Charlie Crist exuded a smooth confidence as he bounded into the room, a conference hall at a teachers union building in downtown Tampa, Florida, earlier this month.

He may be facing a primary election to be the Democratic candidate in the next gubernatorial election, but Crist’s focus seems already set on the general in November – and the far-right Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, he hopes to unseat.

“He’s the most arrogant governor I’ve ever seen in my life,” Crist said to the assembled teachers who nodded in agreement. “It is shocking, it really is. Enough is enough.”

As primary voters in the state cast their ballots today, polls forecast that Crist, a Florida political mainstay, is likely to win by a substantial margin against his closest Democratic opponent, the state’s agriculture commissioner, Nikki Fried.

The 66-year-old has run the gamut of political office in the state, from Republican governor and attorney general, to an incumbent Democratic congressman. Crist memorably joined the Democratic party in 2012, citing an extremist takeover of the Republican party.

Now a political centrist and one of the first in Congress to endorse Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy in 2020, he finds himself increasingly taken aback at the state of his former party.

“The leadership of today’s Republican party is gone. There is no leadership,” he said. “It’s lurching from one culture war to another, attacking the LGBTQ community, attacking African American voters, attacking women and the right to choose.”

A day before Crist sat down with the Guardian, DeSantis suspended and effectively fired a Democratic prosecutor in the state for refusing to enforce Florida’s new abortion law that bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The move was described as extremist overreach of executive power, and Crist, a mild-mannered man who chooses his words carefully, compared DeSantis to a dictator.

“I’m not one to use those sort of strong words, unless they’re true. And in this case, it’s true,” Crist said. “We need to realize what this guy is doing. He wants to be president of the United States, and he’s using Florida as his proving ground to do it.

“He’s a barbaric, wannabe dictator.”

DeSantis is widely believed to be considering a run for the 2024 presidency, and has fundraised over $160m since 2019. Meanwhile, his tenure has ushered in a wave of extreme rightwing legislation in the state – from laws drastically limiting the discussion of gender and sexual identity in classrooms, to banning the teaching of critical race theory to a sweeping voter suppression law.

DeSantis’s tenure and Donald Trump’s 2020 election victory in Florida, in which he increased his margin from 2016 – point to an increasing lurch to the right in Florida, which has long been viewed as America’s most significant swing state.

No Democratic presidential candidate has won Florida since 2012, leading many observers to argue the state is losing its purple status – a term that signifies a swing state, one that can move from Republican to Democrat, and vice versa.

Crist, predictably, argues the opposite, pointing to the election which saw DeSantis take the governor’s mansion in 2018 on a razor-thin 0.4 margin.

But whatever the state’s current political disposition, whoever receives the nod to face DeSantis in November is likely to endure a ferocious election cycle. Although Crist’s status as a veteran Florida political operator seems likely to win him the party’s nomination, it has also been used by Fried as a tool to attack.

In particular, Fried characterizes his record on abortion as inconsistent, pointing to his appointment of three state supreme court judges who are set to rule on Florida’s new law. Crist appointed the state’s chief justice, a formerly anti-abortion politician named Charles Canady, and acknowledges it’s a decision he will regret if the law is upheld.

When asked why a candidate who has already occupied the governor’s mansion once as a Republican, who has been such a familiar face for so long, could stand a chance of success against a rising star of the Republican party, Crist reverts to values.

“I think we need relief, and a better future. My parents raised me the way they did, and I’m offering that decency to my state,” he said. “I know that most Floridians are good, decent people.”