DeSantis is blowing it
How being cast as the Trump Slayer has backfired
A quick note: You’ve not heard from me for a while because I’ve been really sick. I planned to roll out an expanded version of this newsletter in February with extra content for paid subscribers, but I had to nix it because I caught covid, cellulitis (which can be life-threatening), and then mono in quick succession. I’m slowly getting back on my feet - mono lingers for six months or more - but I’m delaying the expanded rollout until June. So for now please keep enjoying everything for free, and I should be back to writing weekly at least from now on.
I never really fancied Ron DeSantis’ chances of winning the Republican primary. He’s been a genuine force to reckon with in Florida, but the idea he was going to trounce Donald Trump has always seemed like wish-casting by a certain subset of elites on the nationalist right. They see in him their Viktor Orban, someone who shares Trump’s values but is more competent at delivering electoral and policy victories. But it seems to me that he’s more likely to be a Cruz or a Rubio than an Orban - a candidate who gets hyped by the media but then falls apart upon contact with the actual electorate.
Before the 2022 midterms, I was skeptical that DeSantis would even risk taking on Trump in a primary this cycle. But then Trump was weakened by the documents investigation and the Republicans suffered a major defeat in the midterms - also widely interpreted as a rejection of Trumpism - and DeSantis faced an opportunity. Trump suddenly looked beatable. But this opportunity was at the same time a problem, because DeSantis now had no real excuse not to put his money where his mouth was. Unless I’m wrong about all of this, I think we might look back on a DeSantis decision to enter the primary as having been a big mistake brought about by what turned out to be a fairly temporary moment of Trumpian weakness.
And indeed, there are all sorts of data points popping up recently which are both favorable to Trump and unfavorable to DeSantis. The first and most obvious is that the polls keep trending in Trump’s direction. In the latest, Trump has a 30% lead over DeSantis. Trump is also blowing his rival out of the water with non-college white voters, the key to his previous victories (and of which more below). Secondly, the media is starting to turn skeptical of DeSantis, which undermines his support further because it removes the aura of success which has surrounded him to date. Finally, donors - who take their cues from the polls and the media - are turning skeptical too, making it harder for him to win the “invisible primary” of jockeying for elite support which precedes the actual primary.
Of course, I might be wrong. It’s awfully early in the cycle, and all kinds of things can happen, particularly when you’re talking about a candidate in as much legal jeopardy as Trump. But let me lay out the reasons for thinking that the DeSantis bubble will eventually burst, if it hasn’t already:
He’s had it fairly easy in Florida and is not prepared for the national scene. Pretty much the entire case that pro-DeSantis pundits make is based on his record as governor of Florida, where he enacted policies they like and where in 2022 he led Republicans to their largest victory in the state since 1916. The basic case these pundits make is that DeSantis will be able to repeat his successes in Florida at the national level in 2024.
But hold up. Will he? There’s actually little reason to expect that DeSantis’ success in Florida will transfer easily to the national level. Florida today is an incredibly permissive environment for a Republican politician thanks to the incompetence of the Florida Democratic Party’s voter registration and turnout efforts, and the long-term red-ward drift of the state. Today for the first time in history there are more registered Republicans than Democrats in Florida, and there is no statewide Democrat in office for the first time since the 1870s. Republicans have a super-majority in the state legislature, and the Democrats haven’t won the governorship since 1994.
Just on a superficial level, that’s a very different political profile to the highly competitive Midwest swing states that DeSantis would need to win to take the presidency. And at least at the moment, we don’t have any evidence that he can do it. In fact, while DeSantis seems to be aware of his need to appeal beyond Florida, his attempts to do so are ham-fisted and have involved bashing his own constituents:
This brings me to my second point, which is that Ron DeSantis does not seem to be a very good politician. And what I mean by that is that while he has been able to stage-manage his political life in Tallahassee, he seems extremely awkward when taken out of his comfort zone. He doesn’t deal well with the unexpected, nor can he seem to improvise. He lacks charm and radiates a kind of weirdness. He does overgrown frat-boy things like go to the town of Brandon, FL to sign bills (because of “Let’s go Brandon!”, geddit?) and downright evil things like trick unsuspecting migrants into going to Martha’s Vineyard. Where Trump has a sort of animal charisma which a great many people respond to, DeSantis is smug, weaselly, quiet. People do not respond well.
His lack of social skills is already drawing criticism. Stories about the way he eats chocolate pudding are becoming legendary (so much so that they drew a denial), but more serious for him are the stories about how unpersonable and awkward he is with donors, the press, and party officials. He rarely engages with the media. He alienates donors by seeming not to care if they like him or not. And he can only handle scripted events and wants the public kept far away from, creating problems in primary states which are used to getting up close and personal with the candidates. What all of this lack of charisma might mean if he eventually has to debate Trump live on stage is easy to imagine.
The third reason that DeSantis will struggle is lack of competitiveness among the non-college white voters who make up the GOP base. The basic way to understand the DeSantis candidacy to date is that he is someone who a subset of GOP elites strongly want to be the nominee but who has yet to demonstrate a strong connection with the GOP base. Trump is handily outpolling DeSantis among voters without a college degree. And while DeSantis still has an advantage - albeit a shrinking one - among voters with a college degree, there are just a heck of a lot more non-college whites in America at large and particularly in the Republican primary electorate.
One of the keys to DeSantis’ success in Florida has been his performance with Hispanic voters. DeSantis flipped heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade county red, the first Republican gubernatorial candidate to do so since Jeb Bush twenty years ago. Even putting aside the complexity of the Hispanic electorate - flipping Miami-Dade doesn’t mean DeSantis can win Hispanics in New Mexico or Arizona - this wouldn’t help much in a GOP primary for two reasons. The first is that Hispanics make up a relatively small part of the GOP primary electorate. The second is that polls show that Republican voters of color in Florida might like DeSantis, but nationally they heavily favor Trump.
The reason for this is simple: Trump’s base continues to be drawn from that section of the Republican primary electorate which does not have a college degree, and which earns less than $50,000 a year. That describes a lot of Hispanics as well as a lot of whites, and that appeal to lesser-educated and less affluent voters crosses racial lines.
I don’t want to take this analogy too far, but I think you can to some extent liken DeSantis to some of the various centrist alternatives to Joe Biden who tried to win the Democratic primary in 2020. Highly-educated voters and pundits (who are themselves highly-educated) went through complex mental gymnastics to explain why these candidates would do better than ol’ Amtrak Joe, who they struggled to take seriously. But the rank-and-file electorate, who are more likely to take politics at face value, responded well to Biden and didn’t respond well to his centrist competitors. Similarly, much of the rationale for DeSantis on behalf of conservative pundits is too clever by half, rationalizing that a faux Trump can win over the electorate while acting more rationally and in line with the goals of conservative pundits once he’s in office. But given the choice, a huge part of the GOP primary electorate is just going to want the real Trump over a knock-off.
DeSantis’ fourth problem is that he is going to peak too early. Again, DeSantis is a victim here of his own success relative to Trump. 2022 seemed to go so well for DeSantis and so badly for Trump that the media quickly crowned DeSantis as Trump’s heir apparent. But the media was writing checks that DeSantis is not remotely equipped to cash. He hasn’t even entered the campaign yet and he’s already getting shot to pieces by the Trump campaign, seemingly before he’s even really thought about how to respond. In recent weeks, DeSantis has been alternating between adopting an above-the-fray impartiality and making half-hearted swipes at Trump. Meanwhile, the MAGAverse is remorselessly dragging him through the mud, with evident results in the polls.
DeSantis’ other foibles make him particularly unsuited to cope with this problem. He lacks national experience and doesn’t show much evidence of political flexibility. He doesn’t appear nimble on his feet. He has benefited thus far from positive media coverage and does not appear to have a strategy for when the media environment turns hostile. His prominent place in the mythology of the coming primary - DeSantis the Trump Slayer! - generates intense coverage and interest in his views, but he actually has very few well-worked out positions on public policy. He appears all over the place on key issues like Ukraine and on issues on which he does have a substantial track record, such as his support for a Paul Ryan-style fiscal agenda, he is on the wrong side of the primary electorate.
This is why I would argue that even though he’s not the frontrunner, the most likely way that his candidacy is going to play out is in a pattern similar to the hordes of other candidates who have prematurely been declared the frontrunner before crashing and burning. Defenders of DeSantis will say the polls don’t matter right now because at this point they are usually not predictive of the final winner. For instance, at the equivalent point in the 2007-8 cycle, the frontrunner was Rudy Giuliani. There has been many a candidate who got to be ahead through garnering intense media interest before crashing and burning when the media turned against them, or the public moved on. But if you look at the GOP field right now, the candidate who is most likely to repeat that pattern is not Trump, who much of the media have always hated and who the public know perhaps better than any other politician in America today, but DeSantis. And the fact he wasn’t even ahead of Trump during his honeymoon should tell you everything you need to know.
What does all of this mean for 2024? I hesitate to be pleased that Trump is likely to be the GOP nominee, but I actually view DeSantis as a somewhat more formidable opponent for the Democrats in a general election if only because (a) Biden has beaten Trump before and (b) Trump generates a degree of polarization and controversy that, as we have seen in election after election, ultimately favors the Democrats. Every macro-economic and political trend predicted a “red wave” in 2022, but Trumpism conspired to break the laws of political gravity. Similarly, the economy might be in a recession in 2024, a situation which would likely benefit an “ordinary” Republican more than it would benefit Trump. On the other hand, the downside risks of a Trump victory are huge - he nearly tore the country apart last time and he could do it again. Trump can even do immense damage in defeat, as he demonstrated on January 6th.
So, much about the implications of of the above remains to be written. And I might ultimately be wrong - maybe DeSantis will suddenly start demonstrating profound charm and tactical genius. But you can still color me skeptical that he’s going to go as far as much of the media seems - or pretends - to think.
Thanks for reading America Explained. Got a question you’d like Andy to answer or a critique you’d like him to respond to? Post it below in a comment, and it could become the subject of a future post.