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I have previously discussed Ron DeSantis's prospects of becoming GOP nominee here and probably back on the old sub as well, but events of the past few weeks make me want to revisit the topic. During this period, several op-eds appeared suggesting that DeSantis is already flaming out. The biggest evidence for this is polling, which shows him losing ground to Donald Trump. While I think these reports are a bit premature—after all, polls from a year out aren't exactly the most reliable, especially concerning a candidate who hasn't even announced yet—they seem to underscore a point I had made previously. Ron DeSantis is a great candidate if the goal is to wed the Trump spirit to a candidate that doesn't want to directly invoke Trump. Some call him Trump-lite but that's not really an accurate description. He knows that the Republican party desperately needs to move on from Trump if they want to win national elections, as most Americans find direct MAGA invocations and claims of rigged elections to be distasteful at best and dangerous at worst. There's value in appearing to be the reasonable Republican who might have a shot at winning the general election in the face of an unpopular octogenarian. On the other hand, he knows that Trump has a large base that is now well-integrated in the party and is distrustful of Romney-type moderates who will sell them out to wealthy elites if it puts an extra nickel in their pockets and will play dead in the face of woke excess. RINOs, in other words. The Tea Party and later Trump reinvigorated a Republican party that had been moribund in the wake of Bush's disastrous second term, and the voters who made 2016 possible won't stand for some squish. They need someone who will fight.
DeSantis sought to split this difference. He balanced effective, bland government with culture-war ostentation. He refused to kowtow to Trump but was reluctant to criticize him. He built up plenty of media buzz. The thought among his supporters was that he would have the upper hand on both Trump wannabes and boring moderates in the primary. And then Trump himself announced his candidacy, and started attacking DeSantis directly, even though DeSantis hadn't (and still hasn't) declared. When he finally announces (probably in June), the primary fight will be a bloodbath. And no, DeSantis can't wait until 2028 because his buzz is solely based around his supposed candidacy. If he sits this one out he's a popular governor who no one outside of Florida gives a fuck about, at least not until 2027, when he'll have to compete with whoever the next wunderkind is, assuming Trump isn't running yet again.
The smart money says that DeSantis would have a shot in the general but is hamstrung by the fact that, having to go against Trump directly, he'll have to run further to the right than a general electorate will find acceptable, and will come out of the primary looking like another MAGA extremist. This is the conventional wisdom but I think this wisdom is wrong. First, DeSantis would have a tough row to hoe in the general even if the GOP handed him the nomination on a silver platter. What's the man know for so far? His COVID response put him on the map, but COVID isn't going to be an issue in 2024, and he'll have to do better than pointing out an isolated glory from four years ago. Everything else he's been in the news for has been culture war bait that is of dubious effectiveness, has nearly no national relevance, and is distasteful to moderates in any event. Part of the reason why Republicans were so disappointing in last year's midterms is because they failed to address things voters actually cared about. As much as the GOP would rag on Biden for inflation, they never presented a coherent plan for how to deal with it. No one knows what Ron DeSantis thinks about inflation. No one knows what the thinks about healthcare. No one knows what he thinks about crime, or how he plans to explain how Florida's crime rate is worse than both New York's and California's. When he's on the debate stage with Biden, what's he going to do, talk about the STOP WOKE act and the Don't Say Gay bill?
But then, he had an opening. Earlier this month, "Justice for All", a new single by Donald Trump and the J6 choir, went to No. 1 on iTunes. The single features president Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over a choir of heavily autotuned January 6th prisoners singing "The Star Spangled Banner" over prison phones. To most people on the left, this was just a hilarious example of how nutty the right is. But it gives DeSantis a chance. This is, for once, proof positive that there's no outflanking Trump on the right. No amount of MAGA-adjacentness is going to cut it here, when Trump represents the platonic ideal of MAGA. DeSantis's culture warring has proven that he's no RINO squish; now he can use this credibility to fight Trump directly. Come out directly and say that Trump's implicit support of the J6 prisoners, most of whom were convicted of assaulting law enforcement, is a disgrace to the idea of law and order and legitimizes left-wing violence. Come out and say that the 2020 election wasn't rigged. Come out and directly attack every MAGA conspiracy theory out there. Run on all the good, boring things he's done in Florida that no one has paid attention to, like environmental legislation, which has greater GOP interest in the wake of the East Palestine debacle. There's little doubt that if he wins Iowa, or New Hampshire, or wherever else, Trump will claim that the election was rigged, so get out ahead of it. He'll lose the Trump faithful but he wasn't winning with them anyway, and the rest of the party will be able to get back to some semblance of normal.
Of course. I wrote all this before I saw the news last night of the latest developments in the Disney scandal. I thought his move against Disney was stupid at the time, and said so here, but all of the DeSantis supporters assured me that this was the right move. It was clear almost immediately that simply ending the special district wasn't going to work, and I wasn't surprised when he said that the legislature would be dealing with the issue at a date that was conveniently after the election. Around this time, Bob Iger came back as Disney CEO, and apparently realized that a drawn-out court battle wasn't in the company's best interests, and it looked like the two sides had reached the kind of compromise that allowed both parties to save face: The state would get a couple token board members and everyone would forget about the whole thing. Then, at some point, DeSantis got greedy and made a deal that looked too good to be true—the entire district would be replaced with a new one whose board would consist entirely of political appointees, including a self-described children's activist and a self-described Christian nationalist, along with some wealthy donors for good measure. Some even went so far as to suggest that the board could monitor the content of Disney's theme park programs. The new board took over last month with relatively little fanfare.
And then, yesterday, weeks after the crucial documents had been signed, it became clear that the whole thing was one big setup, and that Disney had completely outfoxed DeSantis. It turns out that, back in February, the existing RCID board had entered into an agreement with Disney that devolved almost all of its powers. At least the powers that would have given DeSantis any leverage over the company. The board will still oversee infrastructure, but won't have any ability to influence development. Florida officials are obviously livid and the new board is seeking legal redress. I won't comment on the legality of the whole mess because I don't know, but even if the state has a good case against Disney, it doesn't really matter. First, the RCID was a public body and thus subject to sunshine laws. The whole thing was done out in the open—the agreement was posted online so you didn't even need a records request, the meeting adopting the agreement was public, etc.—so the only excuse DeSantis has for getting into this mess was not anticipating some kind of funny business and not noticing that anything was wrong until weeks after the deal was done. Second, it doesn't matter because any litigation won't be resolved until well after the election is over, and I doubt anyone will be issuing preliminary injunctions enabling the board to operate as it desires. One of the centerpieces of DeSantis's culture war has been delayed significantly due almost exclusively to the incompetence of public officials. Who knows, maybe this will blow over, but it significantly damages any attempt by DeSantis to run on competent administration.
Your theorized pivot is tidy, appealing, and, as the kids say, “cope.”
People have been theorizing a moderate backlash to Trumpism since roughly 2017. Each new headline is met with thinkpieces about how the GOP can finally jettison this guy and go back to repealing Obamacare. The most credible time was after the election, when Pence shot down the Eastman plan. It didn’t happen then, and it won’t happen now, because the GOP doesn’t want to lose.
Trump has the moderate wing over a barrel. He is absolutely able to parlay his outsider branding into a protest vote big enough to hand the ‘24 election to the Democrats. A drawn-out primary battle with DeSantis will ruin the guy for some fraction of the Republican base. No, as long as Trump wants the job, the party can’t moderate too far.
I agree with you about Trump but I don't know what other option DeSantis has. If he goes full MAGA the best case scenario is that he denies Trump the nomination by splitting the vote, but even that's a long shot. What do you think he should do, were you advising him? Telling him not to run isn't an option.
If he isn't willing to wait until 2028 and telling him not to run isn't an option, then I'd tell him to spend large sums of money on a marketing company run by a close friend/family relative of mine. It wouldn't change his chances of victory at all (they would stay at a solid 0), but if he's stupid enough to think taking on Trump in 2024 is a good idea it would be unethical of me to let him keep his money.
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Hm.
I want to say run perpendicular. Hit more moderate issues and avoid contradicting Trump on his traditional talking points: jobs and exceptionalism. Do some deficit hawking, at least if that’s compatible with whatever he tries to say about inflation. Maybe immigration works out okay for Ron; I don’t know how well his stunts in that area have been received.
That might all just be a recipe for disaster, or it could be compatible with Ron seeking a VP seat. Not really sure how that works historically.
Honestly, I think it’ll be a moot point; Trump will call him “Small Dick Ron” or something, and the campaign will be over.
That seems to me even more of a surefire way for him to get slaughtered. I mean, who the hell is this supposed to appeal to? People who like Trump enough that they'll be offended by Ron attacking him but who don't like him enough to actually vote for him? People who want Trump but don't think he can win but a guy who says all the same things as Trump but isn't Trump can? He's not getting the VP seat because he already refused to kiss the ring when he declined to seek Trump's endorsement, and Trump is already pounding him mercilessly even though he's not in the race yet, so that ship has sailed. There's literally nothing to gain at this point by trying to appease Trump or Trumplicans. I'm not saying it will work, but I think taking the offensive is really his only shot. Call out Trump for not building the wall. Call out Trump for criticizing states that pass restrictive abortion bans (right after signing the six week ban in Florida which may or may not actually be popular). Call out Trump for his womanizing. If he says Ron "Desanctimonious", lean into it and say something to the effect of "It's easy to appear sanctimonious to someone with no morals whatsoever". He's already implicitly called out Trump for the Stormy Daniels indictment, saying “Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair, I can't speak to that". He said the thing was politically motivated, which is so obviously true that the New York Times isn't even saying otherwise, so it's not like he's toadying by criticizing it, but it's best that people are reminded that the man was banging a porn star while his wife was at home with their newborn son. Say that the Jan 6 committee is political theater but nonetheless lambast the rioters and Trump for election denial and all the rest of it. He doesn't have to be moderate, he just has to criticize Trump. Then bring up all the stuff he's done in Florida that's effective and say that Trump could never have that much of an impact. No of this is necessarily true, I just don't think there's any way to tiptoe around the issue anymore.
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Desantis needs to run in the primary as ‘trump but gets stuff done instead of getting distracted by his ego’. Remember the Republican base, even most of the trump republicans, doesn’t actually like trumps personal behavior, so hitting him there is also a good strategy.
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