSantis in his campaign for governor. Before Trump came forward and endorsed DeSantis, he was not likely to win. And so his rise happened very quickly. And his win was really unexpected. It was also importantly, quite narrow. He won by a margin of 4/10 of a percent. He has used his position as governor to really elevate his national profile since taking office. And COVID 19 certainly handed him challenges, but it also handed him a pretty remarkable opportunity as he's tried to shape a national profile. He has fought mask mandates in schools. He was early to push for schools to reopen. He's fought vaccine mandates, workers denied employment due to heavy handed mandates, and Americans.

Denied freedoms due to a coercive biomedical apparatus. These unprecedented policies have been as ineffective as they have been destructive.

He attacks the Biden administration on a daily basis, decrying Biden's biomedical security state. And he describes Florida as the freest state in the United States.

And how much of that agenda do you see in the current legislative session that you said is in full swing.

We see a lot of DeSantis political ideology, right down to how the budget is being described this year. It's marketed as a Freedom first budget. That's about $100 billion. That includes some issues that are national in scope, don't necessarily have to do with Florida's issues. For example, creating a special police force to oversee state elections. That one's quite controversial. He wants to make it easier to penalize companies, transport illegal immigrants to Florida. And then he has some quite populist stances, not necessarily what you'd expect a budget conscious Republican to be in favor of. He's wanting to offer pay rises for teachers and law enforcement and a billion dollar holiday from the state's petrol tax. It's important to note that despite the DeSantis administration railing against the Biden administration, in fact, a lot of the state's plans are being funded by federal stimulus money.

And all of that just in the budget that say he's putting forward. What else is the legislature dealing with that bears his imprint?

Florida is taking on Republican priorities that are happening nationally. And so we see a lot of red meat social issues that are being tackled. For example, the legislature is planning to pass a law blocking discussions about subjects that make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress on account of race.

Nobody wants this crap, okay? This is an elite driven phenomenon being driven by bureaucratic elites, elites and universities and elites in corporate America, and they're trying to shove it down the throats of the American people.

Not so coded allusion to critical race theory, which factored in pretty majorly in the Virginia governor's race recently. Another proposal would ban discussion of sexuality and gender identity in public school classrooms. There's also a proposal to ban abortions after 15 weeks.

And I have to say, Alexandra, I'm a native Floridian. I chew my nails through election nights every. Every year. And the discussion for a long time had been that as Florida becomes more diverse, as its populations change, it would just end up leaning more Democratic. It would be more sort of stably Democratic. That is clearly not what's going on here. Why do you suppose that is so?

I think Florida is absolutely a swing state when it comes to national elections, but when it comes to its state government, it is decidedly Republic. Republicans are saying now that Florida is a purple state that's leaning red. They absolutely feel momentum is on their side and that they point to voter registration numbers. For the first time in modern history, we have the number of registered Republicans exceeding the registered number of Democrats. I spoke with Chris Sprouls, the Speaker of the House, about this, and he thought that the number of people who are moving to Florida from other American states will only help Florida continue to trend red because people are moving, he argues, due to Republican policies. Now we're seeing people move here.

They're, they seem to be, you know.

Registering as Republicans or at least in.

Large part, and realizing that there's a reason that they chose to come here. So hopefully that holds true.

I mean, I think sometimes you worry.

About people sort of default instincts kick in about where they used to live. But I think that what is a counteract to that is good policy. I've always said, you know, good policy.

Some of the other reasons that Florida is shifting to the right in its state politics are that the Republican Party's very united under DeSantis and Democrats are in as weak a position as they have ever been in state government.

And the talk outside of Florida, of course, is about just how far Mr.

DeSantis could go within Florida. DeSantis is viewed to be the forerunner for president, of course, so much will depend on whether Trump in fact runs. But he's getting a lot of support, especially within the business community. He's an interesting figure and in some ways an unlikely one. He's very warm, wonkish. He comes from Ivy League schools, Harvard, Yale. He was originally, when he was first elected, a bit more balanced. He emphasized the environment. He was kind of into the details and now, of course, has been really grandstanding on a lot of political issues. He really has momentum on his side in many ways. Florida is booming. It reopened very early on during COVID so its businesses have been thriving much more than businesses in other states. And people are relocating to the state, which is in some ways a strong endorsement of Florida's policies, or at least that's how DeSantis will market it. And so it's hard for Democrats in both the 2022 election, but even beyond to make a case that DeSantis has not been good for Florida. I think a lot of the conversation, though, will have to do with COVID 19 and his policies. He has been very anti science in some of his appointments and some of his statements, refusing, for example, to say whether or not he's gotten his booster sh. And so the political discussions around DeSantis's record are sure to be fraught and very controversial.

Alexandra, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason. Always a pleasure.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondents, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@exterator.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. If you want to get married quickly, there's one place in the world to go. Las Vegas. But in the mid 20th century, it was ending marriages that was Sin City's specialty.

With Nevada's six weeks residence law, easy divorces are a big attraction for Las Vegas.

The procedure is unbelievably simple.

Will you state your name please?

Helen Craig.

Either half of the unhappy couple could take up residence in Nevada and get a divorce as quickly as was possible in America.

On the steps of the Las Vegas.

Courthouse, life begins again for thousands of women each year.

Well, six weeks ago when I first.

Came to Las Vegas, I thought I would have a look at another man. But since yesterday, I've changed my mind. It might have been seen as the debasement of an institution at the time, but Nevada was onto an idea that's only now spreading across the rich world. Divorce is increasingly seen as a relationship problem, not a legal one. That means solving the problem with less fighting, lower costs, fewer estrangements, and less reason to head to Nevada.

In most rich countries, divorce rates have either dropped or remained roughly the same since the early 1990s. And that's mostly driven by a fall in marriage rates.

Elise Burr writes about foreign affairs for the Economist.

Also in that time, divorce has gotten easier in about 30 of the 38 members of the OECD, which is a club of rich countries in.

In what sense easier?

Well, more countries are allowing no fault divorce, which is where the government doesn't need to know specifically why you're getting divorced, just that you are so a couple can mark down, say, irreconcilable differences. Sweden first allowed this in 1915, Australia did it in 1975, and New York was the last American state to do so in 2010. And in April of this year, England and Wales are about to allow it. As of right now, in England and Wales, one spouse has to accuse the other of either adultery, unreasonable behavior or desertion, or the couple has to wait either two or five years to get divorced. This shift is mostly going to be a psychological change. One barrister told me that most judges in England don't even look at that page of the divorce filing. But clients really feel like who is blaming whom really matters. Couples will also in April be able to file jointly for divorce. And that's a big psychological change. The same barrister told me, you know, couples who prepare for a fight are going to get a fight.

And so in that sense by changing these laws, there's been a change in how, well, acrimonious the whole business is.

Yeah, I would say there's been a change over the past few decades in how people go about splitting up their things and custody over their children. Traditionally, couples sue one another in litigation and they each have their own lawyers. And that's really based on the idea that their interests are at odds. And if couples can't come to their own agreement through litigation, then a court decides it for them. Increasingly, couples are turning to other methods, like mediation, where couples come to an agreement with a neutral third party. In Norway and Australia, most divorcing couples with children are required to at least try mediation. In the Netherlands, where It's optional, about 2/5 of couples use it. And last year, the British government handed out 500 pound vouchers to subsidize mediation. Another option is so called collaborative divorce. That's where each partner has their own lawyer, but everybody agrees that the case must be settled outside of court. And if they're not able to come to a settlement, then the whole thing blows up and each person needs to find new lawyers, so there's a real incentive to settle. That concept was invented in the early 1990s, and now there's about 20,000 lawyers who are trained in that.

And so do these different approaches lead ultimately to better, less nasty outcomes?

Yeah, I think they can. I would look to Australia. In 2006, the government started funding family relationship centers, which are mostly run by charities, and they offer free and cheap mediation. And they just really help families adjust to their new lives. Parents can take classes on the impact divorce has on children. People can talk to counselors. One even offered cooking classes for clueless dads. Five years after Australia implemented these centers, the number of court filings in divorce cases with children dropped by a third. I spoke to one Australian who had a pretty nasty divorce. He and his ex both got their own lawyers. They settled out of court, but the fees reached the equivalent of US$25,000. Had they gone to court, there wouldn't have been anything left to split. He said the whole thing was strategic and combative and expensive. And several years after his divorce, he and his ex started fighting about custody. But instead of going to lawyers, this time, they went to the government funded mediation service. And he said that it made a world of difference. The mediators provided a neutral setting and techniques on how to deescalate arguments. And the whole thing only cost him a couple hundred bucks.

And you say that couples really come to blows on both the question of custody, but also dividing up the stuff. How are these new methods dealing with the stuff? Part of.

Right. There's been a change in how assets have been split over the past few decades. In the 1960s, alimony was awarded in about a quarter of American divorce cases. Now it's roughly 10%. In the past decade, Germany and several American states have limited the number of scenarios where alimony can be awarded. And most of that is driven because women are earning more money. But it may also be driven by the fact that some judges are getting keener on clean breaks.

But surely some of that is just reflective of societal changes that have been going on over those same decades, not just changes in marriage and divorce and the means thereof.

Right, right. I think social attitudes have driven a lot of this. In rich countries, mothers are increasingly working outside of the homes and fathers are increasingly involved in raising their children in meaningful ways. So it just makes more sense now to split custody and finances differently. There's also been a shift in how people see divorce. I spoke to a couple of divorce lawyers who said that sort of in the age of conscious uncoupling, big scale litigation is just becoming a bit embarrassing.

So the net effect of all this is, is that essentially breaking up isn't so hard to do.

Yeah, well, these cooperative forms of divorce, I wouldn't say are for everyone. They are probably not suitable in cases of domestic violence or for the small share of couples who just can't stand each other's guts. Divorce is always going to involve tears and regrets. But taking into account all these changes, I think that divorce today is speedier, cheaper and less adversarial in general than it was in the past.

Thanks very much for your time, Elise.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Wherever they roam, rhinoceroses are at risk from poachers. But the situation is particularly dire for the Sumatran rhino. There are fewer than 80 of them left on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. That's terrible news for the rhinos, of course. But what hasn't been appreciated until now is that their looming extinction would have serious knock on effects.

So while the situation facing the Sumatran rhino is unquestionably serious, everyone knows that.

Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for the Economist.

What hasn't been clear is, is how serious the threat is to the rest of the organisms in the ecosystem that the rhino lives in, what kind of.

Threat then does their loss pose to the ecosystem?

Animals that depend upon plants often develop relationships with the plants, whereby the plants coat seeds in fleshy, nutritious material that's delectable to the animal, and the animal then eats those seeds and unwittingly poops them out further afield. This is beneficial to the plants because the plants are getting their seeds dispersed through environments that they otherwise might not, because a lot of plants depend upon wind and rain, which is quite random, whereas animals aren't so random. Animals have a tendency to defecate in a lot of the same places and they roam further and more predictably than wind and rain might. So for a lot of species of plant, it's extraordinarily useful to have animals like Sumatran rhinos to eat their fruit and disperse their seeds. And for some plants, going through the digestive tract of some animals is critical for the seed to actually be prepared for germination. And, of course, the size of the seed determines the size of the animal that is required to disperse it. And this is where the Sumatran rhino makes things particularly precarious. Because it's a large animal, it feeds on fruits that have large seeds in them. And with its extinction in the wild, there are not that many species you can pick up the slack.

So the idea here is if no rhinos, then those plants, seeds don't get around, they're in trouble.

That's exactly the problem with the rhinos going locally extinct in a lot of these areas, the plants that have relied on them for thousands of years, millions of years, to transmit their seeds around are in big trouble. And this is a situation that we've seen before, for example, on Madagascar, where mammals have gone extinct. Those mammals were critical to the spread of certain palms and members of the macadamia nut family. When the mammals that transmitted their seeds died out locally, those plants disappeared from those locations too. But there is some hope here, at least there was in that rhinos are not the only big mammals in the Sumatran rainforest.

What other big mammals are we talking about here?

The theory has been, well, elephants live in those rainforests, elephants eat fruit. Are elephants distributing the seeds in absence of the rhinos? Two researchers at the University of Nottingham, Kim McConkie and Ahimsa Campos Akias, questioned whether or not they could find out. This led them to go and explore large amounts of rhino feces throughout the Sumatran rainforest. And they dissected these feces to work out which seeds these animals were dispersing. They also interviewed members of the orang asli groups who live in the rainforests where the rhinos were present until relatively recently, just 15, 20 years ago, and asked them, have you seen what these rhinos ate? They also ran an extensive literature check to see what hunters and ecologists over the past hundred years have seen these rhinoceroses eating. They gathered all that information up and then compared it to what we know about the elephants of those rainforests and what they eat.

And so what's the upshot? Can elephants save the day here?

It turns out the rhinos disperse an awful lot of seeds that the elephants do not. Of 79 plants that rhinos are known to disperse within the Sumatran rainforest, only 57 are dispersed by elephants. That means that the remaining 22 instead are just dropping to the ground. In theory, if they fall in an ideal spot, they might germinate, but we don't know if it's required for them to pass through the rhino gut to actually become in a condition to germinate. So these 22 species are in serious trouble.

So is there anything that can be done here to essentially just replace the role of the rhinos that will seemingly eventually go away?

The best course of action is don't let the rhinos die, get them back into these habitats so they can start distributing the seeds again. Practically, that may be impossible. It's quite late in the lifespan of this species. They may not come back. It is conceivable that humans could try to collect these seeds and disperse them, and if they require processing in a rhino stomach to develop some mechanism for bathing these seeds in whatever kind of chemical bath they need to become germinate able. But it's very unclear whether or not that's required or possible. And of course, it's way more expensive than just putting the rhinos back in the habitat where they belong in the first place.

Matt, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and see you back here tomorrow. Sam.