HE has been described as “DeFuture”, Trump 2.0 and the de facto leader of America’s Republican Party.
But whatever you call him, Ron DeSantis was undoubtedly one of the great success stories of this week’s US midterm elections.
The Florida governor was re-elected, bucking the trend to notch up a 20 per cent margin over his Democrat rival.
While some other Republicans struggled to achieve the predicted landslide, he delivered a convincing victory and strengthened his position as a potential presidential candidate.
So how was DeSantis able to turn the swing state of Florida into deep red Republican territory?
The answer, I believe, lies in his victory speech. He denounced woke ideology and told his cheering supporters: “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
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And nowhere has that been more apparent than in his state’s schools.
Thanks to the bill he was determined to pass, all educational institutions will be judged on whether they offer intellectual freedom.
Everyone gets the freedom to express their beliefs or views and nobody gets cancelled. He also banned from schools the “critical race theory” now gaining ground in America and Britain, which argues that society is inherently racist and everyone should feel responsible.
“We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country,” he pledged.
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DeSantis has outlawed lessons on gender identity up to and including third graders (aged up to nine), has set guidelines for older kids and given parents the right to control what their children learn in school.
And he has encouraged his state Board of Medicine to bar hormone treatment or surgery for minors who claim to be transgender.
This follows a bill he introduced last year banning transgender women and girls from female sports.
“In Florida, girls are going to play girls’ sports and boys are going to play boys’ sports,” he promised. It went down a storm with voters sick of their kids’ education being served up with a side of leftist nonsense.
So I’m not surprised to see the DeSantis surge. We were told the big election issues would be inflation, crime and abortion law, but he put education and his “war on woke” front and centre — and triumphed.
There’s an important lesson there all politicians would do well to learn — including British ones.
I’m well aware American teachers are not alone in wanting to force their “enlightened” world view on students.
If the British government accepts new guidance from teaching groups, schools may soon need to provide gender-neutral lavatories.
In the UK, teaching the tenets of critical race theory as an uncontested fact to school children is against the law.
It has long been a legal requirement for schools in Britain to be non-partisan.
But that hasn’t stopped the intellectual movement finding its way across the Atlantic to Brighton, where a council scheme informed teachers that children as young as seven were not “racially innocent”.
Donald Trump has yet to announce whether he will run again in 2024, and that could change everything.
But tough-talking DeSantis, a Yale graduate and former Navy lawyer, is certainly looking a contender.
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It’s clear that is down almost entirely to putting education’s left-wing activists back in their box.
And that should be a wake-up call for politicians everywhere.