As we near Election Day, it’s instructive to remember where Floridians were — and where our nation was — just four years ago.

On the Monday before Election Day in 2018, Donald Trump and Beltway Republicans were girding up for a midterm drubbing amid the Democrats’ fake, phony, fraudulent Russia collusion hoax. At the same time, the crack pollagandists at Quinnipiac were giddily announcing that Florida Democrat gubernatorial candidate and “rising star” Andrew Gillum had a seven-point lead over the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate, Ron DeSantis. With grim numbers like that, and with Democrats poised to retake control of Congress, it’s a wonder that Florida Republicans even came out to vote.

But vote they did, and DeSantis eked out the narrowest of wins, 49.6% to 49.2%, thereby putting Quinnipiac and its ilk to shame, and thereby allowing Sunshine Staters to dodge a gubernatorial bullet. Sixteen months later, Gillum would be found naked and unconscious on the floor of a South Beach motel room, snuggled up next to a pile of his own vomit after having done some booze and crystal meth and other stuff with a male escort. And earlier this year, Gillum found himself facing a 21-count indictment for wire fraud, conspiracy, and making false statements to the FBI.

Just think: But for one vote out of every 235 votes cast, Andrew Gillum would be governing the Not-So-Free State of Florida. And its people would today be feeling the consequences.

This coming Election Day, however, there won’t be any such drama in the governor’s race. Ron DeSantis is going to smoke Republican Democrat Charlie Crist, likely by double digits, and in doing so, he’ll firmly position himself as the future of the Republican Party.

And that’s what has the Left in full freak-out mode: the fact that the Democrats have no answer for DeSantis. They see him as Trump-tough but baggage-free, deeply disciplined, and 30 years younger. They also see him as an existential threat to the Democrats’ near-monopoly on the Hispanic vote, which has begun to drift off their woke Big Government plantation and toward the party with which they identify on issues like God, work, and family — issues that have become antithetical to today’s Democrat Party.

“Ron DeSantis is so popular among Florida Latinos,” tweeted someone named Chris Evans (no, not that one), “he may win blue county Miami-Dade, something a Republican governor has not done in 20 years.”

To which MSNBC’s lying, homophobic, race-obsessed Joy Reid replied: “This wouldn’t surprise me at all. The Proud Boys have all but merged with the Miami Dade Republican Party. Sociopolitically, Florida is basically morphing into Brazil.”

We’re not sure what to make of the “Brazil” swipe, especially since South Florida’s Hispanic population is mostly of anti-communist Cuban-expat ancestry, but we think it might have something to do with Brazil’s refusal to go all in with socialism like so many other Central and South American countries.

Or it might have something to do with skin color, which is precisely what seems to fixate Reid’s fellow race-baiter, Jemele Hill. Upon considering the same comment about DeSantis’s success in Dade County, she condescendingly tweeted: “That proximity to whiteness is a real thing. Also reminds me of an adage I heard a long time ago about how the oppressed begin to take on the traits of the oppressor.”

“Proximity to whiteness”? And we thought we’d heard it all. If that isn’t racism, we don’t know what is.

But we do know this: Hispanics are on the move, and the Left is really, really worried.

Back in June, in the wake of Republican Mayra Flores’s stunning special-election victory in a Texas district that’s 84% Hispanic, The New York Times couldn’t help but kvetch about “The Rise of the Far-Right Latina.”

As Phil Gramm and John Early wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal: “Hispanics are one of the fastest growing census demographics in America, and their realignment away from the Democratic Party is a political earthquake in the making. If polls are right and increasing numbers of Hispanics vote Republican in November, the much-touted inevitability of Democratic political dominance will have proved to be a pipe dream.”

Thus, a pipe dream for Democrats gives way to the American Dream for Hispanics. We like the sound of it.

POSTSCRIPT: We hope you appreciate the above Hispanic-Republican Venn diagram, which came from our archives. We tried and tried to create a brand-new image, but our beleaguered designer finally threw his hands up and said: “Proximity to whiteness? I don’t even know how to illustrate an idea that dumb!”