The DeSantis Difference

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, November 11, 2022

 

In the 2022 midterms, Florida was another country entirely. While Republicans underperformed in much of the nation, Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio posted absolutely enormous wins against their Democratic opponents. DeSantis’s win — much larger than the generous one expected of him — immediately changed the conversation about 2024. His own supporters began chanting, hilariously, “Two More Years” at his victory party. GOP megadonors began declaring their interest in him. And former president Donald Trump began raging and sulking about him.

 

When was it that DeSantis’s brand diverged so much from Donald Trump’s? It is being presently forgotten. But if you had predicted four years ago that Republicans closely associated with Donald Trump’s brand were getting massacred in the 2022 elections, you would have assumed DeSantis was the first goner, having only squeaked by in 2018, and having done those ads that seemed to have no other purpose than to impress the Donald himself.

 

Instead DeSantis triumphed with a 20-point win.

 

I have cast about among friends and colleagues for their answer to why. They cited his competent governance. The fact that he became the locus of hostile media attention for a long time, but thrived. That he was organized and tactically sound. He had an unerring sense of where the electorate was, and how much room for maneuver he had. For instance, he occupies the governor’s mansion of the most pro-choice red state. And so his position on abortion, restricting it only after 15 weeks’ gestation, was more liberal than the policies pursued by Ohio or Texas. But on the issues related to transgenderism and children, he could pursue aggressive policies, knowing that he had the backing of 70 to 80 percent of the electorate. One friend said Trump was all talk, but DeSantis was a culture warrior with substance.

 

These are all important factors. But the truth is simpler and more profound. DeSantis understood his job.

 

In the speech he delivered to the National Conservatism Conference in September, he bragged about his state’s success due to his approach on Covid. Florida had prioritized keeping schools open. And businesses open, too. The results in test scores, economic recovery, and in-migration told a very obvious story. At the conference and in many speeches since, these are all huge applause lines.

 

While DeSantis says that he championed freedom, in Florida he did so in a way that wasn’t strictly ideological. In fact, he earned objections from libertarians and some conservatives when he banned businesses from instituting vaccine passports for entry and from instituting vaccine mandates for employees. But he explained that his job as a statesman (and yes, he used that word) was not to listen only to the experts in narrow fields, but to “harmonize” the diverse interests of the state he governs.

 

The approach DeSantis took had the insight that the new Covid-era restrictions were rapidly altering social relations between enterprises and customers, and between employers and employees — for the worse. Only where the data were extremely compelling — as in the need to protect the people in nursing homes — would the state take drastic action that disrupted normal life.

 

If you can describe the ideology of DeSantis’s approach, it was one of conserving the social fabric. You were free to be as careful as you wanted to be, but you weren’t free to change the social order. In Florida, you could have business meetings unmasked. In Florida, you weren’t going to be subjected to a permanent, or even temporary, biomedical security state that threatened your job. Just as before, you could expect your private medical decisions to remain your business, and not that of your human-resources department. Your kids could go to school, and socialize, and see their speech therapist unmasked. You could be who you are in Florida: a businessman, a kid on a softball team, a hypochondriac, or a vax-skeptic.

 

DeSantis’s approach seemed outrageous to some: He was defying expert advice. But it had a small-l libertarian humility to it, an understanding that a crisis will pass. This form of leadership had the effect of tempering the moral manias that afflicted so many institutions and cities across the country. That’s what attracted so many hundreds of thousands of people to Florida the past two and half years. And Florida’s success likely inspired other states to give up on these alterations to the social order earlier than they otherwise would have.

 

DeSantis is going to get absolutely Olympian praise on the right in the coming weeks and months, for all sorts of reasons. Some of them true, some of them mercenary, some of them just because he’s the best option not named Donald J. Trump. But his approach to the Covid crisis was a triumph of conservative statesmanship. Which is to say, it was anti-ideological, and by being so, it served well the diverse, strange, and prosperous society that we call Florida.