By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
The Ron DeSantis campaign’s theory of its case has
not been hard to intuit. The Florida governor has devoted most of his energies
to peeling away Donald Trump’s core supporters by taking ownership of the
former president’s issue set and presenting himself as a more competent and
capable steward of those priorities. On paper, the strategy makes sense. But in
focusing to a prohibitive degree on the GOP’s least persuadable voters, he has
sacrificed his appeal to its most persuadable voters. Even if that is a smaller
pool of Republicans, it is one that any anti-Trump candidate must corner if
their presidential enterprise is going to be successful.
We know Ron DeSantis’s campaign understands that its
theory of the case is wrong. That is the unacknowledged subtext of the
campaign’s “reboot” phase, which has stretched on now for the better part of a
week. To follow the reboot granularly is to get lost in
the nuts and bolts of the campaign’s staffing decisions. But
the best film crew in America can’t make a bad script into a good feature. For
DeSantis, it’s the script that needs retooling as much as its executors.
DeSantis reportedly plans to make a set-piece speech next week on the state of the
economy and Joe Biden’s handling of it. That’s a welcome development. “The
economy,” generally, and the party’s approach to bringing inflation to heel are
some of the GOP’s core strengths according
to polling. But DeSantis isn’t running against Biden — not yet. And he
won’t get that opportunity unless he distinguishes his approach to economics
from Donald Trump’s. Right now, however, the governor appears hostage to a fashion in Washington, D.C., among center-right reformers
who are convinced the Republican Party’s economic pitch must divorce itself
entirely from the economic themes to which Republican voters have responded
favorably for almost their whole lives.
Is the governor’s economic message going to be the one favored
by the populist right? Is it going to emphasize trade protectionism and a
technocratic industrial policy over individual liberty, free markets, and moral
and practical superiority of small government? If that is the course DeSantis
adopts, it’s unclear how that sets him apart from Trump except on the margins.
What’s more, it is not clear that the audience for that message isn’t just
dialed into to Donald Trump, the man. A significant number of GOP-voting
Americans with living memories of the 20th century are not hostile toward free-trade policies, laws that allow workers the freedom to not unionize, and markets that reward superior products and services to
those that reward the politically favored. That is less true of younger Republican voters, a demographic apparently
overrepresented among the staffers the DeSantis campaign recently jettisoned. Will the DeSantis campaign acknowledge
the logic of its own conclusions?
Something similar could be said of the campaign’s
infatuation with alternative media venues. By privileging niche venues and the
self-selected audience that populates internet forums, the campaign has forced
its principal to repeatedly navigate minefields — mostly unsuccessfully.
The campaign eschewed the standard campaign roll-out
imagery of a cheering crowd and an adoring family in favor of Elon Musk’s dysfunctional, audio-only online platform where
the candidate was obliged to indulge the hosts’ paranoia about the efforts by
powerful interests to silence the American right. The same could be said of
DeSantis’s sit-down interviews with niche figures such as comedian Russell Brand. The audience that tuned in for that
interview heard a wide-ranging discussion. The much larger audience that missed
it was made aware of it only because of DeSantis’s off-hand comments
downplaying the significance of the events of January 6.
Polling suggests a bare majority of the GOP has convinced themselves of
some convoluted views of that day’s events, but that leaves a substantial
minority of Republicans who reject the revisionism demanded of Trump’s
supporters. Somewhere in these voters’ minds is the understanding that
Americans did not like what happened on January 6 and that the
candidate who associates himself with that day is shackling himself to a
political liability. Those voters are underserved by the Trump–DeSantis
contest.
DeSantis’s instincts here are of a piece with his recent pledge to sue the makers of Bud Light for
sacrificing their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders by engaging in
cultural combat and losing. It’s not distinct from his inexplicable decision to
entertain giving lifelong Democrat and notable crank Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. a role in a DeSantis administration. It’s of a piece with
his lack of an exit strategy from the escalating quagmire involving Disney, or the handful of absurd (and vaguely menacing) videos that the based meme warriors with
whom DeSantis has surrounded himself create and that his campaign promotes.
These bizarrely myopic initiatives do not differentiate DeSantis from Trump,
but they do alienate voters who are keen to turn the page on the Trump years.
Republican voters may not base their votes on foreign
policy, but there are few issues today that divide the GOP’s primary voters
like Russia’s war in Ukraine. To observe the DeSantis campaign’s approach to
that issue, you could be forgiven for thinking that the vast majority of
Republicans are hostile toward Ukraine’s cause. That is just not so. On Ukraine, the governor has distinguished
himself from Trump, but not in advantageous ways. DeSantis’s effort to craft a
coherent Ukraine policy have been frustrated by its inherent contradictions. By contrast,
Trump is retailing an absurdly simplistic approach to the conflict, but it is
one that nonetheless appeals to a conventionally Republican disposition.
When Trump promises to either negotiate a rapid end to
the conflict or arm Ukraine to the teeth, he is advertising a vision for a
muscular, extroverted American presence on the world stage — one that
implicitly contrasts with the approach adopted by the weak-kneed Democrat in
the White House. This, not the idea that America is a spent force which cannot
manage conflicts abroad while still seeing to its responsibilities at home, is
where the GOP’s comfort zone is. If DeSantis cannot present a vision of America
as a force for good, other candidates can and will.
The DeSantis campaign has previewed at least one shift in
its messaging, but it’s one that makes little sense. “There will be more of a
national focus than constant Florida references,” NBC News reported last week. Why? People like Florida.
They’re moving there in droves. The state is a national success story.
“Constant Florida references” serve to highlight the governor’s core competency
— good, conservative governance. Instead, we must conclude that the campaign
plans to abandon this strength in favor of a leaner operation that is
nonetheless committed to a pitch that is not working.
So far, the DeSantis campaign has gone out of its way to
communicate to Trump-skeptical primary voters that the governor’s candidacy
doesn’t need their support. Who are those voters to argue with that?
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