I think it’s way, way too early for any panic for Ron DeSantis or his supporters. But there are some ominous chords being played in the early campaign soundtrack.
I get that DeSantis wants to peel away 10, 20, 30 percent of current Trump supporters, and thus is either going to emphasize his similarities to Trump or only hit Trump from the right for a while. But a huge part of DeSantis’ current appeal is that he represents a choice to put the Trump era behind us for good, and that he as nominee and president would emphasize competence, results, focus, and policy over Trump’s manic circus of social media raging, “owning the libs,” fuming about disloyalty, lack of interest in policy details, etc.
I don’t want to relitigate the governor’s statement on Ukraine all over again, but I’ll just say, the more DeSantis emphasizes to current Trump supporters how he is like Trump, the more both the pro- and anti-Trump folks will ask, “wait, if you’re so much like Trump, and we already have Trump, what do we need you for?”
DeSantis winning nearly 60 percent of the vote in his bid for reelection last year demonstrates that he has the ability to appeal to a lot of people beyond traditional loyalist GOP voters. I realize every presidential candidate has to win the primary first, but in recent cycles, we’ve seen a lot of candidates try to paint themselves as the dream candidate of those diehard party loyalist primary voters. From the way some Republicans run their campaigns, you could be forgiven for thinking that all 31 million or so GOP presidential primary voters watch Fox News, follow online news stories obsessively, hunger for ever-more culture war red meat, and see the primary purpose of a Republican president as declaring a de facto war on every American whose political beliefs are left of center.
Whether Republicans like open presidential primaries or not, a lot of states still have them. There are a lot of right-leaning independents and currently unaffiliated voters out there. A lot of Republican candidates begin by explicitly pitching themselves as “conservative,” and presume that the entire pool of potential primary voters knows what that term means and agrees on what that term means.
Go reread Ronald Reagan’s brief, clear announcement speech from 1975. The word “conservative” does not appear. Reagan did not assume that listeners already agreed with him or were Republicans. Everything is framed as common sense reaction to obvious, undeniable, easily-envisioned problems: inflation, unemployment, and interest rates, the end of cheap and abundant energy, falling behind hostile adversaries militarily, and a government that is increasingly out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans. The language is simple, direct, and clear.
That list of national problems sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I know there are a lot of complaints about “zombie Reaganism,” but vast chunks of that speech could be given today, verbatim, because America’s problems under Joe Biden aren’t all that different from the ones under Gerald Ford — or, for that matter, Jimmy Carter: “Government at all levels now absorbs more than 44 percent of our personal income. It has become more intrusive, more coercive, more meddlesome and less effective.” “The root of these problems lies right here—in Washington, D.C. Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a “buddy” system that functions for its own benefit—increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes.”
Reagan made the best case he could make to anyone who would listen; he didn’t get caught up in some idea of being in some designated “lane” and appealing to one slice of the party. You’re running to be president of the United States, not just the president of the GOP or one faction of it.
Back in 2016, a bit more than 14 million Republicans voted for Donald Trump in the primary. More than 17.1 million Republicans voted for somebody else, but those votes were spread across 16 other options. DeSantis has the potential for broad appeal, but the first step is to actually attempt to appeal to a broad swath of voters across the center and right side of the political spectrum.