DeSantis would be “better for moderates,” National Review correspondent Jim Geraghty wrote in the Washington Post. “If DeSantis the nominee became president, [the parties would] spend more time arguing about policy and what the federal government ought to do, and less about whatever crazy thing Trump said or did that day.”
That would be news to Florida residents, where highly controversial and conservative moves from DeSantis have become commonplace.
On Tuesday, DeSantis asked the Supreme Court to establish a grand jury to investigate “wrongdoing” involving COVID vaccines. That capped off a year during which he punished Disney for its CEO criticizing the so-called “don’t say gay” bill, rounded up Venezuelan migrants in Texas and flew them to an island in Massachusetts, and stripped the Tampa-area state attorney of his powers.
Those actions and others, derided as political stunts by opponents, apparently worked with Florida voters and helped to hand him a whopping 19-point reelection victory. Now, recent polls show DeSantis with big leads over Trump in a potential GOP presidential matchup, with a Wall Street Journal poll giving him a 14-point lead and a USA Today/ Suffolk poll having him 23 points ahead.
These numbers come even with DeSantis yet to announce a bid for the presidency, as Trump has already done.
In fact, DeSantis appears to be pushing an even more conservative agenda that’s aimed at base voters for Trump, whose “Operation Warp Speed” accelerated the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and former Trump adviser, agreed that DeSantis was no moderate.
“What the national media might miss is that Ron DeSantis is an authentic conservative,” Ballard said. “It’s not learned, it’s not something where he looks at the polls to see what a conservative does or believes. … Anyone who says Ron DeSantis is a moderate doesn’t understand him, probably has never met him, certainly, or spent time studying him.”
DeSantis’ ultra-conservative agenda could help him win the Republican primary for president, just as it did for Trump in 2016, but DeSantis would then face the dilemma of whether to move back to the middle for the general election, one analyst said.
“Does he become a corporate, Chamber of Commerce Republican, a country club Republican, a Jeb Bush Republican?” asked David Jolly, a former GOP member of Congress from Pinellas County and co-founder of the Forward Party. He added that such a pivot “would be hard to do.”
“He could have been something new,” Jolly said. “But he chose the direction he chose the last four years, which has all the feel of Donald Trump on steroids.”
‘A Bigger Trump Than Trump’
DeSantis could be the cool-tempered conservative candidate many party leaders want him to be, Jolly said. He just doesn’t want to be that person.
“I’ve given them credit for this: He did what nobody else did, which was distance himself from Trump and just go about governance,” Jolly said. “... But then he saw that his prospects as a presidential candidate required him to be a bigger Trump than Trump himself.”
Becoming increasingly anti-COVID vaccine is one issue where DeSantis might be attempting to outflank Trump from the right. Trump has been booed by his own supporters at rallies for praising the vaccines.
DeSantis, who once traveled the state promoting the shots for seniors, has increasingly embraced anti-vaccine rhetoric as the party’s base became more hostile to them.
Kenneth Goodman, director of the Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy at the University of Miami, said such policies have led to “a lot more dead people than there should have been.”
Florida had the 16th highest death rate per 100,000 people in the nation as of this month, pulling ahead of New York despite the massive number of deaths in that state at the beginning of the pandemic. Florida ranks in the bottom half of states when it comes to the number of residents who have received a booster shot at less than 29 percent.
Goodman criticized DeSantis for cynically using the vaccine issue as a way of getting GOP primary support.
“This is leveraging the erosion of public health for a larger political agenda,” Goodman said. “And it is really erosive. And it has a body count associated with it.”
‘Not Going to Fly Here’
A key test for DeSantis in any presidential run will be Midwestern states such as Michigan, which swung to Trump in 2016 but back to Joe Biden four years later.
Its Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was almost the polar opposite from DeSantis when it came to COVID policies. She received intense blowback, including a foiled kidnapping plot against her, for imposing an extended shutdown, school closures and a mask mandate, the type of restrictions pilloried by DeSantis as “anti-freedom.”
Yet, just like DeSantis, Whitmer won reelection handily by double digits in November, and her party seized control of the Legislature.
A scathing election post-mortem memo from the Michigan GOP concluded their party was “doomed” by their gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon’s intense opposition to abortion rights. The GOP memo also complained that “there were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters.”
DeSantis has been at the forefront of such culture war issues, with laws forbidding transgender athletes in schools sports and banning gender-affirming medical treatments.
“I just don’t see that as the same kind of rallying cry in Michigan that he might be receiving in Florida,” said Jenna Bednar, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. “... Nobody was really getting excited about that.”
Past COVID restrictions, still brought up by DeSantis almost every day as a way of highlighting Florida’s almost total lack of them, have mostly become old news, Bednar said.
“We are not as COVID-obsessed as some other states, including Florida,” she said. “He’s decided to keep that alive in Florida, rather than move forward.”
But she added there was a potential opening for DeSantis on the issue in Michigan and neighboring states.
“There is lingering anger here with the schools,” she said. “They remained shut down much longer and have very, very complicated reopening plans … And so in a really liberal community, like Ann Arbor, despite being first in line for the vaccines and still wearing masks, they were angry [about what was] happening to our kids’ education. So I think that if he tailors it to something like that, it would resonate here.”
One issue, however, could spell trouble for DeSantis. The governor, who signed a 15-week abortion ban in March with no exceptions for rape or incest, said Thursday he was always “willing to sign great life legislation” when asked if he would support a “heartbeat bill” banning abortion at about six weeks.
“Oh my goodness, if he comes to Michigan with a six-week abortion bill as his policy proposal?” Bednar said. “That is not going to fly here. … And I would be really surprised if that would fly in much of America.”
The problem for DeSantis is that these issues are how DeSantis made his name in conservative circles, said Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee political consultant and former anti- Trump Republican-turned-independent.
“I don’t expect DeSantis to change his provocative position on transgender issues or immigration or any of the other hot-button cultural war issues,” Stipanovich said. “... That’s why he’s currently the heir apparent. But does he continue to emphasize them? Or does he just bank them and move on to something that has broader appeal?”
The Mantle of Reagan
Ballard compared DeSantis vs. Trump to Ronald Reagan vs. then-President Gerald Ford in 1976. Reagan, an outsider conservative firebrand, lost that GOP primary race but ultimately won the presidency in 1980 and reshaped the party.
“If Gov. DeSantis runs, he would be very much like Ronald Reagan,” Ballard said. " … I just think he has that maverick conservative mantra, [and] he poses an incredible set of skills that I think we haven’t seen in a long, long time, I think since Reagan.”
Jolly, however, was cynical about Florida’s governor.
“I don’t think he’s a true believer on anything,” Jolly said. “I think that’s one of the greatest misunderstandings of Ron DeSantis. I think he will be whatever he needs to be.”
©2022 Orlando Sentinel. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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