Everyone, it seems, has a visceral, unnuanced view of Ron DeSantis and his presidential ambitions.
After a campaign he’s effectively been running for the last two years, all is lined up for the Florida governor to take the next step, formally moving forward as a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Among the multiple frenzies of speculation about DeSantis is one about timing. When does he take the next step, either a presidential “exploratory committee” or a formal declaration of candidacy?
Most presidential candidates create exploratory committees, even when there’s no doubt they will ultimately announce they’re running. Besides creating a legal mechanism to raise and spend money, the move generates publicity. And then the candidate generates a new round of publicity for the final announcement.
“Mid-May is the target,” for some kind of announcement, NBC News reported at the end of April, citing “GOP operatives familiar” with conversations about the planning.
Bumpy spring
As he cruised to re-election, and in the aftermath of his overwhelming re-election victory, supporters viewed DeSantis as a mighty Republican force. He was depicted as someone more effective than former president Donald Trump and a potential president who could carry forward with more discipline and effective implementation than Trump.
And he’s put himself on the national stage as a scourge of Democrats in Florida, and been able to get fellow Republicans who control the Florida Legislature to fall in line with just about anything he wants.
More recently, however, a much different narrative has developed around DeSantis.
“It does seem as though his campaign is struggling before it begins,” said Gregory Koger, a professor of political science at the University of Miami. “It’s very noticeable that his support base has been dwindling out there for the last few months.”
His popularity in Florida “created some pretty stratospheric expectations for him. And because of that the only place he could go is down. That, I think, is the challenge of the DeSantis effort. It may very well be the victim of its own success in Florida and the victim of its own sky high expectations that it set,” said Joshua Scacco, an associate professor of political communications at the University of South Florida, and author of The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times.
Still, no one should count out DeSantis, said Matt Terrill, a partner at the Washington DC-based consulting firm Firehouse Strategies.
“This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have a long way to go,” Terrill said. The 24/7 news cycle of cable news is largely gone, he said, replaced by a 24-second news cycle in which a moment can have a huge impact on social media.
“All it takes is one moment on a debate stage, or one moment on the stump, to potentially catch fire for any of these candidates,” he said.
Terrill was chief of staff for Florida US Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and later that year ran get-out-the-vote operations for Florida Republicans.
A new DeSantis coming?
The pending formal launch of the campaign provides DeSantis a chance to change course, present a new story, and begin shaping a new narrative that goes beyond what people have already seen and know.
“They probably need to, when they launch the campaign, tell a story that Americans haven’t heard about Ron DeSantis. He’s already had a great deal of publicity. Voters have learned a lot about him, especially through Fox News and other conservative outlets. A campaign launch would be a chance for him to reframe his story, bring up new elements,” Koger said.
And that could make up for any perceived shortcomings.
Brian Crowley, a Florida political analyst who as a Tallahassee and South Florida-based journalist spent decades covering the state’s governors – and presidential campaigns as they blossomed or stumbled in early states of Iowa and New Hampshire – expects that “when he announces, we’re going to see a new Ron DeSantis.
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We’re going to see someone who is ready to take the national stage.” He thinks “the presentation is going to be really different from what we’ve seen so far.”
“He knows what he has to do. He’s not dumb. He knows what he’s up against. He knows the adjustments he’s going to have to make in order to win this,” Crowley said.
That could mean a more amiable DeSantis, Crowley said. “From what we’ve seen of his public personality, that’s not an easy thing for him to do. But he’ll do what he needs to do to win.”
Scacco also said DeSantis has an opportunity for a reset. “He can fix this fairly quickly,” he said, aided by the campaign funds he’s been accumulating. “He’ll have US$100 million to begin to shape that narrative.”
Polling, donors
DeSantis has plunged in poll after poll of Republican primary voters, falling farther and farther behind Trump. (Though he’s still the clear second place choice, at least for now.)
An Emerson College poll released on January 24 found Trump had the support of 55 per cent of Republican voters and DeSantis had 29 per cent. An Emerson poll released on April 28 had 62 per cent for Trump and 16 per cent for DeSantis.
Over the three months, Trump’s support increased 7 percentage points – and DeSantis lost 13 points.
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Some influential big-money donors reportedly are disenchanted, on several levels.
Among the questions are a widely discussed personality that’s seen as curt and lacking in social niceties of the kind people like to see in their political leaders. Some feel DeSantis has made problematic policy moves, both because of the substantive impact and the political implications.
That view isn’t universal. Plenty of others are strongly supportive of the governor, and plenty are willing to financially support his candidacy.
Cultural, social issues
His moves to position himself as a culture warrior is celebrated on the political right, but has generated intense opposition, and even ridicule, from others.
The two most often cited moves are his feud with the Walt Disney Co and his decision to sign into law a near-total ban on abortions in Florida after the sixth week of pregnancy.
Signing the abortion restrictions may endear him to anti-abortion voters, who are a significant part of the Republican primary electorate. But many Republicans don’t want to go as far as the new law, and his support for banning virtually all abortions could hurt Republicans among voters at large, and make it more difficult to win in November 2024.
Disney incurred DeSantis’ wrath when it opposed what the governor calls parental rights and critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” law that prohibits instruction in sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade, and limits it in older grades. (The Legislature voted this year to expand it and DeSantis’ state Board of Education subsequently broadened it to apply to all grades.)
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Disney has retaliated against DeSantis, prompting a round of state laws, legal actions and other skirmishes. And the governor has been mocked for getting into a fight, and many say losing, with Mickey Mouse.
“I think ultimately, the Disney thing hurts Ron DeSantis. It’s partly because it’s an unexplainable fight. He picked a fight simply because he was mad, not because it was a good policy issue,” Crowley said.
And, he said, DeSantis’ response to Disney is concerning to business leaders and conservatives who don’t think the government should retaliate against businesses for their statements.
“That poses a threat to every other business that would have to worry that a President Ron DeSantis would go after them simply because he got mad about something, and that’s not a healthy look for a president.
Campaign schedule
Even the schedule of his unofficial campaign has left him open to attack.
DeSantis has been campaigning across the country. Ostensibly his purpose has been to promote his pre-campaign book to friendly crowds, including key appearances early in the presidential nomination process.
And he spent the penultimate week of the annual legislative session away from Tallahassee, travelling on “an international trade and cultural mission” to Japan, South Korea, Israel and the United Kingdom.
He’s been travelling so much that the Trump campaign issued an illustration of a calendar on which more than a third of the days in March and April were covered with Post-it notes listing the places where DeSantis was out of state.
“Ron DeSantis Spends Half His Time Running for President Outside of Florida, While Florida Taxpayers Pay the Tab,” the Trump campaign proclaimed.
As parts of Fort Lauderdale and southeastern Broward County contended with the aftermath of record-breaking rain and began recovery efforts from historic flooding in mid-April, DeSantis headed to Ohio for political events on April 13.
He returned to Florida that night, where he held a late-night event in his office where he hosted anti-abortion activists and signed the new, restrictive law.
The next day, he flew to Virginia and New Hampshire for political events.
DeSantis was pilloried by Democrats – and the Trump camp – for not visiting the flooded areas that a preliminary state estimate said caused more than US$100 million of damage, including “major damage” to almost 1,100 homes, and hundreds of temporary and permanent lay-offs by affected businesses.
Re-election, then Trump
After his stunning re-election victory last year in which he finished 19.4 percentage points ahead of Democrat Charlie Crist, in a year when Republican performance around the country was worse than expected, DeSantis captured enormous attention, especially as fingers were pointed at Trump as a drag on the party’s performance.
Even before voting was done, DeSantis drew the ire of Trump, who’s focused much of his energy on tearing down his rival. In recent months, Republican voters’ support for the former president has been increasing and DeSantis has been slipping, even as Trump was indicted, and is the subject of other investigations and courtroom battles.
“If Trump becomes disqualified then DeSantis would become obviously the next leading candidate,” Koger said.
Trump, whose support propelled DeSantis to the 2018 Republican gubernatorial nomination and a narrow November victory that year, regards DeSantis as an ingrate. And he’s delivered a constant barrage of criticism in person and through posts on his Truth Social social media platform.
Trump’s attacks are tricky for DeSantis. Respond too forcefully to Trump, and it risks alienating the MAGA base of supporters the former president made a potent force in Republican politics. Don’t respond and Trump’s attacks can take hold.
Owing to the hold Trump has on Republican primary voters and the candidate’s approaches to wooing influential party members – Trump does it; DeSantis doesn’t – the former president has racked up many more primary endorsements.
Trump has the endorsements from 11 of the 20 Republican members of the Florida Congressional Delegation; DeSantis has one.
The endorsement of a particular member of Congress isn’t going to convince many, or any, people to vote for Trump. But the cumulative effect is important, Koger said, adding that endorsements do a good job of predicting the outcomes of presidential nominations.
DeSantis has some endorsements of his own; on Thursday the Republican majority leader of the New Hampshire House of Representatives endorsed DeSantis. A week earlier, Trump announced he had endorsements from more than 50 state legislators in New Hampshire, the first primary state on the Republican nominating calendar.
Don’t count him out
DeSantis foes may love the gloomy portrait, but a range of analysts said it is premature. The Never Back Down super PAC supporting DeSantis is hiring staff and started advertising.
It’s so early in the campaign that DeSantis hasn’t yet campaigned during the Iowa State Fair, an iconic summer stop in the state that will hold the party’s first presidential nominating caucuses next year. If he does, he’ll have a chance to display his appetite for a corn dog or his admiration for an intricately crafted replica of a full grown cow – sculpted out of butter.
“He’s not doomed. There’s a lot of time to go. He still hasn’t launched his campaign. He still has time to launch and reshape the narrative,” Koger said.
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