When a radio host asked Governor Maura Healey in March for her thoughts on Ron DeSantis, she smirked and tried to recall advice her mother once gave her. “If you can’t say something nice …” she started.
But she did have something to say. As the interview continued, Healey called the Florida governor’s stances on education and LGBTQ policies “really shameful.” He’s out to punish people, she said. “It certainly does a disservice to the residents of Florida, ultimately,” she said on “Boston Public Radio.”
Since then, Healey has time and again used Florida — and, by extension, DeSantis — as a foil in highlighting her administration’s agenda and governing values. Her administration paid for a half-dozen billboards around Orlando and Tampa, among dozens in other states, touting Massachusetts as a welcoming place for LGBTQ couples. This week, she celebrated a new law allowing undocumented immigrants to seek out licenses here, the event coincidently coming just days after DeSantis said Florida wouldn’t recognize a different type of license issued by other states for undocumented immigrants known as driver privilege cards.
Healey has even repeatedly, albeit jokingly, pitched Disney — the media giant engaged in an ongoing feud with DeSantis — on relocating to Massachusetts.
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“Where we have real snow, too,” she said at a Pride event last month in Newburyport. “Not that fake stuff.”
Healey has drawn the contrasts as part of an ongoing bid to promote Massachusetts as a desirable place to work and live, and stem a perceived loss of residents to lower-cost locales, Florida included. But whether explicit or not, it’s also regularly put her at direct odds with DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate who may be the political antithesis to Healey, a Democrat and Massachusetts’ first openly gay governor.
“Maura Healey has no Republican foe in Massachusetts because there [virtually] are no Republicans. But to be able to take on Ron DeSantis, it’s the perfect foil given who he is and what he’s doing,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Massachusetts Democratic strategist. “That makes her strategy even stronger — and the likely dividends even better.”
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To political watchers, the strategy echoes Healey’s approach as attorney general, when she sued the Trump administration nearly 100 times, more than all but just three states. While the lawsuits were rooted in her office’s work, they also helped to quickly elevate her name nationally and provide a political calling card as the state’s chief law enforcement officer.
Now, Trump is again running for president but no longer has a hand on the gears of government. DeSantis, however, does, making the state-to-state contrast a natural point of tension.
“There is some delight for voters in Massachusetts’ exceptionalism. We like to be the first, we like to be the best,” said Jane Rayburn, a Democratic pollster at EMC Research. “But dunking on Florida is a pretty easy target because the two governors’ positions are so juxtaposed.”
In a statement, Healey said her actions are not about scoring political points but “making sure that everyone here can grow a family, start a business, and live a life full of opportunity.”
“Our values are an important economic selling point for our state,” she said. “What we’re saying to the rest of the country is, ‘if you want a place that’s going to fight for your freedoms and help you thrive — come to Massachusetts.’”
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A spokesman for DeSantis referred comment to his presidential campaign, saying that “political topics” were outside the purview of his official office. Campaign aides did not respond to questions .
The Healey administration’s decision to run billboards in Florida and a series of other states through July stands out as perhaps the most overt play across state lines.
The banners touted Massachusetts as a place “for us all” with photos of smiling LGBTQ couples, and were scheduled to run through late July in Florida, as well as around the Houston and Dallas areas in Texas — two states that have sought to restrict access to gender-affirming care and suppress teaching about gender identity in local schools. State officials said billboards and social media ads would also appear in New York and other New England states.
Healey has said the $750,000 ad campaign is part of her bid to emphasize the draw of Massachusetts to convince people to not only stay, but also to come here. It’s an argument she threaded through speeches at Pride events in June and about abortion rights, holding Massachusetts up as a state that will safeguard people’s rights.
“We are open for business,” Healey said at a Pride flag-raising outside the State House last month. “Now should be a time when we’re inviting [people] in.”
The reception to a range of conservative laws has been markedly different in Florida, where groups including the NAACP, the gay rights advocacy group Equality Florida, and the League of United Latin American Citizens issued travel advisories for the state in recent months after DeSantis signed a bill defunding diversity programs at state public universities and another that critics have called the “Don’t Say Gay” law in public schools.
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Allie Owen, a political strategist and fundraiser who worked on Healey’s campaign for attorney general and now works in Florida, said it’s not difficult for Democratic governors to draw a contrast with DeSantis’s “dangerous” brand of politics. Owen’s clients include Equality Florida, as well as the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition and Generator Collective.
“I don’t think you need to be the most forward-thinking governor in the country to have nothing in common with him,” Owen said.
Competition between states, and governors, is not a new phenomenon. Other Democratic governors have directly attacked DeSantis amid his rise nationally and now, as a top challenger to Trump for the GOP presidential nomination.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and DeSantis have themselves engaged in a long-running feud, with the latter scoffing at Newsom’s apparent “serious fixation” on his home state. That came days after Newsom called DeSantis a “small, pathetic man” after DeSantis took credit for sending a set of flights carrying migrants to Sacramento. It was very similar to his move last September to fly dozens of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, prompting potential criminal charges.
But for Massachusetts, Florida has become more than a regular holiday destination — Healey herself has vacationed there while governor — or snowbird locale. It’s also a perceived magnet for Massachusetts’ recent population loss.
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Nearly 60,000 Massachusetts residents moved to other states between July 2021 and July 2022, according to US Census estimates. A survey conducted in the spring by the Massachusetts Society of Certified Public Accountants identified the Sunshine State as a popular landing spot for those thinking of relocating.
And Healey herself has namechecked it, telling business leaders in March she doesn’t “want to see people going to Texas or to — I mean, Austin’s cool, but whatever — or to Florida, you know, North Carolina. But this is the dynamic right now.”
In response, Healey has pushed a wide-ranging tax plan that, in part, would slash the tax rate on short-term capital gains. The move, she has argued, would make Massachusetts more competitive with other states, but it has also been fiercely criticized by progressive Democrats and Senate leaders as a handout to the state’s wealthier residents.
The regular contrasts she’s drawn with DeSantis and Florida’s more conservative policy stances serves as a counterbalance to that — a way to “maintain in the public’s eyes her progressive bona fides,” said Tatishe Nteta, director of the UMass Amherst Poll.
“She is attempting to establish a national brand for herself,” he said. “This is a means to do so, to be part of the national conversation, by still trumpeting Massachusetts. In some ways, it’s a reflection of her goal to not just be the governor of the commonwealth.”
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.