If anything, he's going to be the DeSantis of 2022. The guy everybody expects to lose but ends up winning.
People conveniently forget now, but DeSantis was similarly cast as unelectable, super "pro Trump" and far-right. And the vast majority of people here bought into that, including Republicans. Hell, he's still characterized like that today, it's just that Democrats have become more pessimistic in Florida so they don't think he'll lose. But it's really important to remember accurately because we're now making the same exact mistakes and assumptions today, only with more drama around election administration. Shapiro is probably a better candidate than Gillum, though, but nobody was talking as if Gillum was the bad candidate in 2018. It was all about how extreme and bad DeSantis was.
In fairness, I do think a lot of Gillum's underperformance came from the fact that the place where the Florida Democratic Party backslid in 2018 was in Miami, which is particularly difficult to poll. Both Gillum and Nelson did reasonably well in most of the state, on track to get a narrow win.
Though ofc people didn't expect Gillum to underperform Nelson, and then he did, so.
