Fox News probes Ron DeSantis’ property insurance problem. How far will they go?

Ron DeSantis returned on Wednesday to Fox News, where he dealt with a question about one of Florida’s gravest problems: the state’s troubled property insurance market, arguably the worst in the country. It was posed in the morning in absentia, and in the evening on prime time television.

The morning started off with a “Fox & Friends” segment where Ponte Vedra’s Brian Kilmeade and others described a “tragic” state where people “who used to be able to afford to live there can’t afford to live anymore,” with “insurance through the roof” and an “insurance system that collapsed in Florida.”

Later that day in what could be seen as irony, a 100-year-old oak tree fell at the Governor’s Mansion. DeSantis played off the tree’s death, saying removing it would give his kids more space to hit baseballs.

The evening saw Sean Hannity end a softball interview about storm recovery with a curve ball finisher: a question about rates up “30% or even higher” which is “forcing people to self-insure.” DeSantis stood in front of the fallen tree in a windbreaker, on taxpayer owned property and a floodlight serving as a second sun, and made his case.

DeSantis stressed improvements, such as four new companies in the market and another “on the way.”

“Consumers need to have choices,” he said. “That’s how you keep premiums in check.”

But he blamed inflation and 2022’s Hurricane Ian for escalating costs, avoiding the “fraud” explanation sometimes used to justify high rates.

“I think you may, when this hurricane season is over, have more companies that are going to be willing to get in the market. But we’ve had a lot of issues with inflation generally, as you know, and then particularly having Hurricane Ian, which is one of the most costly storms in the history of the United States,” DeSantis said.

Hannity began the show with a monologue about President Joe Biden, saying the “storm made landfall on one of the few days he wasn’t on vacation.” DeSantis did not challenge that narrative or thank the President for his help and cooperation.

In an interview Wednesday, Biden said DeSantis “trusts” his “judgment,” suggesting that campaign speech threats to send the President “back to his basement in Delaware” aren’t the entirety of the relationship between the two men.

“I know this sounds strange, especially (given) the nature of politics today. But you know, I was down there (after) the last major storm. I spent a lot of time with him walking from community to community, making sure he had what he needed to get it done,” Biden said.

“I think he trusts my judgment and my desire to help and I trust him to be able to suggest that this is not about politics. It’s about taking care of the people of the state,” Biden added.

The Governor more or less affirmed the President’s take.

He said Wednesday in Perry that “supporting the needs of the people who are in harm’s way or have difficulties” has got to “triumph over any type of short-term political calculation or any type of positioning.”

“This is the real deal. You have people’s lives that have been at risk. We don’t necessarily have any confirmed fatalities yet, but that very well may change. And then you have people whose livelihoods have been turned upside down and so they need support. So we’re going to work together from local, state, federal, regardless of party, to be able to deliver results for the people in their time of need.”

He said something similar before the storm.

“There’s a time and a place to have ‘political season,’ but then there’s a time and a place to say that this is something that’s life-threatening. This is something that could potentially cost somebody their life, that could cost them their livelihood. And we have a responsibility as Americans to come together and do what we can to mitigate any damage and to protect people,” DeSantis said Monday.

DeSantis and Biden cooperated in the wake of 2022’s Hurricane Ian and after the Surfside condo collapse as well, in two other suspensions of the so-called “political season.”

Hannity didn’t seem aware of those quotes or that history of timely and practical federal response, but it would have been an interesting line of questioning to drive at the two working across party lines, shelving performative rhetoric for the greater good.

Hannity or the Governor could have mentioned the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) having ensured “all needs are met” or stressed the collaboration with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell starting Thursday. That didn’t come up either.

Perhaps that was just a short segment. Hannity didn’t bother to ask DeSantis about throwing the House and the Senate under the bus over the insurance issue. DeSantis, on successive days, blamed the Legislature for not implementing insurance reforms he wanted, then refused to say what those reforms were when asked directly Tuesday in Tallahassee.

Hannity, or presumably any Fox host going forward, could have asked DeSantis about Sen. Rick Scott’s pointed criticisms.

“It’s way too expensive to insure homes in Florida right now. And so we’ve got to work with the insurance companies. (We’ve) got to recruit them to come back to the state. (We’ve) got to get more competition and (we’ve) got to solve the problem so they can drive their rates down,” Scott told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

“Until it’s completely solved, there’s more to do,” he added. “So we still have companies leaving. I mean, we have less competition.”

Scott, who was Governor for eight years, said issues endemic to the Florida market “have to be solved at the state level.”

That includes shrinking Citizens Property Insurance’s exposure, the state insurer of last resort.

“I worked to get it down from a million policies to 400,000. I think it’s back up to 1.3 million policies. It’s not a fully funded insurance product,” Scott maintained.

Scott’s critiques are not new. He called the state’s insurance marketplace a “disaster” earlier this year, saying the departure of Farmers Insurance was a “wake-up call” to the state.

Could a Fox host ask about that? It seems more likely than it did 24 hours ago.

The symbiosis between the politician DeSantis and the network’s more performative hosts has been years in the making, buoying him improbably to the nomination for Governor in 2018, then a win outright in the General Election. But the property insurance market is already being tested early this storm season, and as the numbers of claims become known after Idalia, critical questions will emerge, even in historical safe spaces.