Set aside some time to watch Ron DeSantis’s NatCon speech.
If you’re closely watching Ron DeSantis and his positioning for a widely anticipated presidential run in 2024, I highly recommend setting aside an hour to watch his full speech at NatCon, the National Conservatism Conference, which was conveniently held in Miami, Fla., in mid September. The speech strikes a lot of notes familiar to regular watchers of his stump speeches, but if you haven’t watched him at work in a long-form address, this is a good sample. He makes a vigorous case for his philosophy, his ideas, and his actions — from his highlights to more dubious ideas such as his unconstitutional social-media law — across a broad array of policy areas, including pandemic response, education, immigration, mob violence, law enforcement, transgenderism, low taxes and fiscal restraint, elections administration, woke corporations, separation of powers, and the administrative state. (He was notably silent on abortion, and, given his position running for reelection as a governor, he avoided any discussion of foreign policy, other than trade with China). Among other things, DeSantis champions Reaganism while making an argument (popular with the NatCon crowd but justly a subject of heated debate within the conservative movement) that times have changed in ways that require governments to stand up more to big business in order to preserve individual liberty and republican self-government.
A major challenge for any Republican candidate these days, especially one aiming to peel Donald Trump’s supporters away from Trump himself (as DeSantis will have to do if he faces off with Trump in a presidential race), is that a whole lot of Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen, and it wasn’t. There isn’t evidence showing enough fraudulent or illegal votes to change the outcome across a sufficient number of states. While Democrats committed blatant illegalities, and while the nature of voter fraud is such that some portion will always be undetectable, there really is not a defensible case for there being enough places for illegal votes to have hidden for the election to have actually been stolen.
DeSantis has thus far stayed out of questions about challenging the 2020 results ever since an ill-advised interview with Laura Ingraham early on in November 2020 in which he made a brief reference to the power of state legislatures to select electors. He had, of course, a luxury that Brian Kemp and Doug Ducey did not: Trump won Florida and wasn’t challenging the results there. He has now had nearly two years to formulate his answer. If you watch the four minutes of the speech that start at 29:23 discussing the integrity of elections, you can see how he is trying to thread the needle of appealing to voters who think the election was stolen while not, himself, saying anything he can’t back up — and at the same time, implicitly taking a shot at Trump. DeSantis takes more or less exactly the line I predicted back in January: He attacks how the election was run in other states, but contrasts it with how the election was run in Florida. The implicit message to Trump supporters is: Trump let it happen, but I didn’t let it happen here. They won’t get away with doing to me what they did to him.
He then pivoted to discussing the reforms he made in 2019 before the election and in 2021. He justifies replacing inept (or worse) elections administrators in Broward and Palm Beach Counties on the grounds that “one generation of botched elections is enough” (an interesting repurposing of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most notorious line). He notes that people after the 2020 election were saying, “Why can’t these other states do like Florida does? They didn’t used to say that about Florida . . . we did much better.” Now, he says, “We have the most secure elections in the country” thanks to a swift and transparent system of vote-counting, voter ID for in-person and absentee ballots, bans on ballot harvesting and “Zuckerbucks” (private financing of elections offices in exchange for access or influence), and Florida’s creation of a dedicated law-enforcement unit to actually enforce these laws.
His approach is reminiscent of the line taken by Mollie Hemingway’s book Rigged, which tallied up problems with the 2020 election but stopped short of directly making indefensible claims that it was actually stolen. DeSantis slams other states — accurately — for making “not constitutional changes” to their laws without consent of their state legislatures. He also describes the Zuckerbucks project as “corrupt as hell,” and, as Hemingway has detailed, he has a point insofar as the project in some places allowed preferential access to proprietary elections data for private, partisan financiers:
A few weeks after the five Wisconsin cities received their grants, CTCL [the Center for Tech and Civic Life, dispenser of much of the funding] emailed Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, to offer “an experienced elections staffer that could potentially embed with your staff in Milwaukee in a matter of days.” The staffer leading Wisconsin’s portion of the National Vote at Home Institute was an out-of-state Democratic activist named Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein. As soon as he met with Woodall-Vogg, he asked for contacts in other cities and at the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
Spitzer-Rubenstein would eventually take over much of Green Bay’s election planning from the official charged with running the election, Green Bay Clerk Kris Teske…Emails from Spitzer-Rubenstein show the extent to which he was managing the election process. To one government official he wrote, “By Monday, I’ll have our edits on the absentee voting instructions. We’re pushing Quickbase to get their system up and running and I’ll keep you updated. I’ll revise the planning tool to accurately reflect the process. I’ll create a flowchart for the vote-by-mail processing that we will be able to share with both inspectors and also observers.”
Once early voting started, Woodall-Vogg would provide Spitzer-Rubenstein with daily updates on the numbers of absentee ballots returned and still outstanding in each ward—prized information for a political operative. Amazingly, Spitzer-Rubenstein even asked for direct access to the Milwaukee Election Commission’s voter database: “Would you or someone else on your team be able to do a screen-share so we can see the process for an export?” he wrote. “Do you know if WisVote has an [application programming interface] or anything similar so that it can connect with other software apps? That would be the holy grail.” Even for Woodall-Vogg, that was too much. “While I completely understand and appreciate the assistance that is trying to be provided,” she replied, “I am definitely not comfortable having a non-staff member involved in the function of our voter database, much less recording it.”
When these emails were released in 2021, they stunned Wisconsin observers. “What exactly was the National Vote at Home Institute doing with its daily reports? Was it making sure that people were actually voting from home by going door-to-door to collect ballots from voters who had not yet turned theirs in? Was this data sharing a condition of the CTCL grant? And who was really running Milwaukee’s election?” asked Dan O’Donnell, whose election analysis appeared at Wisconsin’s conservative MacIver Institute. [Emphasis added.]
All of this, from DeSantis, is shrewd if not entirely principled politics. It’s not beanbag, but if it succeeds, it’s a sort of rhetorical methadone that will pry voters away from a leader who is selling them something much more dangerous than simply telling them the truth about provable if not decisive problems with the election. Unlike Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer, DeSantis isn’t calling the entire American election system a “rigged game” or trying to preemptively delegitimize this fall’s elections. Of course, DeSantis is still sooner or later going to be pressed on the direct question of whether he thinks Trump was the legal winner of the 2020 election. We shall see, then, how well he is able to manage to answer or deflect that inquiry with his dignity intact.
