The DeSantis DeCline
How the Florida Governor’s Campaign Has Failed to Catch Fire and How Trump’s Standing in the Party is Nearly Unbeatable
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Let me take you back to last November right after the midterm elections. A narrative was rapidly developing among both GOP establishment and mainstream pundits, stemming from the election results.
The GOP underperformed nationally and in swing state races where former President Donald Trump played a key role in endorsing candidates in primaries. GOP candidates who closely aligned themselves to Trump and his lies about the 2020 election flopped in what should’ve been a strong year for the GOP given the unpopularity of President Biden and the typical midterm backlash against the party in power.
Meanwhile, in the Sunshine State, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, who was quickly becoming a darling of the Republican party’s base since some believed he lacked the baggage of Donald Trump, won re-election in a landslide, beating his Democratic challenger by nearly 20 points. Florida Republicans routed Florida Democrats in a true red wave that didn’t materialize in most other states across the nation. To Republican pundits and many observers of politics, this dichotomy showed one thing: Donald Trump is a political loser who will drag the GOP to defeat while Ron DeSantis’ way leads the GOP back toward their winning ways.
The next day, the front page of the New York Post, often an indicator of where the Republican Party is leaning, lauded DeSantis as the future of the party, with a headline of “DeFuture.” The Murdoch Empire (Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post) was beginning to cast DeSantis as the next GOP kingmaker, temporarily severing their long-time devotion to the former president. Trump declared his 2024 White House bid a week after the election in an apparent attempt to recapture his relevance. It didn’t get him much of a polling bump. In fact, polls in the few months after the November election showed DeSantis either close behind Trump or in some cases ahead of the former president.
Jump to today’s headlines, and you’ll see how the narrative has quickly reversed. DeSantis’ campaign is conducting a reset, his campaign fundraising is heavily dependent on wealthy donors who have maxed out, and the polls show Trump with massive leads over DeSantis both nationally and in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Now Trump is driving the narrative while DeSantis is very weak and on the ropes, which is most evidenced by the fact that so many other candidates have gotten into the primary race. Any drop in Trump’s support in the polls is not necessarily flowing mostly to DeSantis but is flowing pretty evenly to the other candidates. And there is still talk of others potentially joining the field like my state’s Governor Glenn Youngkin. This shows that DeSantis has not been able to accomplish the first goal of his campaign (or at least what should’ve been his first goal): clear the field and become the undisputed clear alternative to Trump to set up a Trump vs. non-Trump primary and avoid the prisoner’s dilemma that defined the 2016 GOP presidential primary.
I will be discussing why this is the case, as well as highlighting the inherent structural advantages that Donald Trump possesses, which even a stronger candidate like Ron DeSantis would struggle to overcome.
DeSantis’ Huge Missteps
Let’s begin first though with a few errors DeSantis has made as a candidate and talk about why his personality is a bigger problem than any campaign reboot can solve. I’m prepared to be wrong here as well - we have seen over-bloated campaigns reset early enough in the primary season to find a path to victory (John McCain in the summer of 2007 comes to mind). Maybe DeSantis can truly come back and rewrite the story of his 2024 campaign. But I’m doubtful because campaign structures and organizations are fixable; candidate personalities are much more difficult to remedy.
DeSantis supporters thought that if he could turn a formerly swing state red, then he could win the same type of voters that brought him that landslide at a national level. There are a few flaws there though.
The Florida Democratic Party didn’t really see DeSantis as beatable and therefore, put up a hapless candidate in Charlie Crist. The national party did not invest in Florida so turnout among Democratic voters dropped big time. This type of turnout dynamic simply is not replicable in battleground states in 2024.
I think one thing that most pundits miss as an ingredient in DeSantis’ landslide victory was his very recent handling of the response to Hurricane Ian, standing with President Biden who praised his performance, right before the election. As a Governor, responding to a crisis like that gives you free media and positive coverage that is impossible for an underfunded challenger like Crist to garner.
The other factor in his popularity was how he handled the response to COVID-19. I have serious issues with how DeSantis handled COVID and data shows Florida did not fare well in terms of death rates after DeSantis began to take actions that, in my view, weakened Floridians’ trust in the COVID vaccines in the summer and fall of 2021. But to many Floridians, that didn’t matter as much as the fact that DeSantis kept the schools open earlier and the state’s economy more open. To me, that message was resonant with many swing voters in the state. It is really what drove DeSantis’ popularity both in Florida but also among GOP voters nationally as well in 2021 and 2022.
Here’s the snag though for Ron now: no one really cares about COVID anymore at least when it comes to how they vote, and people don’t want to rehash the debates over vaccines, masks, and school closures in 2023. The American voter’s mindset is “what have you done for me lately” and COVID isn’t on the voters’ mind. So DeSantis talking so much about COVID during his campaign makes him look out of touch with what voters care about. He’s not speaking to the moment we are in right now. More on that in a bit when I talk about his campaign messaging debacles.
Finally, keep in mind: beating a hapless Florida Democratic Party is nowhere near as daunting as beating the last man to occupy the White House in a primary fought in the national spotlight as well as in press coverage and skilled retail politicking in battleground states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. It requires different tactics and much more communication skills and the ability to control a narrative. As Florida Governor in 2019-2022, DeSantis was able to control the narrative -- he significantly outspent his weak opposition in the 2022 election, he was able to be the center of attention on any big state issue, and, with an overwhelmingly Republican legislature, get whatever policy he wanted passed. Now he’s a challenger candidate and has to be nimble and savvy enough to make moments outside of the protected media bubble he built in Florida.
And the early reports are in: he absolutely sucks at this.
In March, I wrote the following based on early media reports about DeSantis’ pre-official campaign forays into meeting voters and donors:
Early reports of DeSantis’ stops in early primary states indicate that he doesn’t share much of an appetite for the socializing with voters and donors that comes with being a successful national candidate. He doesn’t come across as a person with the social skills voters expect from top-tier presidential candidates.
Maybe that was premature. Maybe he’ll get better, I thought. Nope, that hasn’t happened! He had the infamous moment where he awkwardly laughed with a voter in an early primary state. Watch the clip here. He had the moment at a New Hampshire diner where a voter introduced himself and all DeSantis said in response was, “Okay” - not introducing himself or asking about the voter like good candidates do in such situations. On an overseas trip to Japan prior to announcing his campaign, after a reporter asked DeSantis about falling behind in the polls to Trump, DeSantis weirdly shook his head and said “I’m not a candidate.” These moments speak to DeSantis’ awkwardness and his inability to come off as likable. He just simply comes across as a weird dude. And weird dudes that are off-putting don’t get elected President.
DeSantis’ Weird, “Too Online” Campaign
Adding to the “weird” vibe of his candidacy are the issues he’s decided to focus on and how his campaign apparatus is just filled with weirdos. DeSantis, after trying to mimic Trump as I wrote in March, is now trying to run to Trump’s right and focus heavily on policy disputes you see play out in the online fever swamps and not in the conversations happening among average voters in their living rooms.
He focuses so heavily on being anti-woke that it has become a punchline. This might be a dated reference, but in a Democratic presidential primary debate in the fall of 2007, then-Senator Joe Biden went after then-leading GOP national frontrunner Rudy Giuliani for centering his campaign message only on the former NYC mayor’s response to the 9/11 attacks. Biden quipped: “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11… I mean there’s nothing else.” It seems like one could credibly say, “Ron DeSantis … There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and woke.”
After the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March, DeSantis actually went so far as to blame “wokeism” and DEI programs for the bank’s failures rather than the actual financial issues like over-leveraged balance sheets in the midst of interest rate hikes. His obsession with “wokeism” has led him to start fights with Disney that resulted in Disney scrapping plans to add 2,000 jobs in Florida. Now, even after his supposed reset, Desantis is targeting Bud Light, urging legal action against Anheuser-Busch which has money in the state pension fund, as punishment for Bud Light having an ad with a trans influencer. In one speech, he attempts to sound like Winston Churchill in the great battle against “woke”, saying, “We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of Congress.”
Again, many Republican voters do truly care about “fighting woke ideology.” But that’s not all they care about, and when you emphasize it so much, it turns you into a one-trick pony who isn’t speaking to the concerns of many voters, including those within the GOP base. DeSantis’ approach to talking about these issues is way “too online.” Many non-normie “online” folks talk about this stuff all the time, but most voters only know the broad strokes. For instance, DeSantis talks about targeting ESG, or corporate social responsibility initiatives to set environmental, social and governance goals at companies. I’m a pretty online voter who does follow this culture war madness even if I think this issue is super esoteric and irrelevant to the job of an elected official, let alone the president. And beyond the basic definition, I still have no idea what ESG is. Surely many non-online voters don’t care to read about it either.
His campaign staff is also very “online,” with his people often getting into tiffs on Twitter over stuff campaigns should not be concerned about. And that leads to his War Room putting out a video that castigates Donald Trump for not being anti-LGBTQ enough while comparing DeSantis to characters from online conservative memes and quoting commentators talking about how bad his policies are to LGBTQ people as a badge of honor. The ad oddly compared DeSantis to Patrick Bateman, Christian Bale’s sociopathic character in American Psycho, interspersed with images of half-naked meatheads. The irony of this hypermasculine imagery interspersed with anti-LGBTQ messaging should not be lost on anyone.
The message was awful and horrific. I also don’t think it did anything to persuade the Trump supporters he has to dislodge given how Trump’s appointed conservative justices on the Supreme Court just issued a ruling that angered LGBTQ advocates. But the way it was presented with all these memes was too online for the average GOP voter who is old and not going to get these niche online references. It’s the type of mentality that led him to officially launch his campaign on a Twitter spaces conversation with two men who are so out of touch with the average American -- Elon Musk and David Sachs -- and then after the (failed) launch, put out an ad that has just as many images of Elon as it does DeSantis. It’s just all so weird.
DeSantis Is Too Far Right
Prior to officially entering the race, DeSantis rammed through a policy agenda that fails to win over more moderate Trump voters and pushes him too far to the right for general election swing voters, thus weakening his electability argument over Trump.
Prior to his re-election, DeSantis supported a less draconian view on abortion, signing into law a 15-week ban. I have doubts based on polling data in the post-Roe environment that a 15-week ban is a good sell to voters, but it’s far easier to sell than the bill he signed recently - a 6-week ban on abortion. I’ve written in the past that many Trump voters are actually pro-choice or at least not motivated by the abortion issue, so this won’t win them over, and it certainly is not a good position for a general election as seen in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and in national polling. Recent polling of GOP primary voters suggests nearly three-in-ten GOP primary voters identify as pro-choice and less than a quarter support no exceptions to abortion restrictions. He rammed through a law that allows Florida residents to “carry a concealed loaded weapon without a permit” -- a very unpopular policy among wide swaths of the electorate. And he pushed to expand his “Don’t Say Gay” Bill from applying to 3rd grade and younger to 12th grade and younger. Again, it’s certainly understandable why DeSantis was on solid political ground as many saw him protecting third graders from being exposed to very sensitive sexual topics in the classroom. But preventing teenagers from learning about these issues in the real world is surely not as popular with voters in the middle.
Prior to these legislative moves, DeSantis was establishing himself as the candidate of college-educated Republican voters. But now, according to analysis from The Miami Herald, DeSantis’ support among these college-educated GOP voters has dropped at a faster rate than his support has dropped among non-college-educated GOP voters. And it is because DeSantis has moved so far right on these hot-button cultural issues that he is losing some of these voters who have been iffy on how Trump veered so much into these cultural issues. And in doing so, he hasn’t been able to gain a foothold within the non-college GOP base that’s enamored with Trump.
DeSantis Is . . . Not Trump
Now one might argue (and I’ve thought this for a while) that DeSantis, by running so heavily on the grievance politics that propelled Trump, would be buoyed in the polls. Running on bullying and attacking groups the GOP base doesn’t like is a key part of Trump’s appeal with Republicans since 2015. Trump was never an evangelical champion but white evangelicals love him because he opposes the groups they think have been attacking them, for example. But I think DeSantis’ failure to launch by being just as mean, if not more so, than Trump highlights an incomplete understanding of Trump’s appeal as a candidate. Trump is incredibly vindictive and addicted to grievance politics and bullying tactics but is also a charismatic and media-savvy candidate. DeSantis is just stale and boring. And Trump may be mean, but he has a better sense of humor. When Trump’s supporters attend a Trump rally, they feel like they are at a rock concert- Trump is entertaining (yes he’s a dangerous authoritarian demagogue, but a big factor in his appeal was that he has always been an entertainer). As Helen Lewis so eloquently described DeSantis’ campaign struggles in The Atlantic: “He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes.”
And Ron DeSantis’ political brand was that he was a “fighter.” But when it comes to standing up to Donald Trump on his biggest weaknesses with voters overall, he hasn’t been a fighter, but someone who more often than not jumps to Trump’s defense. Donald Trump has been indicted twice, potentially three times. In a normal world, this would be catnip for a challenger campaign. But DeSantis (in fairness, like most other GOP candidates) has come to his defense, saying the Biden DOJ is going after Trump unfairly. The calculation is obvious: don’t piss off Trump’s voters because if Trump is sidelined, then you can pick up his voters. But this is the same flawed mentality that led Ted Cruz to never attack Trump, hoping he’d pick up his voters. Cruz was humiliated in the process and failed to win the nomination. Maybe, just maybe, Ron DeSantis is this primary’s Ted Cruz: an unlikeable, super ideological candidate who can’t beat Trump because enough voters don’t see him as a good enough alternative to Trump.
Trump’s Nearly Unbreakable Bond with the GOP Base
I will say in closing though that while I stand by my critiques of DeSantis’ campaign, even if DeSantis ran a better campaign, I’m not sure he’d be doing much better (though he’d be not in free fall!).
That is because, as I’ve long argued to friends and family, the GOP base is the ultimate problem here. They are in a cult-like devotion to Donald Trump. He’s their modern-day Ronald Reagan. To a majority of GOP primary voters, Donald Trump can do no wrong. A majority of Republican voters believe that Donald Trump actually legitimately won the 2020 presidential election. That is an incredibly hard brick wall to pierce.
Think about this: if you believe Donald Trump actually didn’t lose the 2020 election, you’re very likely not going to be convinced by an argument from his primary challengers that he’s a political loser dragging down the GOP’s electoral prospects. That is why the typical electability argument is harder to use to persuade voters within the GOP primary electorate to your side. Hence, when GOP voters are asked who is more likely to win the 2024 general election, by a wide margin, they choose Trump over DeSantis.
Trump’s prospects have improved because Trump has been indicted -- not necessarily among the general electorate, but most certainly among GOP primary voters. The modern-day GOP is a party of victimhood, and one tilted heavily against institutions of accountability against Trump. So, when Trump is indicted, the argument is very easy for Trump to make to his supporters: “They’re targeting me because they are targeting you.” Again, Trump understands what these other candidates don’t fully grasp about the party they want to lead: the base wants to be told they are victims of grand conspiracies to silence them, that their America is under assault by ominous forces, and only those who say they’ll be their voice against these forces can be trusted. Trump has built that reputation with these base voters, and that is hard to break.
Keep in mind too: Trump is, among GOP voters, basically akin to an incumbent President (heck, many of them think he still is the president!). This is a man that many of these voters have voted for at least twice, and in some cases three times, going back to the 2016 primary. If you have voted for someone numerous times before, it can be quite challenging to not vote for them again if given the opportunity. Those bonds are hard to sever. You have to have a really compelling alternative to break you away. And DeSantis is not that guy, at least in the way he’s run his campaign up to this point.
DeSantis has time to turn this around, but he will need to have a serious reset and a total recalibration of his message. And he will have to learn how to be good with people. That last part is the toughest of all. And it’s why Ron DeSantis may very well be a very failed candidate.