Ron DeSantis' Shriveling Campaign

Ron DeSantis and many Republicans previously thought that DeSantis might be the hope of the Republican Party and an alternative to the now four time indicted Donald Trump. In the process of seeking to court the Christofascist and white supremacist base, DeSantis went all in on the culture wars, declaring war on Disney, his state's largest employer, has sought to erase black history from education in Florida, declared a jihad against LGBT Floridians and LGBT Americans in general, and signed a law making abortion after 6 weeks - a time frame before most women even know they are pregnant.  The result has to date been that three civil rights organizations have issued travel advisories against travel to Florida, educated voters have been repelled by his embrace of ignorance and bigotry, and and effort to put an abortion referendum the 2024 is well on its way to securing the signatures required for the ballot initiative.  The latter item, if successful, will likely cause Democrats and pro-choice voters to flood to the polls in 2024. Meanwhile, DeSantis still trails Trump among GOP primary voters by double digit and on poll shows Chris Christie ahead of DeSantis in New Hampshire.  Personally, I hope the implosion continues and that DeSantis who has decided to make cruelty and discrimination his trade mark ends up spurned even more.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at DeSantis' crumbling campaign.  Here are excerpts:

Go to YouTube, and you can still find the Ron DeSantis who got Republican donors and media so excited, just a year ago. A source familiar with the campaign described clips of DeSantis, usually at press conferences he gave as governor of Florida, that went viral in Republican circles. . . . The questions were often about DeSantis’s COVID policies, and also sometimes about his aggressive stances against the teaching of race and gender topics in public schools or his perplexing war on Disney. In response, DeSantis generally took an impatient tone—the press, he seemed to suggest, was once again wasting everyone’s time.

It wasn’t surprising that this kind of figure would appeal most keenly to conservative élites: his gubernatorial campaign last year, effectively a COVID victory lap, drew an astonishing two hundred million dollars in contributions from donors, and, in a four-month period just after the 2020 election, Fox News producers asked DeSantis to appear on the network more than a hundred and ten times. By the end of 2022, after DeSantis romped to reëlection in a midterm cycle in which Republicans underperformed and some of Trump’s preferred candidates flamed out, it seemed to G.O.P. pollsters that the DeSantis phenomenon was no longer just top-down.

Since the 2020 election, Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster closely affiliated with the Never Trump movement, has been conducting frequent focus groups with Republicans who voted twice for Trump. This past winter, Longwell told me, “We started having to screen groups for Trump favorability to find people who even wanted Trump to run again. I can’t tell you how dominant DeSantis was in that moment, and how clear people were that it was time to move on.” Former Trump voters, Longwell said, “were very DeSantis curious. They just thought Trump had too much baggage.

One theory circulating among politicos right now is that DeSantis simply waited too long to enter the race. . . . But, whatever the reasons for the delay, it was also the case that DeSantis and his advisers had not solved a fundamental problem for the campaign: how to run against Trump. Within two months of DeSantis’s announcement, his campaign laid off a third of its staff; last week, he fired his campaign manager. In a recent Times/Siena poll, he trailed Trump 54–17 among national Republican primary voters.

At the outset of his campaign, DeSantis had a strong base of support among more moderate, college-educated voters. But this base alone is not big enough to win the Republican primaries. “Early on in the race, DeSantis was gonna have to make a decision,” a leading G.O.P. consultant working with a rival candidate told me. One path, he said, would have been to run as a moderate, pull all the anti-Trump people into his camp, and then go to work on the conservatives by arguing that he was younger than Trump, more competent at governing, and likelier to win. The other path was to try to run from the right, even if that cost him the support of his natural base, on the theory that it would be impossible to beat Trump without denting his conservative support and that eventually the moderates would come home because, as the consultant put it, “Where the fuck else are they gonna go?”

In truth, a conservative run was a more natural fit for DeSantis. As DeSantis built his national brand, he had leaned heavily into a hard form of culture war: attacking Disney and pushing laws that curtailed the teaching of gender- and race-related topics. It would have been tricky for even the most adept politician to pivot from this to a moderate pitch of good governance and policy. The DeSantis campaign also seemed to lack Trump’s appeal to what the source familiar with the campaign called the “deep base instincts” of the Republican Party. Perhaps to compensate for this and to channel the right-wing id, the campaign associated itself with some envelope-pushing young activists and journalists. This backfired.

But, from the start of this year, DeSantis has struggled to identify issues that might appeal to very conservative voters. In February, DeSantis criticized the U.S.’s support of the Ukraine war, but he was forced to reverse his position after some prominent donors threw a fit. In April, as much of the political world was coming to terms with Democrats’ electoral advantage after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, DeSantis signed a bill outlawing abortion after six weeks.

For several years now, it’s been common to hear Republican consultants and pollsters say that Trump dominates among the Party’s conservative base because he is seen as a “fighter.” More than anyone else in the G.O.P. primary, DeSantis has a reputation for political aggression and a track record of conservative efficacy, but that doesn’t seem to have helped him. Perhaps this characterization of Trump is misleading. Is he really a fighter? He is a yeller, certainly, an expresser, a maker of big threats. He also wanders away from the fights he has started.

On August 4th, a verdict of a sort was delivered on DeSantis’s effort to pry the conservative base from Trump. The hotel magnate Robert Bigelow, the largest individual donor to the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, to which he’d given twenty million dollars, told Reuters that he would not give any more money to the campaign unless it adopts a more moderate approach, saying that DeSantis “does need to shift to get moderates.” When I spoke with Sarah Longwell a few days later, she told me that, in her last two focus groups of two-time Trump voters, not a single participant had said that they wanted DeSantis to win the nomination . . .

The qualities that recommended DeSantis six months ago are intact; Trump is in a strong poll position but a perilous legal one. When I followed DeSantis on the Iowa trail last week, at least, the challenge seemed to be the fundamental political matter of what, exactly, he was trying to say. . . . He did not mention his conflict with Disney; the riff on “parental rights in education” was reserved for his wife, who took the mike after him. Was he abandoning the culture-war hard line? It was difficult to tell. I had the impression that he was hedging.

If the DeSantis campaign is changing, it isn’t yet obvious how. The source familiar with the campaign told me, “If you’re seeking to understand why this entire operation has been such a disaster, the problem has more to do with the fact that there isn’t any unifying theory of the case and certainly no unifying, coherent message—it’s a schizophrenic campaign with a schizophrenic message.” DeSantis, the source went on, had put himself in the impossible position of trying to be “more moderate than Trump and more conservative than him simultaneously.”

In recent weeks, the campaign had taken note of an anti-Trump message that seemed likely to have some traction with Republican voters: a sixty-second spot, “John,” cut by a PAC. In it, a middle-aged man, seated on the steps of a suburban home and speaking calmly to the camera, says that he loves Donald Trump and saw him as a “breath of fresh air,” but that this got him disinvited from his sister’s for Thanksgiving. “The drama . . . he’s got so many distractions, the constant fighting, there’s something every day,” John says. “And I’m not sure he can focus on moving the country forward.” The country is heading in the wrong direction, he adds, “and we definitely need somebody that can freakin’ win. I think you probably lose that bet if you voted for Trump.”

But if this was the sort of message that DeSantis’s supporters hoped might dent Trump’s standing, there was an obvious problem: it did not so much as mention DeSantis. The first debate is on August 23rd, and the best message that the DeSantis campaign has found is not about the Florida governor himself.