Ever since Ron DeSantis prodded the Florida legislature to strip Disney of its Reedy Creek special district and replace it with a state-run Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, critics of DeSantis have invested a lot of rhetorical energy in predicting that this will all blow up in his face. There are fair grounds to criticize the dissolution of Reedy Creek — we’ve had quite a few rounds of debate on the matter here at National Review, concerning which I have offered my own thoughts before at some length. DeSantis has faced his own uphill struggles in seeking to topple Donald Trump from atop the Republican Party. But thus far, the doomsayers’ track record is pretty terrible. Today’s news from Disney only underlined that.

To recap: There were dire warnings that picking a fight with the state’s biggest business and unsettling the tax base of central Florida would cost DeSantis in his 2022 reelection bid, alienating voters in the center of the state. Instead, he romped to victory, Florida Republican voters strongly backed his moves against the House of Mouse, and the chief critic of DeSantis on this front in the Republican presidential primary — Mike Pence — is currently polling at no better than a third of DeSantis’s support nationally or in any early state. DeSantis has yet to pay any political cost.

Then, there were predictions of doom on the legal front: that Disney could overturn the whole shebang as a First-Amendment violation, that its lawyers had somehow outsmarted DeSantis’s Central Florida Tourism Oversight District in drafting a bunch of last-minute contracts to lock in the old arrangement, and that Disney’s federal lawsuit would bulldoze Florida’s efforts to undo those contracts. Well, the lawsuits are still ongoing, so a lot could happen, but as things currently stand, it is not going great for Disney. The CFTOD countersued Disney in state court for a declaration that it was Disney who screwed up and violated a bunch of Florida rules, and therefore that the ‘midnight contracts’ were invalid. Disney recently lost its effort to get the state case dismissed, and has now abandoned all but the First-Amendment-retaliation claim in its federal-court suit. Disney’s remaining claims will now be heard instead in state court on a fast track; there is already a motion for summary judgment in favor of the CFTOD pending before the judge. If the CFTOD is right that the contracts are invalid as a matter of state law, the rest of the company’s claims go away because the state took nothing from Disney of any value by refusing to enforce them. And even the First-Amendment case has issues: Anti-DeSantis Judge Mark Walker recused himself, and Disney will have to argue its way around a strong Eleventh Circuit precedent, Ala. Educ. Ass’n v. Bentley (In re Hubbard), (11th Cir 2015), under which “when a statute is facially constitutional, a plaintiff cannot bring a free-speech challenge by claiming that the lawmakers who passed it acted with a constitutionally impermissible purpose.” Again: DeSantis has yet to pay any legal cost.

But did he drive Disney out of his state and cost his economy as a result? That was the third claim of the critics. It was the taunt of California governor Gavin Newsom when he could spare a moment from attacking his own state’s businesses. But we’ve seen little evidence of that so far. In May, not long into the legal battle, there was a much-ballyhooed announcement that Disney was “pulling the plug on a nearly $1 billion office complex that was scheduled for construction in Orlando” that “would have brought more than 2,000 jobs to the region,” but if you looked closely, it turned out that CEO Bob Iger had been opposed to the office project since inheriting it from his predecessor, and was looking for an excuse to kill it. In July, Iger told CNBC that “the last thing I want is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars” and, speaking of Disney’s original battle with DeSantis, “I’m not sure that was handled very well” by the company. DeSantis, for his part, has been cooling the Disney-bashing in order to convey that the company should drop its lawsuit and make peace with the new legal regime, telling Last Call in August: “We’ve appreciated working with them over the years, but I would just say go back to what you did well.” “I think it’s going to be the right business decision,” he added: The state has “basically moved on.”

Today, Disney held a two-hour investor presentation in Orlando to lay out the company’s “plans to boost capital spending in the Disney Parks, Experiences and Products business segment to nearly double in a 10-year period, as compared with the previous decade, to approximately $60 billion in aggregate.” The accompanying slideshow, filed publicly with the SEC, sounds bullish on the role of the company’s U.S. theme parks compared with Disney’s struggling non-park business, and gives no hint that the flagship parks in Florida won’t get the lion’s share of the new investments. A graph shows “domestic parks” revenue now above pre-pandemic levels, and highlights five new rides opened since fiscal year 2020 — four of them at the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, or Hollywood Studios in Florida. A map shows over a thousand “acres of land for future development,” with seven parks around the world featured — including a giant icon of Disney World covering the entire state of Florida. The slideshow touts the Disney Cruise line, headquartered in Celebration, Florida; and the opening in 2024 of more Fort Wilderness Cabins and Polynesian Villas, located in Lake Buena Vista.

The company was cagey when asked about specific locations for future investment, not least because it doesn’t want to undercut its legal claims for damages. Josh D’Amaro, chairman of the parks division, told the New York Times, “We want to keep growing and investing and have ambitious plans in Florida. For the benefit of our guests, our cast members and the economy of central Florida, we hope the conditions will be there for us to do so.” He declined to elaborate further. But the business press can read the writing on the wall. Iger has rattled his saber about scaling back a planned $17 billion investment in Florida (it’s unclear if that’s part of the $60 billion figure), but that is not the message delivered today. Reuters quoted Paul Verna, an analyst at Insider Intelligence: “The political risks of doing business in Florida won’t stop Disney from continuing to invest in its most lucrative U.S. destination.” The Orlando Sentinel quoted Dennis Speigel, CEO and founder of International Theme Park Services: “Like it or not, it is a battle in [the Central Florida] market with Universal, and Disney has always held the throne. And they’re not going to relinquish that, in my opinion.”

Score another strike against the doomsayers.