DeSantis Continues to Be His Own Worse Enemy

Anyone watching Ron DeSantis' floundering campaign - save Virginia's Glenn Youngkin who continues to try to be DeSantis' mini-me on the culture wars - can quickly come to the conclusion that DeSantis is his own worse enemy.  Besides be unlikeable, DeSantis is continuing his culture war agenda that thrills some of the MAGA base, yet repels moderates and independents he would need to win a general election.  As a long column in the New York Times lays out, DeSantis comes across as stiff and his positions are calculated and give little appearance that DeSantis truly believes what he says.  He can try to hold himself out as a man of the people but his Ivy League credentials only serve to show the act as a sham.  With the upcoming Republican Party debate - which Trump is boycotting rather than have to engage in any sort of debate or answer questions about his multiple indictments - DeSantis' only chance would seem to somehow recast himself.  Based on his conduct to date, that act may be beyond DeSantis' skill set and would require a transformation of his prickly personality.  Personally, I hope DeSantis continues to implode even as Trump's criminal charges and the apparent flipping of some of his co-defendants may begin to set the stage or Republican voters to wake up to Trump's foulness.  Here are column highlights:

Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, appeared to be a formidable challenger to Donald Trump — on paper at least.  He didn’t back down from fights with the left; he started them. “I will be able to destroy leftism in this country, and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history,” DeSantis said.

He has thumbed his nose at blue state governors, shipping them planeloads of immigrants. He has removed locally elected Democratic prosecutors. Whenever he sees what he believes to be an excess on the left, he stamps it out — from drag shows to critical race theory.

He is not just a supporter of the hard right agenda; he has personally weaponized it. Unlike traditional conservatives, wary of the abuse of state power, DeSantis relishes using his authority to enforce his version of what is moral and what is not.

Since declaring his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, however, DeSantis has lost traction: support for DeSantis has fallen from 31.3 percent on Jan. 20 to 20.7 percent on May 15, the day DeSantis announced, all the way down to 14.9 percent on Aug. 21, according to RealClearPolitics.

As DeSantis prepares for the first Republican presidential debate Wednesday night, the central question he faces is why his support collapsed and whether he can get his campaign back on track.

There are a lot of answers to the first question, most of them with a grain or more of truth. DeSantis has turned out to be a stiff on the stump, a man without affect. He speaks in alphabet talk: CRT, DEI, ESG. His attempts to outflank Trump from the right . . . seem to be more politically calculated than based on conviction. In terms of executive competence, attention to detail and commitment to an agenda, DeSantis stands head and shoulders above Trump, but he has so far been unable to capitalize on these strengths.

That much is understood, but is DeSantis burdened by a larger liability? I posed the following question to a cross section of political operatives and political scientists:

Ron DeSantis has been noticeably unsuccessful in his challenge to Trump. Why? Is it because DeSantis does not or cannot demonstrate the visceral animosity that Trump exudes?

The net result is that his supporters get to realize Trump is willing to refer to “shithole countries” in Africa and Latin America, to say about immigrants that “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” or to describe Latino gang members: “These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”

“Trump’s speech style,” Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Law School-San Francisco, wrote by email, “adeptly channels the talk traditions of blue-collar men who pride themselves on not having to suck up and self-edit to get ahead, which is the way they see professionals’ traditions of decorum.”

Not only that, Williams continued, “Trump is way ahead of DeSantis in his perceived ability to get things done as a strong leader — that’s Trump cashing in on his enactment of blue-collar traditions of tough, straight-talking manliness. Also Trump is fun while DeSantis is a drip.”

Williams argued, “DeSantis holds the delusion that politics is chiefly about policy differences” when in practice it is more often “about identity and self-affirmation. Trump understands instinctively that non-college Americans feel distinctly dissed: non-college grads are 73 percentage points lower than grads to believe they’re treated with dignity.

Williams described DeSantis’s approach to campaigning as “a clumsy color-by-numbers culture-wars formula” accompanied by a speaking style “more Harvard than hard hat, as when he talked about ‘biomedical security restrictions’ in his speech to the Republican Party convention in North Carolina (whatever those are??).”

Williams cited a paper, published earlier this year, “Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes” by Justin Grimmer, William Marble and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, that “showed that, while racial resentment strongly predicts Trump voting, that’s not why he won: He won because he also attracted a much larger group of voters with only moderate levels of racial resentment.”

DeSantis, in contrast, is very specific and consistent about policy, and he is too extreme for many on the right. To ice the cake, he appears to be really bad at retail politics — he just isn’t likable, and certainly isn’t charismatic. Together, I don’t think DeSantis can compete to overcome these obstacles, even if he were to start using Trump-like rhetoric.

In a particularly devastating comparison of DeSantis to Trump, David Bateman, a political scientist at Cornell, wrote: “Trump is able to speak the language of hate and resentment in a way that everyone believes is real, and not just a calculated act.”

Everything about DeSantis, by contrast, seems calculated. He’s the Yale and Harvard guy now complaining about intellectuals and elites. He’s talking about wokism and critical race theory, when no one knows what those are (even Trump noted no one can define woke, though he yells against it himself). When he tries to be as visceral as Trump, he just comes off as weird. DeSantis saying he’s going to start “slitting throats” reminded me of Romney’s “severely conservative.” While DeSantis’s is a dangerous escalation of violent imagery, they both sound bizarre and unnatural.

[I]nsofar as DeSantis is seen as “an establishment Trump, who I expect most voters will see as fully aligned with G.O.P. orthodoxy but even more focused on the priorities of racial and social conservatives (taking over universities, banning books, or attacking transpersons), he starts to look more like a general election loser.”

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, argued in an email that DeSantis has adopted an approach to the nomination fight that was bound to fail:

DeSantis’s strategy, and that of any candidate not named Trump, should be to consolidate the Maybe Trump voters. But DeSantis has seemed like he was going after the Always Trump voters with his aggressive language (“slitting throats”), his comment that Ukraine was just a “territorial dispute,” his suggestion that vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. would be a good candidate to head the Centers for Disease Control, and his doubling down on whether slavery might have been beneficial to some enslaved people.

The problem with this approach, Ayres continued, is that “the Always Trump voters are ‘Always Trump’ for a reason — they are not going to settle for the second-best Trump if they can get the real thing.”

Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, elaborated on the difficulties facing DeSantis’s bid to position himself to the right of Trump. “The DeSantis strategy is weak in that there are not enough Republican voters to be gained to the right of Trump,” Shapiro wrote in an email. ” In addition, Shapiro contended, “Trump’s style and language are more authentic and natural.” Trump’s “Queens street-rhetoric style may help, but the point is that Trump sounds real and not staged for political purposes, in contrast to DeSantis’s endless use of ‘woke’ which is very vague and has had more meaning in liberal-left and educated elite circles and does not have the clear meaning that Trump’s position taking has. DeSantis sounds staged and forced in discussing this.”

“DeSantis’s main problem,” Carnoy wrote by email, is that he is not Trump and Trump is still around largely filling the space that Trump himself has defined and continues to define. This is the ‘victim’ space, where the ‘victims’ are the ‘forgotten core Americans,’ besieged by liberals who want to help everyone but them — migrants, blacks, LGBTQIA, homeless, foreign countries in fights for democracy.

“Trump figured out in 2015 that he could continue to help the rich (including himself) economically through traditional tax reduction policies — stoking inequality — and simultaneously enthuse the forgotten by throwing rich red ‘victim identity’ meat to this bloc of white (and Hispanic) working class voters.”

It will be very difficult to persuade Republican primary voters to abandon Trump, Hopkins wrote, citing “a nationwide survey I conducted earlier this summer. I found that on key issues from immigration to health care and climate changes, the differences between all Republicans, Trump supporters, and DeSantis supporters were typically fairly minimal. On issues alone, it’s hard to envision DeSantis convincing G.O.P. voters to abandon Trump.”

Not everybody thinks Trump has charisma, wit and humor, but many of his supporters remain captivated. They want the show to go on.