The Night Before Elections: The Dawn of Ron DeSantis’s State of the State, and his Implications for the Electorate and for the Future
Glenn Beck, the right-wing talk radio host, was half-joking when he made this suggestion the day after Tuesday’s elections, but he voiced a longing that a number of Republicans had after the midterms: a hope to linger with the visions of a red tsunami that wiped out Democratic power across the country. The party had an poor showing in the mid-term, that many expected would be a historic romp, so it felt too bad to continue.
For one Republican, though, the night got better and better as it went on. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection by nearly 20 points, in a night that saw the one-time swing state turn decisively red. He would not have to share the spotlight as Republican losses piled up and anyone who was looking for a beacon of hope would have to turn to Florida.
It will be the high-water mark of his presidential ambitions in just a few weeks, so before declaring this the dawn of DeSantis, remember. The spotlight can very quickly become the hot seat, and DeSantis is both untested as a national candidate and as a Trump adversary. Those who see an easy pivot from the era of Trump to the age of DeSantis are likely in for another wave of disappointment, both because of the particulars of DeSantis’ victory and the persistence of Trump’s power.
On the surface, he looks like Trump’s heir. He consciously molded himself after Trump after he won the governorship by a whisper-thin margin. DeSantis leaned into the politics of resentment and resistance, flouting Covid-19 guidelines, attacking schools for teaching about racism and sexuality and dumping asylum-seekers in Massachusetts as part of an anti-immigrant publicity stunt.
He has married that political style with a strongman persona. As governor, he has targeted protestors, universities, public health workers and corporations for opposing his policies. He sent police to round up voters who had felony convictions because they were confused by the state efforts to strip them of their right to vote. He bent the state legislature to his will in support of the anti-gay laws and a new redistricting map after Disney criticized the state’s bill to not say gay.
But as Sen. Marco Rubio, a one-time frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, knows, neither success in Florida nor success in theory naturally translates into national victory. The reason for that is due to Florida. The electorate there has been trending more conservative in recent years, even as the country as a whole has coalesced around center-left policies (note how even many red states now vote for Medicaid expansion, abortion protections and higher minimum wage laws).
The Democratic Party in Florida is in a state of disrepair, and it is difficult to field and support candidates. And Florida has a specific mix of Latino voters that is unlike most other states, weighted heavily toward immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela who respond favorably to DeSantis’s attack on Democrats as socialists.
Donald Trump is a Florida resident. The Dump Trump crowd, though bigger at the moment than at perhaps any time since 2016, does not seem to fully understand how deep and unquestioning the cult of personality around Trump still is within parts of the party.
Just two years ago, the party failed to pass a policy platform, instead issuing a statement of loyalty to Trump. When party elites inched away from Trump after his election loss and the insurrection that followed, they did not manage to bring the party with them. The majority of the Republicans in the House voted to overturn the election and the majority of Republican voters still believe that the election was stolen.
The imitation of Biden sounding like Donald Trump may become the new reality if he sounds a lot like him. Biden’s attacks on congressional Republicans for being allegedly eager to cut Medicare and Social Security were a clear preview of how he hopes to run against the G.O.P. in 2024. It was a sign that Trump might try to regain his party’s nomination by reviving his rejection of Tea Party austerity and attacking potential rivals who don’t care about libertarian ideals.
That strategy was previewed a bit recently by Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Shelby Talcott in Semafor. Their subject was the so-called Fair Tax, a longstanding fascination for certain right-wing activists that proposes to replace the U.S. tax code with a sales tax. This would yield certain advantages in economic efficiency; it would also result in a dramatic tax increase on the middle class.
In the heyday of the Tea Party, when implausible policy proposals were all the rage, the Fair Tax was endorsed by many of today’s 2024 hopefuls: by Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and, yes, by DeSantis himself. Trump can accuse his potential rivals of supporting a middle-class tax hike if he wants to, because the Trumpworld source said that they will launch an attack on them.
It is possible that the same quote will apply to the entitlement changes that many Republicans, such as DeSantis, supported in the same era. Those proposals were serious rather than crankish, if ill-timed for a moment when there was more fiscal space than deficit hawks believed. It was crucial that Trump discarded them because they were unpopular and seriously unpopular. Philip Klein from National Review points out that he has a plan to go after DeSantis and other people, just as he did with Romney in the 2012 primaries.