Many of the governor’s cultural battles in Florida have taken head-on the things that worry socially conservative parents the most these days.
Tim Alberta in the Atlantic and Steve Peoples for the Associated Press both note a vulnerability for Donald Trump heading into the 2024 primaries: Social and religious conservative leaders and the pro-life movement are open to another candidate. They aren’t especially interested in Mike Pence, either. That gives Ron DeSantis an opportunity to exploit the opening — an opening that another candidate could fill if he won’t tend to it.
Alberta, who opens his story at Hillsdale College, notes that Trump is suffering a self-inflicted wound driven by his ego:
Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. . . . The former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders. . . . For the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition. The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. . . .
It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.
Alberta speaks on the record to Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who says, “What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump,” and Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, who says of Trump’s tirade, “He thinks it will go away, but it won’t.” Peoples observes: “In the early days of the 2024 presidential contest, no Republican has worked harder to avoid the [abortion] issue than the former president. . . . ‘We’re looking at a lot of different things,’ Trump said when asked twice by The Associated Press whether he supports a federal abortion ban.” He quotes Bob Vander Plaats, a long-prominent Iowa social conservative leader and president of Iowa’s Family Leader: Abortion remains “a character-defining issue.”
Of course, it should be recalled that Evangelical Christians, and religious voters and social conservatives in general, were divided in the 2016 primaries: Regular churchgoers were more likely to support Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, while those who were less religiously affiliated and practicing were much more likely to back Trump. The latter are less likely to follow the lead of people such as Perkins, Dannenfelser, and Vander Plaats.
DeSantis has started to court these leaders and voters. Alberta details a few of those efforts, and the Florida governor has upcoming events at Hillsdale on April 6 and Liberty University on April 14. He has also pledged to sign Florida’s “heartbeat bill,” which builds on a 2022 bill he signed (a 15-week abortion ban) by pushing the line back to six weeks. DeSantis has not been especially vocal on the issue, but if he makes it to the general election, he will need to learn sooner or later learn a key lesson of 2022: Pro-lifers can’t win on the abortion issue by ducking it. They need to defend their position and make the public case.
In the interim, DeSantis has a strong record to defend beyond abortion, such as his stance against age-inappropriate sexual indoctrination in schools. Many of his cultural battles in Florida have taken head-on the things that worry socially conservative parents the most these days. But it will also remain to be seen: Even if he has the words, does he know the music? Can an Italian Catholic from Florida with northern roots and an Ivy League education who isn’t in the habit of being publicly demonstrative about his faith connect with Evangelical protestants in Iowa and South Carolina?