Should Ron DeSantis Wait His Turn?

By Isaac Schorr
Monday, August 08, 2022
 
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has established himself as the most, and perhaps the only, viable alternative to Donald Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries.
 
For the last three and a half years, DeSantis has used his time in Tallahassee to build out a resume that evidences a firmer commitment to conservative causes and much more impressive focus on achieving conservative ends than Donald Trump ever did. He’s bolstered that record — on Covid, education, “younger transgender” Floridians, and other issues — with crowd-pleasing rebukes of woke capital and the media, which treat DeSantis with a contempt comparable only to that which they show the former president.
 
And yet, there exists some non-negligible number of politicos who believe that DeSantis would and/or should wait his turn, let Trump have one last go at it, and start gaming out a 2028 run for the White House.
 
Last month, former Trump campaign manager and Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway issued a not-so-subtle warning to DeSantis after a straw poll found that 78 percent of attendees at a TPUSA youth conference wanted Trump to top the ticket again in 2024.
 
“He’s [DeSantis] a great governor, he’s fascinating. He could be a two-term [governor], and he’s got a great sense for the culture warrior part [of the job] too. Ron DeSantis can be the best two-term governor in Florida in modern history and run for president before he’s 50,” said Conway on Fox Business. “Governor DeSantis did speak on Friday night. He was well-received. He’s an unbelievably successful and consequential governor of Florida. But it’s President Trump who led in the polls,” she continued.
 
Peter Navarro, another longtime Trump groupie, has suggested that DeSantis resign himself to being the former president’s sidekick in 2024, writing a “memo to Ron” for the Daily Caller cautioning that “patience is as patience does.”
 
A CPAC straw poll conducted at a conference in Texas this weekend showed similar enthusiasm for a Trump-redux, with 69 percent calling him their man.
 
None of this should — or is likely to — dissuade DeSantis from throwing his hat into the 2024 race, and here’s why.
 
First, it is a sign of weakness, not strength, that Team Trump has been reduced to touting straw-poll results from events that most Americans, and indeed the vast majority of Republicans, know nothing about. CPAC, affectionately called “TPAC” by Conway, is a conference that’s been repurposed into an appeal to the former president’s vanity — its organizer, American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp, used the occasion to proclaim that Trump would lead the conservative movement until he “takes his last breath.” TPUSA, meanwhile, is led by Charlie Kirk, who proclaimed that he would pay for 80 buses full of students to attend the protests of Trump’s loss in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. (He sent seven.)
 
Do you think that weirdos who not only show up to political conferences, but show up to political conferences run by such slavish Trump devotees, make up anything close to a representative sample of Republican voters?
 
Polls of the general public show a much closer race, two years out, even with Trump’s built-in advantages. One recent YouGov poll of registered Republicans found that Trump could only boast a nine-point national lead over DeSantis. State-level surveys conducted by John Bolton’s super PAC suggest that DeSantis could compete against Trump in Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina. Especially encouraging is DeSantis’s well-established lead in Florida, where Senator Marco Rubio could not best Trump in 2016. It’s not just evidence that the governor can do the bare minimum and win his home state, but that the more voters know and learn about him, the more they like him.
 
Second, no politician with presidential aspirations ever benefited from waiting until the iron cooled to strike. Just ask Chris Christie, who passed on running for president in 2012, when he would have been a favorite for the Republican nomination, and ended up dropping out before the South Carolina primary in 2016.
 
Christie, by all measures a successful executive during his first term in New Jersey, was plagued by scandals in his second term that had rendered him a spent force when 2016 rolled around. In this world, bad things happen. Sometimes they’re out of, and sometimes they’re within, the control of elected officials, but they happen. If you’re lucky enough to have avoided them while positioning yourself as a genuine contender for the White House, you don’t wait around until they do, inevitably, occur under your watch.
 
Moreover, the allure of the new and exciting cannot be underestimated. In 2012, Christie was the popular, bombastic, conservative governor of a blue state. By 2016, he was old news. Right now, DeSantis’s flouting of Covid orthodoxy is at the top of many peoples’ minds. By 2028, it will be a distant memory of a long-since-passed political age.
 
Lastly, DeSantis can and should run in 2024 because to decline to do so would undermine his central appeal: his conviction that he is the best man for the job.
 
To run in 2028 as a Trump acolyte would be to run as Trump-lite. Voters don’t want a watered-down Americano; they want authentic, distinct brands. DeSantis has one of those right now, and it shines through — like it or not — at every signing ceremony, press conference, and other public appearances he makes. DeSantis says he takes the positions he does because he believes they’re right — torpedoes be damned.
 
If he wants everyone to believe him, he’ll need to take them not just from the media and the left, but from the man at Mar-a-Lago.