Dan McLaughlin of National Review Online challenges a popular narrative about the political feud between Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Ever since Ron DeSantis prodded the Florida legislature to strip Disney of its Reedy Creek special district and replace it with a state-run Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, critics of DeSantis have invested a lot of rhetorical energy in predicting that this will all blow up in his face. … [T]hus far, the doomsayers’ track record is pretty terrible. …
… To recap: There were dire warnings that picking a fight with the state’s biggest business and unsettling the tax base of central Florida would cost DeSantis in his 2022 reelection bid, alienating voters in the center of the state. Instead, he romped to victory, Florida Republican voters strongly backed his moves against the House of Mouse, and the chief critic of DeSantis on this front in the Republican presidential primary — Mike Pence — is currently polling at no better than a third of DeSantis’s support nationally or in any early state. DeSantis has yet to pay any political cost. …
… Disney held a two-hour investor presentation in Orlando to lay out the company’s “plans to boost capital spending in the Disney Parks, Experiences and Products business segment to nearly double in a 10-year period, as compared with the previous decade, to approximately $60 billion in aggregate.” The accompanying slideshow, filed publicly with the SEC, sounds bullish on the role of the company’s U.S. theme parks compared with Disney’s struggling non-park business, and gives no hint that the flagship parks in Florida won’t get the lion’s share of the new investments. A graph shows “domestic parks” revenue now above pre-pandemic levels, and highlights five new rides opened since fiscal year 2020 — four of them at the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, or Hollywood Studios in Florida.
