President Trump delivered an urgent warning to his staunchest supporters in Florida Wednesday night at a pulsating political rally: Don’t let Ron DeSantis lose the governor’s race next week. Not with Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election plans potentially hinging on the country’s biggest presidential battleground state.
“This is my state also,” Mr. Trump reminded them, alluding to his golf properties and winter home in Palm Beach and his one-point victory in 2016.
That Mr. DeSantis is the Republican nominee for governor is a testament to Mr. Trump’s strong endorsement and popularity with conservatives. That Mr. Trump’s support has not been enough to make Mr. DeSantis the favorite on Tuesday — in one of the most high-profile and symbolically important races in the country — is evidence not only of the president’s shaky footing with independents, but also of Mr. DeSantis’s shortcomings as a candidate, political strategists from both parties say.
Mr. Trump has expended more political capital on Mr. DeSantis than on most other candidates this year, so the president would inevitably own a loss. Neither party is counting out Mr. DeSantis, but he is slightly trailing Andrew Gillum, the Democratic mayor of Tallahassee, in most public polls; the president has scheduled another rally on Saturday in Pensacola.
What seemed a winnable race for Republicans against Mr. Gillum, an outspoken progressive who supports impeaching Mr. Trump, has instead become neck-and-neck, with the charismatic Democrat drawing far larger crowds than Mr. DeSantis, a telegenic Fox News regular who has proved uneven on the trail.
In the closing weeks of the campaign, what has separated the two candidates most is how each has dealt with issues of race and identity. Mr. Gillum, who would become Florida’s first African-American governor, has talked about both matters at length; Mr. DeSantis, who is white, has struggled to address questions about his past political associations with racists and xenophobes.
Mr. DeSantis and his team never prepared to run against Mr. Gillum; they thought they would face one of the more traditional, centrist Democrats running in the primary. The Republican fumbled early on with how to criticize his unexpected opponent and how to deal with a contender who, more than other Democrats who ran for governor, knew how to make moments go viral.
One reason Mr. DeSantis may have stumbled is where he had come from: the conservative cocoon of the political right, where his rise to national prominence — lifted by stoking fears of terrorism — went little noticed because Mr. DeSantis was only a congressman in a reliably Republican seat. (He resigned after winning the August primary.)
Over nearly three terms in office, Mr. DeSantis, a 40-year-old Yale and Harvard graduate and former Navy prosecutor, became a familiar face on Fox, doing hits from Capitol Hill and flying to New York to appear from the network’s flagship studio. He attended conferences billed as conservative gatherings where he made his name known in political circles that mattered.
Thrust into a marquee race in a purple state, however, Mr. DeSantis floundered.
In a Fox interview the day after the Aug. 28 primary, he said electing Mr. Gillum, 39, could “monkey this up,” which Democrats denounced as a racist dog whistle. (Mr. DeSantis denied that.) News reports exposed how far-right extremists were among the organizers and attendees of some of the conferences he frequented. A white supremacist group targeted Mr. Gillum with offensive robocalls. A campaign contributor apologized for referring to former President Barack Obama with a racist slur, but Mr. DeSantis declined to return his donation.
Mr. DeSantis managed to regroup from that rough start. But the controversies have cast a shadow over his campaign.
During the candidates’ last debate, Mr. DeSantis angrily rejected a question about his ties to a conservative author, David Horowitz, who has made incendiary statements.
“Are you going to play the McCarthy-ite game?” Mr. DeSantis asked, suggesting he was being found guilty by association. “How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement someone makes?”
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Mr. DeSantis has pounded Mr. Gillum over a continuing FBI investigation into possible corruption in Tallahassee’s community redevelopment agency, and over inappropriate gifts Mr. Gillum appears to have accepted during several trips with a lobbyist friend. Mr. Trump has gone as far as to label Mr. Gillum, without evidence, a “thief.” On Thursday, the Gillum campaign was also dealing with criticism after the conservative undercover journalism operation, Project Veritas, released a video in which a Gillum volunteer calls Florida “a cracker” state. (The campaign has cut ties with the volunteer.)
Mr. Gillum and his supporters have tried to turn those accusations of corruption — as well as claims by Mr. DeSantis that Mr. Gillum is anti-police — against Mr. DeSantis and Republicans, saying the attacks are fueled by racism against a successful black politician. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has countered that resorting to accusations of racism is a way for Mr. Gillum to avoid scrutiny on his lobbyist dealings.
Mr. DeSantis first outlined his conservative ideology in a 2011 book that turned him into a popular speaker at Florida Tea Party and Republican gatherings. The book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” borrowed from the title of Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” Mr. DeSantis dwelled on socialist and radical mentors in Mr. Obama’s life, arguing that, under their influence, the former president steered the country on a path divergent from what the founding fathers intended.
His anti-Obama message appeared to resonate with some Fox viewers. By mid-2012, even before his first election, he was a guest on Sean Hannity’s show; by the time he got to Washington the next year, Mr. DeSantis had bypassed the obscurity of most rank-and-file freshman members of Congress.
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Since 2013, Mr. DeSantis has appeared at four conferences sponsored by Mr. Horowitz — which was first reported by The Washington Post — and had praised his organization as one that “shoots straight, tells the American people the truth and is standing up for the right thing.” He has continued to defend his speeches there, noting that the keynote address at one of the gatherings was given by a Medal of Honor recipient.
When Mr. Trump recently tweeted that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” had joined a large caravan of Central Americans heading to the United States, he was repeating an idea advanced on Capitol Hill in 2016 by Mr. DeSantis, who called a hearing to discuss the threat posed by Islamic terrorists crossing the Mexican border
(Mazzei and Saul 5).
Determined to show his independence in his first months in office, he [De Santis] appointed a chief science officer and pledged billions for the Everglades.
He pardoned four wrongfully accused Black men. He lifted a ban on medical marijuana in smokable form.
He was hardly a moderate: Mr. DeSantis also gutted a voter-approved measure meant to restore felons’ right to vote. He allowed some teachers to carry guns in schools. He banned so-called sanctuary cities in a state where there were none.
But the mix pleased voters, and his approval ratings surged. Might the man who had shown his diaper-age daughter building a wall in campaign ad actually be a pragmatist?
Then came the pandemic.
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Mr. DeSantis centralized power in his office early in the pandemic, ceding little of the spotlight to public health officials. The state Department of Health’s weekly Covid-19 recaps are titled “Updates on Florida’s Vaccination Efforts Under Governor DeSantis’s Leadership.”
Mr. DeSantis’s slowness in locking down the state last year [2020] hurt his approval ratings. So did the deadly summer surge of the virus. But then, far earlier than most other governors, he pledged that schools would open in the fall and life would start returning to normal.
“His policies were contrarian, and he was defiant,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster who has tracked Mr. DeSantis’s popularity and saw it rebound beginning last summer. “The more he stands his ground, the more he speaks his mind, the more the affinity grows for him.”
His critics see the governor as stubborn and unwilling to hear dissent.
“The governor we have today is the governor we anticipated after the election,” said Nikki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner and the only Democrat elected statewide, who looks likely to run against Mr. DeSantis.
“He surprised everybody in 2019,” she added, “but obviously that is not truly who he is.”
In some ways, Mr. DeSantis has filled the void left by Mr. Trump, minus the tweets. He remains a Fox News regular. He counts among his scientific advisers Dr. Scott W. Atlas, the former Trump adviser who has promoted dubious theories.
And the governor’s favorite foes are the “corporate media,” against whom he has scored political points.
His recent tangle with “60 Minutes” centered on the extent to which political connections have helped white, wealthy Floridians get vaccinated.
Local news outlets have chronicled how vaccine access has been slower for Black, Latino and poorer communities. Some pop-up vaccination sites were opened in neighborhoods that had many older residents — and that also had ties to DeSantis campaign donors.
But “60 Minutes” focused on how Publix supermarket pharmacies received doses and left out relevant details, including an extended response from the governor at a news conference.
On Wednesday, in Mr. DeSantis’s words, he “hit them back right between the eyes,” accusing “60 Minutes” of pursuing a malicious narrative (Maxxei 6).
Referred to as “DeathSantis” and mocked for allowing “Florida Morons” to pack state beaches, Mr. DeSantis faced national scorn for his resistance to shutdowns. Last fall [2020], he lifted all restrictions, keeping schools open for in-person learning and forbidding local officials from shutting down businesses or fining people for not wearing masks.
“I see, in many parts of our country, a sad state of affairs: schools closed, businesses shuttered and lives destroyed,” Mr. DeSantis said, offering a rousing defense of his pandemic response at the opening of Florida’s legislative session this week. “While so many other states kept locking people down, Florida lifted people up.”
The same could be said about Mr. DeSantis’s political ambitions.
For Republicans, loyalty to the former president and his pet issues has become the ultimate litmus test. Mr. DeSantis checked all the boxes: fighting with the media, questioning scientific experts, embracing baseless claims of election fraud and railing against liberals.
Conservatives rewarded the governor for his fealty. His approval rating rose above water in recent weeks, with some polling of Republicans showing Mr. DeSantis with higher ratings than Mr. Trump. He finished first in a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend covering a field of potential presidential candidates that did not include Mr. Trump, fueling chatter about a 2024 bid (Lerer 1).
Mr. DeSantis passed conservative red-meat legislation like voting reform and an “anti-riot” law (a federal judge recently blocked enforcement of it) and picked fights with proponents of mask and vaccine mandates, Big Tech, the media and even some Florida cruise lines.
Mr. DeSantis’s moves were not a complete surprise. In our partisan political atmosphere, there’s a rationale for firing up your base to maximize turnout. Since 2018, the proportion of registered Republicans in Florida has inched up and moved closer to Democrats’ share. As Steve Schale, a Florida election expert, recently noted, “Sometime before the end of this year, there will be more Republicans registered in Florida than Democrats” — which, he said, has never happened before.
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Mr. DeSantis’s approval numbers have … [now] declined. A late August [2021] Morning Consult poll showed him down to 48 percent approval from 54 percent in late June — with the biggest shift coming from independents. Another survey of the governor’s approval from Quinnipiac now stands 12 points lower than it did in 2019. And while he opposed vaccine mandates for cruise ships — a significant industry in the state, with a lot of Republican customers — over 60 percent of Floridians supported them (Mair 1).
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday [December 2020] told a private gathering of political donors and corporate executives that he has urged President Donald Trump to “fight on” to overturn November’s election results.
In wide-ranging remarks made in person behind closed doors at a meeting of the Associated Industries of Florida, DeSantis dismissed the risks of the coronavirus, contradicted science and targeted U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. He also defended Trump’s attempt to fight the results of the election.
“I told the president to fight on,” DeSantis told the group gathered at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes resort hotel in Orlando, according to a recording of the speech obtained by POLITICO. “In reality, none of this stuff has succeeded yet. Time is running out.”
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DeSantis defended his response to the coronavirus pandemic, during which he has resisted imposing state-level restrictions on gatherings and mask-wearing. Florida has reported more than 1 million cases as of this week.
“We have, I think, really saved the livelihoods of millions and millions of students, parents, workers, business owners by approaching this in an evidence-based way and a way that focused on facts not fear, and in a way that was more moderate,” said DeSantis.
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DeSantis also took shots at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its “ridiculous” studies on the Covid-19 outbreak, which he said were more about “affirming” the positions of “bureaucrats” than science.
He questioned the need for contract tracing, saying most people are either infected in their homes or medical authorities can’t figure out the source of infections.
People can engage in most outdoor activities, including sports, because the virus doesn’t spread at such events, DeSantis told the group. He insisted that Trump’s huge rallies did not contribute to the spread of Covid-19, countering a Stanford University study released in late October that traced 30,000 cases and hundreds of deaths to Trump rallies (Dixon 1).
An exchange in August 2021 is a typical example of how DeSantis interacts with the press — with a combination of bluster and grievance modeled on Donald Trump, his political mentor and potential rival.
The Delta variant of the coronavirus had just arrived, and a question about the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the state set him off. There was plenty of room in Florida’s hospitals, he explained.
Then, with a jerky, almost robotic forward-chopping motion, he gestured at the reporters gathered in front of him. “I think it’s important to point out because obviously media does hysteria,” he said. “You try to fearmonger. You try to do this stuff.”
Awkward and ineloquent as the moment was, it was vintage DeSantis — a frequently underestimated politician who has made the media his focal point and foil throughout his rapid rise. The clash, not the case numbers, which averaged nearly 25,000 a day in Florida at the peak of the Delta surge, led that day’s headlines.
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Former aides say that DeSantis views the press as just another extension of the political process — a tool to weaponize or use for his own benefit. …
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The mainstream press, which DeSantis invariably describes with epithets like “the corporate media” or ‘the Acela media,” tends to get brass-knuckle treatment — when it gets access to him at all.
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His former aides as well as his critics describe his approach to the media as methodical and ruthless, in contrast to Trump’s haphazard, seat-of-the-pants approach.
“He has studied what has worked and left behind what doesn’t,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman who has contemplated running against him for governor. “He’s very good at maximizing the Trump benefit without bringing along the liabilities” (Hounshell and Askarinam 1-4).
Susie Wiles, a Republican consultant who helped guide the last month of DeSantis’s 2018 campaign for governor, described the candidate as a “workhorse.”
“It’s like watching an actor who can film the whole scene in one take,” Wiles told The Miami Herald. “He can gobble up a whole issue in one briefing, and when I saw that on my second day, I thought, ‘This is a whole different kind of thing.’” Wiles added, “If he doesn’t have a photographic memory, it’s close” (Edsall 2).
Republican politics have become oppositional politics: Deny the science, demean the media, own the libs. Conservatives are less defined by what they are for than by what they are against.
…
… at the peak of their intransigence and callousness, his [Trump’s] party catastrophically mishandled the pandemic. They refused to follow the science or act with caution. And, because of their reflexive opposition to the facts, untold numbers of people who didn’t have to die did.
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Perhaps no politician has taken the reins from Trump with more vigor — and disastrous effects — than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a man who thinks he could be the next Republican president. But to supplant the last leader of his party, he has to out-Trump Trump.
To accomplish this meteoric rise, he needed to do two things. First, become the darling of the Trump freedom fighters, fighting for the right to get sick and die. And second, he has to be the opposite of the establishment, in this case Joe Biden and his administration. If Biden swerves left, DeSantis must swerve right, even if the hospitals in his state are overrun and the funeral parlors reach capacity.
As The Times reported on Wednesday [August 2021]: “More people in Florida are catching the coronavirus, being hospitalized and dying of Covid-19 now than at any previous point in the pandemic.” The Times continued, “This week, 227 virus deaths were being reported each day in Florida, on average, as of Tuesday, a record for the state and by far the most in the United States right now.”
The citizens of Florida do not even support DeSantis’s politically calculated pandemic positions. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week [August 2021] found that “six in 10 Floridians support requiring masks in schools,” and “61 percent say recent rise in Covid-19 cases in Florida was preventable.”
But there are two things more important to DeSantis than those numbers. First, a different Quinnipiac poll found that regardless of how few Floridians approve of his performance, his approval rating is still higher than Biden’s in the state.
Second, DeSantis is playing to an electorate beyond the panhandle. As long as he is still mentioned in the same breath as Biden, even if the coverage is negative, he is playing well among Republicans. As long as he is fighting Washington and Democrats and experts, it doesn’t matter to entrenched Republicans that he’s not fighting the plague.
Some bodies must be sacrificed to appease the gods of partisan resistance.
To keep the spotlight, DeSantis is employing many of the same tricks as Trump: fighting with the media about coverage, deflecting blame onto Biden and convincing his followers that folding to facts is the same as forfeiting freedoms.
As DeSantis said in early August [2021], “We can either have a free society, or we can have a biomedical security state.” He continued, “And I can tell you: Florida, we’re a free state. People are going to be free to choose to make their own decisions.”
Yes, Florida, DeSantis is allowing you to choose death so that he can have a greater political life (Blow 1-2).
… he has championed a smorgasbord of policies — some of dubious constitutionality — seemingly designed to make progressives’ heads explode. In recent months, he has signed legislation curtailing voting access, cracking down on protesters and punishing social media firms for deplatforming political candidates. … He pushed to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. He issued an executive order, and later signed legislation, barring businesses and government agencies from requiring vaccine passports.
Recent polls show Mr. DeSantis with solid job approval numbers heading into his 2022 re-election race — a position strengthened by his ability to rake in piles of campaign cash from his nationwide network of donors. He is a familiar face on Fox News and Fox Business.
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… the pro-Democratic group Remove Ron has produced an ad with this theme, taunting the former president for being overtaken by a “rookie congressman” who was a “nobody” until Mr. Trump “made him governor of America’s third largest state.” The ad mocks, “Ron must think you’re past your prime or that you’re a loser, Donald,” before warning that if Mr. DeSantis wins re-election in 2022, neither he nor Florida will have any more use for Mr. Trump. “The clock is ticking, Donald. What are you going to do about it” (Cottle 1-2).
Works cited:
Blow, Charles M. “Ron DeSantis, How Many Covid Deaths Are Enough?” New York Times, August 29, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/29/opinion/ron-desantis-covid-death.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
Cottle, Michelle. “Can One Florida Man Wrest Control of the G.O.P. from Another?” New York Times, July 2, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/opinion/donald-trump-ron-desantis-republican-party.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
Dixon, Matt. “DeSantis Tells Trump To 'Fight On,' Takes Aim at Science and Has Beef with John Roberts.” Politico, December 3, 2020. Net. https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/12/03/desantis-tells-trump-to-fight-on-takes-aim-at-science-and-has-beef-with-john-roberts-1341031
Edsall, Thomas B. ‘”We Want People That Are Going To Fight the Left,’ Says the Man Out-Trumping Trump.” New York Times, March 16, 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/opinion/ron-desantis-is-gambling-on-out-trumping-trump.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
Hounshell, Blake and Askarinam, Leah. “DeSantis and the Media: (Not) a Love Story.” New York Times, January 31. 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/politics/desantis-media.html
Lerer, Lisa. “DeSantis Is Ascendant and Cuomo Is Faltering.” New York Times, updated April 10, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/us/politics/desantis-cuomo-political-future.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
Mair, Liz. “Ron DeSantis Was a Slam Dunk. Until He Wasn’t.” New York Times, September 24, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/opinion/ron-desantis-florida.html
Mazzei, Patricia. “Could Ron DeSantis Be Trump’s G.O.P. Heir? He’s Certainly Trying.” New York Times, updated August 15, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/politics/ron-desantis-republican-trump.html
Mazzei, Patricia and Saul, Stephanie. “Ron DeSantis, a Trump Ally, Struggles in Florida as Racial Flare-Ups Come to Fore.” New York Times. November 1, 2018. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/us/politics/ron-desantis-florida-trump-gillum.html
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