DeSantis blamed Epstein, stock trading and trans-focused ads for the GOP’s midterm beating. He didn’t mention the plant. Texas has some notes.
Ron DeSantis has a theory about why Republicans got crushed on Tuesday. It covers a lot of ground. Weed isn’t part of it.
At a press conference in Tallahassee on Wednesday, the term-limited Florida governor called the results “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans,” Politico reported. “It’s the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States, blue states, red states, everything in between,” he said.
Then he went down the list. He faulted the members of Congress who voted against releasing the Epstein files and the lawmakers who never banned congressional stock trading. He said Republican campaigns leaned on transgender issues while voters were worried about the economy, jobs and the war with Iran, and that Democrats beat the party on regulating AI and big tech. On the ads, he was blunt: Republicans “really were fighting yesterday’s battle.”
In Politico’s account of the press conference, cannabis and hemp never come up. That’s an odd gap. Texas, one of the conservative strongholds where Republicans took losses, just ran a top-of-the-ballot fight over the plant.
Texas Already Ran the Experiment
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick spent 2025 trying to ban hemp-derived THC products. The Legislature passed his ban, and Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed it. At a press conference that June, Patrick drew his line. “I’m not going to legalize marijuana in Texas. And if people want to vote me out of office for that, so be it,” he said.
On Tuesday, Democrat Vikki Goodwin unseated Patrick after campaigning against his crackdown. She opposed the ban and backed alcohol-style rules for hemp THC, including age limits and marketing restrictions. “It didn’t seem like a very good political move when so many people are buying these products,” she told KUT News. Chron, the Houston Chronicle’s free news site, tied Patrick’s loss to his THC crusade.
Patrick wasn’t the only one. James Talarico, who called Patrick’s ban “insane” and “a gift to the cartels” on the Texas House floor in May 2025, beat Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate. As attorney general, Paxton had sued Austin, San Marcos, Denton, Killeen, Elgin and Dallas to overturn decriminalization ordinances their own voters approved. And Abbott, who vetoed the ban but later ordered a crackdown on smokable hemp, lost to Democrat Gina Hinojosa.
Joe Rogan warned them. Talking about the THC crackdown on his podcast in August, he had a warning for Texas Republicans. “You will fuck this place up and you will turn the whole thing blue,” he said.
No exit poll we’ve seen isolates hemp as the issue that decided those races, and Texas Democrats ran on far more than THC. But the people who staked their careers on the crackdown lost, and the candidates who ran against it won.
Florida ‘Held the Line.’ Voters Never Got Asked.
DeSantis took a victory lap on his own state. “The one state that was able to hold the line and withstand that is right here in the free state of Florida,” he said.
On cannabis, Florida’s line held before anyone voted. Smart & Safe Florida’s 2026 legalization amendment never reached the ballot. The state threw out tens of thousands of its petition signatures, an appeals court sided with the state, and in March the Florida Supreme Court declined to hear the campaign’s appeal.
The last time Floridians did get a say, in 2024, Amendment 3 won nearly 56% of the vote and still failed, because Florida requires 60% to amend its constitution. DeSantis campaigned hard against it. As High Times reported in April, $10 million from a Medicaid settlement moved through the Hope Florida Foundation to groups that funded the campaign against the measure. A Leon County grand jury later alleged that the money had been misappropriated. In October, a state appeals court ordered the grand jury’s report expunged. The court ruled that the panel overstepped its authority, rejected its misappropriation finding and held that the $10 million was never public money.
Meanwhile, other red states that broke on Tuesday are lining up the other way. Iowa elected Democrat Rob Sand governor. Sand wants to legalize cannabis and tax it like alcohol.
Yesterday’s Battle Has a Date
There’s a reason the GOP might rather not talk about it. Nearly two-thirds of Americans back legal marijuana, but Republican support fell to 40% in Gallup’s 2025 survey, down from 55% two years earlier. The party’s own voters are split, and its leaders have picked a side anyway.
That side has a deadline. The federal hemp ban Congress tucked into last November’s spending deal was set to hit on Nov. 12. A stopgap funding law pushed most of it to Dec. 11, which gives the outgoing Republican-led Congress five more weeks to decide whether to let it land.
DeSantis is right that his party spent the cycle fighting yesterday’s battle. On weed, it’s still fighting it. In Texas, Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton fought it hardest. Both are out of a job in January.
