The differences in policies were heavily hyped, but if you look at overall policy and people's actual individual behaviour both Florida and California went through pretty stringent lockdowns. In practice a lot of work places enforced social distancing, masks, pushed vaccines. The two states certainly had much more similar public behaviour and policies with each other than either had with some other countries like Ecuador or Brazil. Another difference that gets hyped up a lot is Sweden versus many other European countries. Sweden was famous for "not locking down", but in fact it did pretty heavily in the grand scheme of things. It just did it a bit later than many other countries.

Take a look at the stringency index in this article.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-07/califo...

Florida locked down just as fast and just as hard as California for the first 6 months of the pandemic. After that stringency measures diverged, but Florida still maintained a range of significant pandemic control measures. Their measures in early 2021 were about as strict as California's in late 2021. Overall they were more similar than different.

It also seems that the high number of elderly people in Florida, as a group, took the pandemic very seriously. They were in fact more likely to get themselves vaccinated than elderly people in California, despite the lack of mandates.

In the end it's actual behaviour of the population that makes the difference, whether that behaviour was mandated or not. One interesting stat is that in the most pro-Trump counties (60%+ support) death rates were 2.7x higher than in the most Pro-Biden counties. In the top 10% of counties for each camp the death rate differential was 6x. At the peak of the wave in 2021 about a thousand more Republicans were dying per day than Democrats.