That’s really the only interpretation we can come up with given the gaping chasm that has opened up in polling between Ron DeSantis and the silly orange Charlie Crist in that state’s governor’s race, not to mention what Marco Rubio is doing to Val Demings in the Florida Senate race.

Florida is red. It’s starting to become one of the reddest states in the union. And Florida used to be the purplest of states. Republicans across the country should study Florida in practically every way possible to see what lessons can be transplanted into their own states, because it’s definitely working.

The Florida governor’s race is beginning to look like a “blowout,” and the U.S. Senate race is barely any closer, according to new polling from the University of North Florida.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has the support of 55% of registered voters, with Democratic challenger Charlie Crist at 41%, according to a UNF Public Opinion Research Lab (PORL) poll.

Approximately 4% of those surveyed did not have a preference or refused to answer, while less than 1% of those polled planned to vote for a third party.

“Given DeSantis’ historic fundraising and popularity among Republicans, his lead in this race is not surprising,” Dr. Michael Binder, PORL faculty director, said in a press release. “The surprise in these numbers is that a statewide race in Florida is closer to a blowout than a recount.”

Regarding the senatorial race, 54% of respondents indicated they would vote for Sen. Marco Rubio, against 43% of respondents who favored Democratic candidate Rep. Val Demings.

The thing is, yes, Charlie Crist is a ridiculous joke – and his campaign is an unmitigated train wreck. He campaign manager threw in the towel three weeks from Election Day; that’s how much of a mess that campaign is.

But Charlie Crist had a competitive primary with Nikki Fried, the wacko leftist agriculture commissioner who’s much more of a national Democrat than he is (Crist, after all, was a Republican until a few years back when the party moved on from his unprincipled grifting style), and he embarrassed her. Why? Mostly because black voters, who make up a sizable chunk of the state’s Democrats, broke hard for him and away from her on cultural issues.

In other words, Charlie Crist The Joke is the best Florida’s Democrats could muster up for this race.

And Val Demings, who’s a congresswoman and a former police chief in Orlando, is about as good a candidate as you’ll see out of today’s Democrat Party. She’s also going to lose in a landslide.

Coming a long way from Bill Nelson’s never-ending tenure as a Senator and Al Gore’s hanging chads in Broward County, for sure.

Or even Andrew Gillum’s near-miss loss to DeSantis four years ago.

There are a few reasons why what used to be a bellwether state is now an electoral rout. They’re pretty easy to identify.

Gillum might not be a major reason, but he certainly didn’t help. The Democrats in that state put so much political capital into him as the next Barack Obama, and he had about as much substance as Obama did. But when Gillum was found naked and unconscious in a hotel bathroom with blood and drugs all over the floor, following a romp with a gay male prostitute, it was one of the most ridiculous and definitive moments in Florida political history. At that point voters there realized that even the “best and brightest” on the Democrat side are a bunch of self-destructive degenerates bereft of morals who can’t be allowed around their kids.

It was a real sea change moment.

DeSantis’ efforts as governor have been transformative as well. He’s the best governor in America by a pretty wide margin, and even people who didn’t vote for him have conceded over and over that his governance has been impressive. Florida is booming, it’s bursting at the seams with new arrivals, it’s turning into not only a major incubator of enterprise but even a center of culture (that wasn’t really much of a thing before)…people might think of America as in decline but there is very little evidence of that in the Sunshine State.

That makes new Republicans. People like success.

But there are other factors as well. Generally speaking, it’s 15 years from the time people immigrate to the U.S. to the time they become citizens and start voting, and so the people who arrived in America from, say, 2005 to 2007, are now entering the electorate.

Florida has some 900,000 Venezuelans, and the first wave of them began fleeing the then-Chavez regime when things really started to get bad around…2005 to 2007. Those Venezuelans are overwhelmingly Republican, perhaps even more so than Cubans are.

Not to mention the people moving to Florida from places like New York are mostly Republicans giving up on their dysfunctional Democrat-dominated home states. In Florida, as in Texas, everybody looks leeringly at the transplants and implores them not to bring their awful voting patterns with them from their former blue homes, but more often than not the warning isn’t necessary.

It’s a wonderful state which is getting better all the time, and the better it gets the more Republican it gets. Florida Democrats, of course, keep getting worse – you’ve probably heard about the Rubio and DeSantis doorknocker who was hospitalized by thugs in Hialeah for the sin of campaigning for Republicans.

Those tactics might work in Portland. They don’t work in a place where society functions. And it functions in Florida, which is why voters are overwhelmingly opting to keep it that way with the only party committed to the project.