Kamala Harris and leftist pundits have falsely claimed that Florida’s history curriculum whitewashes slavery.
Republican presidential contenders are looking to the left for inspiration in their latest attack against Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
Former congressman Will Hurd and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie have criticized DeSantis over Florida’s new standards for teaching African-American studies — borrowing attacks from Democrats including Vice President Kamala Harris.
Liberal pundits have seized on a line in the curriculum that mentions teaching students that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and requires teaching “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
Harris claimed in a speech last week that, “just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”
“They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it,” she added.
Asked about the standard in question, DeSantis told reporters: “I mean, I didn’t do it and I wasn’t involved in it. But I think what they’re doing is I think that they’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later, later in life. But the reality is all of that is rooted in whatever is factual. They listed everything out.”
But Hurd and Christie have criticized the curriculum and suggested DeSantis’s response is evidence that he lacks the leadership skills needed to be president.
“DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed, and now he doesn’t want to take responsibility for whatever is done in the aftermath of it. And from listening and watching his comments, he’s obviously uncomfortable,” Christie said in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.
“‘I didn’t do it’ and ‘I’m not involved in it’ are not the words of leadership,” he said. “If this was such a big issue for Governor DeSantis, he had four years to do this. He only started to focus on this when he decided he wanted to run for president and try to get to the right of Donald Trump. And so, I think people see this as politically manipulative.”
Hurd made a similar argument during an appearance on CNN: “There is no — there was no upside to slavery. Slavery was not a jobs program.” He claimed DeSantis “showed his lack of leadership, by acting like it was somebody else’s fault and not something that was done, on his watch.”
Members of the workgroup that helped craft the new standards told NR’s Ryan Mills there was no intention to suggest that African Americans benefited from slavery. The curriculum instead aims to show that enslaved people were “resilient” and used the skills they developed to better their lives under difficult circumstances.
It’s a long-shot argument from long-shot candidates: Christie sits at 2.4 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average and Hurd hasn’t even been included in enough polls to register.
Left-wing controversy notwithstanding, DeSantis’s campaign is undergoing a revamp after the governor has failed to make significant headway against front-runner Donald Trump in the polls.
Thirty-eight staffers have been cut across several departments of the campaign, accounting for more than 40 percent of its original staff, Politico reported on Tuesday. The cuts included around ten event-planning positions that were announced just weeks ago. The news comes almost two weeks after the campaign announced the departure of two senior advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain.
“Following a top-to-bottom review of our organization, we have taken additional, aggressive steps to streamline operations and put Ron DeSantis in the strongest position to win this primary and defeat Joe Biden,” DeSantis campaign manager Generra Peck said in a statement. “Gov. DeSantis is going to lead the Great American Comeback and we’re ready to hit the ground running as we head into an important month of the campaign.”
The shake-up comes amid reported financial troubles for the campaign, which recently announced it raised $20 million during the second quarter, though the New York Times reported much of those funds have already been spent. A significant amount of those donations came from donors who maxed out their contribution and would not be able to give again.
A significant financial strain on the campaign has been DeSantis’s demands to fly private, with the flights eating up nearly 40 percent of every dollar he raised in his first six weeks, according to the report.
The campaign sought to reassure supporters that the reset is for the best in a memo on Tuesday. “No campaign is immune to changes, cuts, or challenges,” the note read.
A Fox Business survey of Iowa Republicans released this week showed Trump leading the field with the support of 46 percent of likely GOP caucus-goers. DeSantis followed far behind at 16 percent, while Senator Tim Scott came in third at 11 percent.
Meanwhile a Fox Business poll in South Carolina showed DeSantis in third place, behind Trump and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. Forty-eight percent of likely Republican primary voters backed Trump, while 14 percent supported Haley, 13 percent supported DeSantis, and 10 percent supported Scott.
As NR’s Jim Geraghty said, “When you launch as a highly touted challenger with high expectations, and national polls still have you in the mid teens a few months later, you have to shake up your staff the way Ron DeSantis is currently doing.”
DeSantis will kickstart a bus tour on Thursday in Iowa hosted by Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting his campaign. The PAC will host more bus-tour stops with DeSantis across Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina in the coming weeks, according to a news release.
Another part of the campaign shakeup is a new approach to handling media, including an increased willingness to sit for interviews with less friendly reporters.
The governor will appear on the Megyn Kelly Show on Friday, months after the veteran broadcast journalist told an audience at National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit that DeSantis is “afraid” to come on her show because she’s an “actual journalist.”
She said back in March that he would not agree to appear on her SiriusXM show during his media tour to promote his book, The Courage to Be Free. She said that he was instead opting to appear on right-wing “basement TV.”
“There would be absolutely no reason not to come to me,” she said, pointing out that she is “not MSNBC and he knows it,” as her audience tends to be right-leaning with some “center-lefties.”
“If he comes to somebody like me, who’s an actual journalist — I’m not a hater, my vote is gettable — what’s he going to do? I’m not going to give him a pass just like I didn’t give [former president] Trump a pass,” she said.
She said journalists should be adversarial and that she just wants to have a “fun, spicy, robust, tough exchange” with DeSantis, whom she suggested will likely eventually acquiesce and appear on her show — and clearly she was right.
She told the Daily Signal earlier this month that she believes DeSantis is “starting to find his groove” after he participated in a GOP candidate forum with Tucker Carlson at the FAMiLY Leadership Summit in Iowa earlier this month.
“I think the larger narrative is that DeSantis has stalled, right?” she said. “But it is relatively early, and he’s got $150 million in his war chest, so it’s too early to pronounce his campaign over it. Having said that, it hasn’t been gangbusters. He got sort of a false start with that Twitter spaces thing. And he’s not a natural retail politician, but if you watch the guy enough, I think eventually he will win you over.”
She suggested then that the “No. 1 thing he needs to do is get himself in front of adversarial liberal media and fight.”
DeSantis began putting his new media strategy in motion last week when he sat for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Vivek Ramaswamy has seemingly had a brighter week than DeSantis, if the Drudge Report is any indication. A large photo of Ramaswamy led the site on Tuesday above a headline that read, “RAMASWAMY RISING NEW FACE OF REPUBLICANS THREAT TO TRUMP?”
The headline linked out to an article in The Hill about Ramaswamy’s standing in a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released Monday that found 52 percent of likely GOP primary voters would support Trump, 12 percent would support DeSantis, and 10 percent would support Ramaswamy.
The headline also linked to an NBC News article noting that, while Ramaswamy “didn’t attract all that much attention when he launched his presidential bid in February,” now “that’s changing.”
“Ramaswamy has blanketed the early-state trail as well as both conservative and mainstream media, embracing a strategy that has him omnipresent in the Republican presidential primary,” the report reads. “That strategy seems to be working.”
While Ramaswamy was making positive headlines, a super PAC supporting Miami mayor Francis Suarez’s presidential campaign found itself in hot water this week when a government watchdog group filed a complaint with the FEC over a $500,000 contribution to the PAC that it says may have violated campaign-finance laws.
The complaint from the Campaign Legal Center says the business behind the contribution to the SOS America PAC, PassionForest LLC, did not have the financial means to make such a large contribution. The Campaign Legal Center suggests the company, which sells artificial flowers on Amazon, was used to hide the identities of the actual donors. Because PassionForest filed a trademark application listing a Chinese address, the watchdog suggests the contribution could have been made to conceal illegal foreign contributions.
The super PAC dismissed the complaint as an attack “intended to undercut the only Hispanic Republican candidate.”
“It is our understanding that the complaint makes no accusations whatsoever against SOS America PAC or the Mayor. This is nothing more than a political attack and it will be seen for what it is,” SOS America PAC spokesperson Chapin Fay told the Associated Press.
Around NR
• Jim Geraghty says that as new polling reveals that the numbers have “barely changed since the beginning of the year and the longshot candidates remain in the mid to low single digits, it is more than fair to ask what these longshot candidates expect to change between now and when the voting starts early next year”:
Yes, we haven’t had any debates yet. Yes, you can argue that Republican primary voters aren’t that tuned in yet. But just how likely is it that television audiences tune in to watch the first debate next month, and become suddenly and wildly entranced with, say, Doug Burgum, and prefer him to all of the other options?
• Despite the “whole political world” having been “built around the idea that DeSantis is going to fight Trump for the nomination at some point,” Michael Brendan Dougherty says that voters shouldn’t expect anything to change until the pair are on stage together:
The trick is that this fight has to happen inside the Republican tent. If DeSantis does what Chris Christie does — goes on Sunday-morning talk shows and bashes Trump — he’ll look like he’s amplifying liberal criticisms of Trump, which most partisans don’t distinguish from criticisms of themselves. . . . Nothing is going to matter until DeSantis can speak directly to Trump’s face and own the consequences of it.
• John McCormack observes that only two events have changed the trajectory of the race up until this point — the midterm elections and Trump’s first indictment:
There have been some big news stories in the presidential primary since then. DeSantis’s glitchy and insular May 25 campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces was widely ridiculed. The June 9 federal indictment of Trump for illegally hoarding classified national-defense information at Mar-a-Lago was widely considered to be damning. But nothing since the Bragg indictment has significantly moved the needle in national polls.
• Noah Rothman dissects a “ridiculous oppo dump” against Tim Scott in Politico. Rothman notes that Scott is “alleged to have professional associations with a political consultant who was once videotaped at a poker game using racial slurs.” The consultant in question worked in Scott’s office as a legislative aide in 2017 and later worked in Will Hurd’s office in 2018 before launching the firm that contracts with Scott’s allied PAC and other Republican outlets in 2020:
To capitalize on Politico’s attack, one of Scott’s opponents will have to commit to retailing the narrative that the South Carolina senator is either clueless or secretly in league with the casually racist. But it will require a lot of repeated exposition to get that impression to stick with Republican voters. As investments of political capital go, that’s a bad one.
• Trump’s favorability among Republican and Republican-leaning voters has fallen amid his criminal indictments, according to a new Pew poll. Support for the former president fell from 75 percent in July 2022 to 66 percent this month, Ari Blaff reports. The poll also highlighted the challenge facing Trump’s opponents over how to respond to the former president’s legal troubles:
Conservative voters were split over how the rest of the field of presidential contenders should have responded to the indictment over his alleged mishandling of classified documents in Florida. Nearly half (45 percent), believe that presidential contenders should not take a position on the matter, while another 42 percent argue that they should be outspoken in their condemnation of Trump’s prosecution.
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