To give you a sense of the keen COVID acumen behind this spot, it comes from a PAC founded by that guy who used to wander around Florida’s beaches last year dressed as the Grim Reaper. DeSantis insisted on keeping the beaches open, which the Reaper, a.k.a. Daniel Uhlfelder, believed would surely result in a wave of deadly infection.

As it turned out, between the sunshine and the ocean breezes, being outdoors on a beach is one of the safest places in the world during a pandemic caused by an aerosolized virus.

This ad from the PAC, “Remove Ron,” is so comically overwrought that it can only be a moneymaking venture. This isn’t what you run if you’re looking to persuade swing voters. This is what you run when you’re looking to make bank off of Very Online members of “the Resistance” with too much disposable income. First you get their attention, then you get them stimulated by attacking their political hate objects, then you get their cash. Watch, then read on.

The most allegedly damning things DeSantis says in that spot are “we trust people to make their own decisions in this state” and vowing to stand in the way of future lockdown efforts. Is there a meaningful pro-lockdown constituency anywhere on the political spectrum at this stage, with more than 60 percent of the public having received at least one vaccine dose?

Also, the flight attendant in the ad warns the passengers that they’re entering a jurisdiction where they won’t be required to get a vaccine while within state lines. Is there any state in the country that mandates vaccination as a condition of entry, let alone among all residents?

Also also, I’m guessing anyone flying to Florida at this point is already aware of the state’s few COVID restrictions. For many visitors, it’s a draw. “DisneyWorld is open!”

Also also also, this ad is a little late, no?

Forty-seven of the 50 states are seeing transmission decline right now, Florida among them. Maybe that’s a seasonal thing, maybe it’s a function of increasing population immunity. Either way, if DeSantis’s state is now past the worst of COVID, pandemic-themed ads aren’t going to do much to hurt him when he’s still more than a year away from facing voters.

What would an effective ad against an anti-mandate governor look like? Tonally, it should be the opposite of the quasi-Hollywood-parody of the clip above. That’s a strange common thread between Uhlfelder’s Grim Reaper shtick and his “Florever Purge” ad — both ask you to hate DeSantis for not taking COVID seriously enough while following an essentially comic approach to the pandemic themselves. A better strategy would be to find and interview someone whose family member died because they couldn’t get timely care in local hospitals overcrowded with COVID patients. “If only DeSantis had let local governments impose mask and vaccine mandates,” the subject might say, “my relative would still be alive.” Horror stories about people whose parents ended up suffering or dying needlessly because ICUs are occupied by unvaxxed people with COVID trickle in day by day from across the country. There’s only so much a governor can do to avert that, but letting local governments and business owners take their own measures to limit infection is one thing.

One more thing the ad does ineffectively is give the total death toll from COVID in Florida instead of the trendline. Fifty thousand is a big number, granted, but the state is fourth in total deaths behind California, Texas, and New York despite being third among the 50 states in total population. It’s actually doing slightly better in that metric than we’d expect, in other words. What’s truly noteworthy about Florida’s death toll is how many of those deaths were recorded just within the past few months, long after the vaccines began rolling out. Florida used to be middle-of-the-pack in deaths per capita; now it ranks 10th because of its terrible summer surge. A cannier ad would have tried to make the case that the state has fallen behind others in progress against COVID because of DeSantis’s policies, not that its overall numbers on the pandemic are notably bad. But as I say, this is a moneymaking ploy and cinematic “Purge” nonsense will pay better with lefties.