Ron DeSantis Would Face Challenges as a Presidential Contender

He’s politically skilled, but America’s different from Florida — and he’d have to overcome the obstacle of Trump.

A decade back, when Ron DeSantis was emerging from a Republican primary for a safe congressional seat on Florida’s northern Atlantic coast, no one was predicting that the Navy veteran and double-Ivy would be talked about as the future of the Republican Party.

Easy general-election victories against overmatched competition came in 2012, 2014, and 2016. That last one happened after DeSantis launched a run for Marco Rubio’s Senate seat, then shelved those aspirations when Rubio found a reason to run for reelection after Trump thumped him in the presidential primary.

When rumblings began in 2017 that the congressman was considering a run for governor, they were greeted with skepticism. Agriculture commissioner Adam Putnam had been running a soft campaign for his entire second term, and he had the endorsements and the lobbyists on lock, with his Polk County twang underscoring his claim that he “knew Florida best.”

DeSantis didn’t have those advantages, and at first, it was easy to be skeptical that he would overcome Putnam. His major supporters were Representative Matt Gaetz, whose quotes often would overshadow those of DeSantis at campaign events, and former president Donald Trump, who recounts his role in DeSantis’s 2018 run at event after event.

Trump has repeatedly told the story that DeSantis was at 3 percent in the polls before the endorsement, which DeSantis lobbied heavily for, and it was that endorsement that capsized Putnam. Trump also continues to remind interviewers that he came in to help DeSantis close the race against Andrew Gillum ahead of the November election.

Once in the governor’s office, DeSantis seemed to find his footing after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, with Joe Biden’s Covid-19 policies serving as the perfect foil. Press conferences around the state found DeSantis auditioning lines to be picked up by Fox News and other outlets, with the governor landing fresh soundbites a few times a week.

DeSantis is able to do this, in part, because he has changed the nature of press conferences.

While Rick Scott would hold a gaggle after formal remarks, DeSantis likes to take reporter questions with a crowd on hand (he’s done so since he was a candidate), and often that crowd reaction helps him to contextualize criticism coming from the corporate media. He’s helped by the reality of an ever-shrinking press corps, both in Tallahassee and elsewhere, in terms of controlling the narrative.

Additionally, he’s starting to put his fingerprint on state government, with hires that mirror his aggressive style. Joe Ladapo may be the most polemical surgeon general at any level since C. Everett Koop. And in terms of his comms style, recent-ish hires Taryn Fenske and Christina Pushaw represent a generational shift away from a more genteel dynamic with corporate press in past administrations.

DeSantis is able to do all this in part because of the state’s weak Democratic Party, which has been in the legislative minority for decades. He’s popular with the grassroots in a way that Rick Scott, Charlie Crist, and even Jeb Bush were not, and he’s built a national media apparatus that frames him as the future of the party. How many right-of-center commentators have moved to Florida in recent months in part because of DeSantis?

With all this said, can the model translate nationally? Peter Spiliakos offered reasons for cautious optimism for DeSantis fans on National Review yesterday. As he correctly points out, compared to someone like Scott Walker or Rick Perry, GOP governors previously taken seriously as potential presidential candidates a couple of years out from an election, DeSantis is smarter and seems to have a better handle on his long-term political strategy.

There’s only one problem, of course, but it’s a big one: Donald Trump.

Trump’s now-weekly rallies have offered a familiar pattern: endorsements of local MAGA candidates, then the long stemwinder with the unsubtle 2024 tease. It could be suggested that the strategy is reaching diminishing-returns territory, also, with polls of the 2024 landscape showing the former president with less than majority support in various states and nationally. DeSantis is usually a strong second in these surveys.

Trump’s MO in recent months: to make sure that DeSantis remains second fiddle. How many times has he told essentially this story with slight semantic variations? “Ron was at 3 percent when he asked for my endorsement. I didn’t want to do it, but I did, and that’s why he beat Adam Putnam and Andrew Gillum both.”

How many more times will he tell it? That’s the problem for DeSantis.

DeSantis fans imagine a scenario where Trump, suddenly aware of the passage of time and the need to pass the torch, will gracefully bow out and clear the field for the governor. That’s not likely. There already seems to be a not-so-subtle Trump/DeSantis rivalry. An ally of the governor’s is running against Trump’s choice for agriculture commissioner, Senate president Wilton Simpson. Trump has endorsed Florida’s attorney general and CFO, but not the governor . . . even as he found time to endorse Dr. Oz over the weekend.

Recall also that former DeSantis campaign ace Susie Wiles, whose strategy drove the come-from-behind win for him in 2018, was booted from the governor’s orbit. She still works for Trump, though.

Assuming Trump runs in 2024 and DeSantis doesn’t, which is the former president’s prediction/warning we keep hearing, there could be problems. And there could also be problems if Trump doesn’t run.

DeSantis as the non-Trump frontrunner is already a target, as Maryland governor Larry Hogan’s diss of the state’s Parental Rights in Education law shows. Expect more 2024 types to hit DeSantis as spring turns to summer.

It’s difficult to stay atop polls for years on end, and a frontrunner two years out doesn’t always hold serve by the time New Hampshire and Iowa voters are in play.

In short, DeSantis is in a good place. But he’s got a lot of storms to weather between now and any presidential primary, and most of those storms will come from rivals on the right.

We’ve seen GOP governors conquer the odds before: Ronald Reagan, in his second serious campaign for the nomination in 1980; George W. Bush in 2000. Is DeSantis this era’s equivalent? He’s as good a bet as any governor of his generation, but there is a reason he throws cold water on 2024 questions asked by reporters. He knows better than most how premature those queries really are.

Spiliakos makes some solid points, among them the realization that DeSantis has to deepen his message: “You probably can’t run a 2024 presidential campaign by playing the hits from Florida state government 2020–2022.”

That underscores a problem DeSantis could face: The stories that drive Tallahassee will not be the ones rehearsed on debate stages, where larger national and geopolitical questions will take precedence. Disses of Anthony Fauci likely won’t be as relevant as 2024 approaches.

“The challenge that DeSantis faces — which Perry and Walker also faced but failed at — is to articulate how his statewide record applies to federal politics,” Spiliakos asserts, and that is especially true given that he didn’t accomplish much that anyone remembers during six years in Congress.

Can DeSantis pull this off? It’s certainly possible. But he will have to accomplish it while somehow resolving the problem created by a former president who believes DeSantis owes him. With any former president, that could be an issue. With Donald Trump?

As Omar Little put it in The Wire, “You come at the King, you best not miss.”