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Florida's DeSantis positions himself as Trump's heir to the White House

Donors outside Florida are eager to get in on the ground floor, said Nick Iarossi, a Tallahassee lobbyist and DeSantis fundraiser.

"I've been doing this for 20 years," Iarossi said, "and you normally don't have prominent donors from other states reaching out and saying, 'Hey, how do I meet this guy? How do I support him? I think he's going to be president one day, and I want to get to know him now. I want to support him for his 2022 election to make sure he wins if we need him running in 2024.'"

DeSantis' appeal isn't isolated to Trump diehards. His job-approval rating in the Mason-Dixon poll was 59 percent among independents.

Florida House committee weighs new rules for voting by mail

A Florida House committee takes up its own effort to rewrite vote-by-mail rules Monday, as Republicans push to enhance “ballot security” — despite no evidence of widespread problems — while Democrats and voter rights advocates say the election-related proposals before lawmakers would be costly and will make it harder for some Floridians to vote.

The election bill is one of several high-profile measures coming before Florida lawmakers in the coming days, as they hunker down for some of the heaviest lifting yet during their two-month session — including work on rewriting parts of the state’s election laws, providing protections for businesses against COVID-related lawsuits and enacting additional ways to punish demonstrators who turn violent.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have made those measures top priorities.

Florida among states where rapid COVID-19 vaccine rollout backfired, analysis finds

Despite the clamor to speed up the U.S. vaccination drive against COVID-19 and get the country back to normal, the first three months of the rollout suggest faster is not necessarily better.

A surprising new analysis found that states such as Florida, South Carolina and Missouri that raced ahead of others to offer the vaccine to ever-larger groups of people have vaccinated smaller shares of their population than those that moved more slowly and methodically, such as Hawaii and Connecticut.

The explanation, as experts see it, is that the rapid expansion of eligibility caused a surge in demand too big for some states to handle and led to serious disarray. Vaccine supplies proved insufficient or unpredictable, websites crashed and phone lines became jammed, spreading confusion, frustration and resignation among many people.

Planners Say Time Is Running Out To Prep South Florida's Aging Flood Control System For Sea Rise

Planners and water managers took their fight to regional planners Friday as they struggle to update the 70-year-old sprawling flood control system, that stretches from Central to South Florida, to accommodate heavier rainfall and rising seas fueled by climate change.

The miles of canals and levees originally designed to accommodate 2 million people never contemplated sea rise. The region now has 11 million people, with seas rising twice as fast as just 20 years ago.

“Some of that rise may not be permanent, but the trend is what the trend is,” Broward County Resilience Chief Jennifer Jurado said during a workshop of the South Florida and Treasure Coast regional planning councils. “That's what we need to be anticipating and recognize that time is not our friend.”