by Frank Holmes, reporter
While most of the media dedicated their coverage to determining just how badly Republicans “lost” the 2022 midterms, they’ve ignored one of the most devastating defeats that Democrats suffered last Tuesday.
The humiliating setback isn’t just a one-off election loss. It’s a costly, well-planned, multi-year strategy thought up from the highest levels of Democratic donors and consultants… and it just blew up in their faces.
Democrats’ hopes, and their money, just sank deep into the Florida everglades.
None other than left-wing megadonor George Soros placed multiple bets over the last four years that Puerto Ricans, living in Florida after being displaced by Hurricane Maria, could be radicalized, registered, and rewarded for turning Florida blue forever.
Soros thought he could buy Florida for the Democrats at a song—but he bet wrong. As The Horn News reported in 2018, “He spent a paltry $430,000 to establish United for Progress – a PAC dedicated to putting the state of Florida under permanent Democrat Party rule – just two months before the 2016 elections. And he just doubled-down with another $450,000 in donations.”
Thanks in part to United for Progress, Ron DeSantis came within less than half-a-point of losing the 2018 governor’s election to radical left-wing Democrat Andrew Gillum, who was later caught in a sex-and-drugs scandal.
That excited Soros, so the Hungarian-born billionaire donated yet another $500,000 to United for Progress in 2020. That infusion of cash came from Soros’ Democracy PAC, which he shoveled another $125 million into at the beginning of 2022.
He thought he could erase DeSantis, who is one of the two most popular Republicans in the country, from the political landscape.
Left-wing activists who happen to be Puerto Rican went whole-hog in their attack on Ron DeSantis ahead of the election.
“Our Puerto Rican values stand in stark contrast to who Ron DeSantis is,” wrote Maruxa Cardenas, the leader of an organizing group for the Puerto Rican community, in The Orlando Sentinel last month. She accused him of “censoring honest conversations about racism, discrimination, and injustice in our schools by banning books and whitewashing our history.”
That’s how she described a DeSantis bill banning teachers from foisting their private, far-Left political views on young children at taxpayers’ expense.
The drumbeat sounded heavily in the media, which tried its best to make it look like Soros had beaten the Florida governor.
Axios bragged about a tiny Telemundo/LX News poll which found that Puerto Rican Floridians backed Democrat Charlie Crist over DeSantis by 12 percentage points, 59 percent to 37 percent.
NBC “News” was just a little more honest: “Republicans have even improved their margins with Puerto Rican voters who lean more Democratic and have a lower approval of DeSantis.”
Improved hardly describes the reality.
As it turns out, a majority of Puerto Ricans voted for Ron DeSantis — not for the Democrat — last week during his 20-point landslide win over Charlie Crist.
“A majority of Puerto Ricans, the state’s second-largest Hispanic group, who historically lean Democratic, voted for DeSantis, according to network exit polls,” The Washington Post quietly admitted just days after the midterms.
It turns out, DeSantis beat Soros at his own game. He invested $5 million in voter registration drives well ahead of the election… beginning in 2019, actually. All in all, DeSantis registered 553,000 new voters, turning turning a 257,000-vote advantages for the Democratic Party into roughly a 300,000-vote edge for the GOP.
That wasn’t the only reversal the Florida governor made. In 2020, Joe Biden won the state’s Hispanic voters by seven points; last week, Ron DeSantis won the Hispanic vote by 15 percent.
That helped power DeSantis into winning deep-blue Miami-Dade County, becoming the first Republican to do so in 20 years.
Not only did the Democrats lose the vote; they lost their shirts. The party spent about $18 million just on TV ads against the incumbent, not counting millions upon millions more in the campaign.
All they bought was their own humiliation.
The Left’s biggest loss isn’t just that they lost Florida by an embarrassing margin: Their greatest funder and strategic thinker, George Soros, made a four-year investment in transforming the state’s voting pool into a permanent Democratic majority…and he fell flat on his face.
Not only did Ron DeSantis reverse Joe Biden’s victory; not only did he win the demographic the Democrats wanted more than any other: DeSantis also beat George Soros.
The media won’t tell you that, but The Horn News told you about Soros’ plan four years ago… and we told you about how badly he lost this year.
Whatever his future, we should call Ron DeSantis the Soros slayer.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”