How come Republicans who think they need to get back to being a "proper" and "respectable" party think DeSantis would be an answer to that? He's the governor of a state where everyone is an overly-tanned meth addict and he spent his victory speech going on about woke people. What woke people are in Florida? Most woke people I know hate Florida. Key West? Yea maybe a lot of gay folks in Key West but they bring in big-time vacation revenue and Ron-Ron would be stupid to tick them off with his wild ramblings about Woke. My auntie watches MSNBC all day and thinks DeSantis is worse than Trump, actually.
If they want to get respectable again like the good ol' days of Bob Dole they ought to nominate a mild-mannered state legislator from Nebraska who just think the dang government should let him farm and own an assault rifle.
Florida is the single state in the US closest to representing national demographics, as you yourself point out clearly.
This is DeSantis’ high water mark, much like the Christie 2013 buzz post-win
This feels different.
It is different in three obvious ways: it's later right now (Christie had long since collapsed at this point in 2014), it's been sustained for a long time (like 2 years at this point), and it comes from a different place. It's forgotten now, but the Christie bump was coextensive with a smaller Paul bump, and the two candidates represented rival energies within the party. When you examine the DeSantis bump, his demographics don't look similar to what Christie's were in 2013: they look similar to what Paul's were, except ludicrously magnified. (This is even more true among donors/activist-y types: consider DeSantis doing well at CPAC where Paul once dominated).
(That said, Remington also actually has a long record of missing in Republican primaries in favor of candidates they like.)