How badly have Democrat fortunes fallen in the Sunshine State? Four years ago, Ron DeSantis won a stunning upset over Andrew Gillum by less than a half-percentage point. Rick Scott won his own 2014 gubernatorial challenge from recycled candidate Charlie Crist by roughly one percent, Politico recalls.

Today? A new Mason-Dixon poll puts DeSantis in front of Crist by double digits, and Republicans leading comfortably in all of Florida’s statewide races:

Mason Dixon Polling & Strategy on Wednesday released survey results that showed DeSantis with a commanding 11-point lead over Democrat Charlie Crist: 52 percent to 41 percent.

Also big margins— That same poll showed all three Republicans seeking Cabinet posts also with double-digit leads: Attorney General Ashley Moody up over Aramis Ayala, 50 percent to 37 percent; Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis leads Adam Hattersley, 47 percent to 37 percent; and Senate President Wilton Simpson with a clear advantage over Naomi Esther Blemur in the agriculture commissioner race, 47 percent to 34 percent.

A bit of history— Switching back to the governor’s race, let’s put that into context. DeSantis beat Andrew Gillum in 2018 by more than 32,000 votes, or about 0.4 percent. Then-Gov. Rick Scott beat Crist by roughly 1 percent in 2014. If you roll back all the way to 2006, Crist — when he was a Republican — defeated Rep. Jim Davis by a 7-point margin. The last time a candidate for governor won by double digits was in 2002, when Jeb Bush won a second term by nearly 13 percent over Bill McBride.

Even for a state slipping into the solidly red column, that kind of shift seems … amazing. Assuming Mason-Dixon has an accurate predictive result — and we’ll get back to that in a moment — what happened in Florida?

First off, Democrats for some reason chose Crist to top their ticket, a man who never met a value he wouldn’t trade for a return to public office. Chameleons change less often than Crist. At the very least, one could chalk that choice up to a need for experience and campaign savvy against a juggernaut like DeSantis, but Crist has demonstrated exactly bupkis on that score too. His first act as the nominee was to tell Floridians who approved of DeSantis’ performance — a majority then as well as now — not to vote for Crist or even bother him with their questions. He then picked as a running mate a teachers’ union official that actively campaigned for the school shutdowns that infuriated parents across the state during the pandemic.

A bigger fulcrum of change, though, may have been the pandemic itself. DeSantis and Greg Abbott in Texas led red-state rebellions against the CDC’s lockdown push, reopening schools and businesses within the first few months of the pandemic. In both places, the health outcomes differed little from the overall national arc of the pandemic, but in both places the economies and education suffered far less damage. Beto O’Rourke has been smart enough in Texas to not make the pandemic response an issue, but Florida Democrats were stupid enough to let Crist attack DeSantis at his strength, and Floridians appear to be responding just as you’d expect to the cheerleading for top-down elite governance.

Back to our first question, though: how representative is this Mason-Dixon result? RCP has the gubernatorial race at DeSantis +6.3 points including this poll in its aggregation, and in this case all of the aggregated results are likely-voter surveys. However, the gaps have grown wider in more recent polls; a Siena poll from the previous week put DeSantis up eight points, with a smaller sample size. The last poll that showed Crist in the lead was an outlier from St. Pete Polls at the beginning of August, and it’s been DeSantis all the way ever since.

What about the six-point lead for Rubio? That’s actually a point less than Rubio’s lead in the Siena poll, and just slightly above his RCP aggregate average lead of four points.  Earlier, Rubio looked more at risk than DeSantis, but it now seems as though he’s drawing a pretty good distance away from Demings. (Be sure to read Tom Jackson’s thoughts on that in our VIP section, too.)

Democrats look as though they’re on track not just to lose Florida in the midterms, but for the next decade or more. Let’s hope Crist plans another comeback in four years, and makes it more like a generation.