Just a few months ago, Ron DeSantis held the Republican presidential nomination in his hands. The governor won re-election in Florida by a landslide in November and polling showed a nation-wide double-digit lead over Donald Trump. Since then, a jury in New York found Trump liable for sexual assault, while a different jury indicted him on more than 30 charges of fraud, tied to hush money paid to a porn star. Trump is 76, and DeSantis is 44. Never has a candidate enjoyed a greater head start than Ron DeSantis of Florida.
And yet… With DeSantis expected to launch his campaign this week, polls show Trump has opened up a 36-point advantage. His lead has evaporated, and his opponent gathers momentum by the day.
Spare a moment of pity for DeSantis’s poor historical timing. He faces an unprecedented opponent, a president twice impeached, who won a second nomination but lost re-election, and still enjoys the affection of millions of Republican voters. So, DeSantis finds himself stuck, forced to strike a balance between criticising Trump and avoiding the appearance of disloyalty. And while the currently unemployed Trump is free to campaign and raise funds around the country, DeSantis again must maintain a balance, positioning himself as a national candidate while still doing his job back home in Florida. That’s what led to scenes like the one in the state capital last week: Before a cheering crowd DeSantis signed a series of sweeping, headline-grabbing bills sure to appeal to a national conservative audience — a ban on transgender care for children, a ban on drag shows — and afterwards, like a celebrating pop star, he tossed Sharpie markers into the crowd.
This balancing act between local and national, responsibility and ambition, doesn’t always win adoration, though. It led DeSantis to pick a fight with one of the most powerful entities in his state: Disney. The feud started a year ago, when DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which restricts the teaching of gender identity to young students. It was an “anti-woke” signal to conservatives across the country. Disney objected. DeSantis responded by trying to seize a special tax district that gives Disney a measure of autonomy. And last Thursday, Disney returned a thunderous salvo, cancelling a billion-dollar expansion plan that would have brought 2,000 jobs to Florida. The move shook other business leaders — and political donors — and called into question DeSantis’s ability to navigate tricky political terrain. While Trump has struggled to pin one of his famously pithy nicknames on his opponent, the six-syllable “DeSanctimonious”, DeSantis seems to have earned one on his own; the day Disney cancelled its big Florida plans, “DeSatan” trended across US social media.
In Florida, the editorial board of the Orlando newspaper seemed grief-stricken by Disney’s withdrawal: “All gone,” it wrote. “All sacrificed on the altar of one man’s outsized ambition and arrogance.” The Trump campaign took notice, and hurried to release a statement: “Ron DeSantis’ failed war on Disney has done little for his limping shadow campaign and now is doing even less for Florida’s economy.”
DeSantis’s trip to Iowa was illustrative of the difficult line he is trying to tread. During a pair of speeches, he delivered largely rote remarks, rehashing points from his book The Courage to Be Free, staking out a series of anti-woke positions within the current American culture war while also trying to leave himself room to manoeuvre in a broader general election. “As much as I wish that a majority of this country were Republicans, that is not the case,” he told the crowd. “So, you want to win the Republicans, of course, but you also gotta win independents.”
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