The Contradictions of Ron DeSantis
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t officially decided whether he’ll seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But already the contradictions are sharpening between his prospective general-election strengths and his emerging strategy to win the Republican primaries.
Many of DeSantis’s boosters are drawn to him as a potential Republican nominee because they believe that his record as the chief executive of an economically thriving state would position him to win back some of the college-educated suburban voters who have stampeded away from the GOP since 2016.
[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know DeSantis]
But DeSantis, through his escalating attacks on what he calls “woke” ideology, has signaled that if he runs, as most expect, he will seek the GOP nomination by emphasizing the same cultural grievances about racial and social change that former President Donald Trump has stressed. Those messages have enabled Trump to energize hard-core conservatives, but at the price of repelling many well-educated suburbanites.
With that approach, DeSantis seems destined to test a question that sharply divides strategists from the two parties: Will more voters accept Trumpism without Trump himself attached to it?
As DeSantis careens through a seemingly endless succession of culture-war firefights with targets including the Walt Disney Company, without alienating so many socially moderate suburbanites that he can’t win a general election. The evidence, they say, is his landslide reelection victory last November, after pursuing an aggressive strategy of keeping Florida businesses and schools open during the pandemic. The found DeSantis winning about three-fifths of Florida’s college-educated white voters in a year when that group provided crucial support to Democrats in many other states. (DeSantis also posted notable gains with Latino and Black male voters.)
