By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, August 24, 2022
If the Clintons are the penicillin-resistant
gonorrhea of American politics, then Charlie Crist is the athletes’ foot of
Florida politics — irritating, embarrassing, and kind of gross, whichever side
he’s on.
Crist, the former Republican governor of Florida, now
wants to be the Democratic governor of Florida, having switched parties after
losing a 2010 GOP Senate primary to Marco Rubio and then running against Rubio
as an “unaffiliated” candidate in the general election, pulling away from
Republicans as Republicans pulled away from him.
I suppose the poor Libertarians will have to take him
next time around.
Florida is a weird state, and not just because they let
Charlie Cooke vote there. Florida is a state that is purple on paper — 5
million Democrats, 5.2 million Republicans, 4 million unaffiliated voters, and
257,000 minor-party adherents — but Democrats have a damned hard time winning
elections there. The state hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1994, it
has two Republican senators, 16 of its 27 House seats went Republican in 2020,
and Democratic presidential candidates have won its electoral votes only three
times since 1980 (Bill Clinton in 1996 but not 1992, Barack Obama both times).
That’s a poor showing in the context of an apparently tight electorate.
One possible explanation, unlikely though it may sound,
is that Florida Republicans are — hear me out! — smart.
Jeb Bush wasn’t a great candidate in the 2016 Republican
primary, but he was a really good governor of Florida — in fact, part of his
problem in 2016 (beyond Bush fatigue) was that too much time had elapsed
between his outstanding gubernatorial performance and his seeking the
Republican nomination. Rick Scott is not a charming man — he sometimes talks
like a cable-news ogre — but he was a very capable governor, with an approach
to the job of the sort that should give technocracy a better reputation than it
has. Ron DeSantis’s decision to cast himself as Donald Trump’s Mini-Me has been
at times silly and undignified, but he, too, has been an effective governor —
which probably explains his popularity at home. There is a case to be made that
Florida has prospered in large part thanks to Democratic leaders and Democratic
policies — the same policies that have ruined California and New York — but
Floridians’ experience with Republican government has been, in recent years, a
good one: a confidence-inspiring one, even.
The fact that Florida has about as many registered
Democrats as Republicans but consistently votes Republican suggests — and the
polls bear out — that Florida’s elections have been delivered to the GOP by
Republican-leaning independents. A fair number of such independents are
right-wing populists who are, for obvious reasons, embarrassed to call
themselves Republicans, but who are not likely to vote for a Democrat over a
conservative tribune such as DeSantis. If there are a few country-club
Republican types who are put off by DeSantis’s ersatz Trumpiness, there do not
seem to be enough of them to add up to much. The idea that there is some slice
of Republicans or Republican-voting independents that is going to be peeled off
by the modest charms, such as they are, of Charlie Crist is fanciful.
More likely is that there will be a non-trivial number of
Democrats who didn’t like Crist’s sharp-elbowed treatment of conspiracy-kook
Nikki Fried in the Democratic primary and who may just barely remember
that Crist once held office as a Republican. Democrats could do themselves a
few favors by making peace with former Republicans, especially nominal ones —
the Democratic Party and the country would be in better shape today if Mike
Bloomberg had been elected president rather than Joe Biden — but that is not
going to happen in our time of imbecilic Kulturkampf politics.
And now, Crist says he doesn’t want the
votes of DeSantis supporters, rhetorically writing off the majority of Florida
voters — around 54 percent — who approve of DeSantis’s performance. DeSantis’s
approval rating has lately run as high as 18 points ahead of his disapproval
rating — Crist is going to have a hard time forging a majority out of those
leftovers.
Crist is clever enough — just barely — to understand that
his best hope is to make the Florida governor’s race a proxy for the 2024
presidential election, hoping to turn out Florida Democrats in unusually large
numbers to crush and humiliate the current Republican front-runner. That is a
poor strategy. For one thing, DeSantis may not be the 2024 Republican
front-runner in November: It is entirely possible that the front-runner will be
a different Floridian, the one Florida already has voted to elect president
— twice.
“Make it all about Trump!” is a pretty good strategy in
California or New Jersey, but it isn’t the most obvious one to deploy in a
state that Trump has never lost.
Crist has been resurrected, but it is unlikely that he will ascend.
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