On the menu today: I’m not interested in discussing whether you think Ron DeSantis is charismatic or not. What I want to discuss is how seemingly overnight, so many people decided that the single most important measuring stick of DeSantis as a presidential candidate is whether he’s surpassing some nebulous and subjective “charisma threshold” and how he works rope lines, as opposed to any of the dozens of other measurements of a campaign that are quantifiable. Does charisma matter? Of course. But I can’t help but notice that a lot, if not quite all, of the people who are most eager to tell you about DeSantis’s allegedly crippling lack of charisma were never going to vote for him in the first place.
It Doesn’t Matter That Much How DeSantis Works a Rope Line
As the 2024 presidential cycle was taking shape, a handful of influential voices in the news media concluded that the key weakness of Ron DeSantis — and thus, the single most important measuring stick of the Florida governor for the duration of his presidential campaign — is that he has an allegedly glaring charisma deficit.
Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic magazine, November 30, 2022: “Just Wait Until You Get to Know Ron DeSantis. People who haven’t met him think he’s a hot commodity. People who have met him aren’t so sure.”
Jonathan Martin, Politico, January 17, 2023: “The GOP’s great hope to defeat Trump is hot on Fox but cold on the stump and in the VIP line.”
Michael Bender, the New York Times, March 10, 2023: “[DeSantis’] preference for policy over personality can make him seem awkward and arrogant or otherwise astonishing in person, depending on the voter and the success or failure of his one-on-one exchanges.”
Paul Waldman, the Washington Post, March 14, 2023: “DeSantis is so lacking in charisma that winning the presidency would be exceedingly difficult.”
There have even been some who have tried to argue that DeSantis is simultaneously “devoid of charisma” and that he heads up an “authoritarian personality cult.” I’m fairly certain that a personality is a prerequisite for a cult of personality; it’s right there in the name. Contradictory arguments such as these make it seem as if someone is cooking spaghetti, throwing it all against a wall, and seeing what sticks.
For a lot of people in the mainstream media, a charisma deficit is the perfect candidate weakness to argue about because it is subjective and difficult to measure with any precision. For almost everything else a campaign and its staff do or attempt, there are numbers we can measure: What’s their level of support in the polls? How much money did they raise? How many donors do they have? How many campaign stops did the candidate make? Roughly how many people showed up? How much are they spending to air that campaign ad? How big is the television market? How many campaign offices, staffers, and volunteers do they have? How many doors have they knocked on? How many phone calls and texts have they made?
But a candidate’s charisma? That can’t be quantified or precisely measured. You can watch how the candidate does when interacting with groups and argue whether the attendees were enthralled or merely pleased. (I notice that more than a thousand people came to see DeSantis at a breakfast stop last week in Bluffton, S.C.) You can sit around and debate how he looks in photos, as Slate and Matt Lewis did. But you can’t go out and prove, through data, that a candidate was 12 percent more charismatic on Wednesday than he was on Monday.
And when DeSantis did a campaign stop in Iowa this past weekend, almost everything was covered through the lens of, “Is he being charismatic enough?”
Politico: “DeSantis — who has faced quite a bit of criticism for his aloofness — is out here doing retail politics, and he seems to be improving at it. ‘That’s an oldie but a goodie,’ DeSantis says as he signs a bumper sticker from his 2018 gubernatorial campaign.”
Bloomberg: “DeSantis, faced with pressure to improve his retail politics, worked crowds at U.S. Senator Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride on Saturday — he stopped for ice cream with his children at a stand his super PAC set up in the parking lot at the Des Moines event, signed the side of his team’s touring bus and posed for pictures.”
The Financial Times: “DeSantis is also trying to convey a more human side to his candidacy. Critics have accused him of being too socially awkward and not investing enough in the ‘shaking hands and kissing babies’ side of retail politics that voters in early primary states crave.”
If DeSantis were the boring black hole of personality that these columnists describe, you’d figure that at some point it might have impeded his rise to where he is now. Apparently, he’s the kind of uncharismatic guy who becomes captain of the Yale baseball team, advances through the ranks to lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, marries the attractive local-news anchor, and wins a seven-way GOP House primary in a rout. This alleged charisma deficit hasn’t stopped DeSantis from rising to the Florida governor’s mansion, winning reelection by 20 points, and starting in second place in the GOP presidential primary.
Does DeSantis strike some people as boring or stiff? Sure. Does DeSantis strike lots of people as boring or stiff enough to impede them from supporting him or voting for him? So far, no.
It feels fair to ask whether certain media voices are using “He lacks charisma” as a synonym for, “He doesn’t appeal to me, a person who has disliked him and opposed him from the first moment I heard of him.” A lot, if not quite all, of the people who are most eager to tell you about DeSantis’s crippling lack of charisma were never going to vote for him in the first place. Last November, just days after the election, David Faris of Slate wrote,
Florida’s governor is a mediocre debater who sports an empty-storefront stare while speaking and a penchant for getting publicly owned by his opponents. When hit with a particularly sharp jab, he tends to look like someone who has just felt the ominous first pangs of the stomach flu and knows he only has minutes left.
And yet, somehow, DeSantis stomped his way to a second term, winning by the largest margin in Florida in four decades, earning about a half-million more votes than any other gubernatorial candidate in the state had ever won.
When you’re the runner-up in the Republican presidential primary the way DeSantis currently is, just about everybody else in the political world is rooting against you. The Democrats are rooting against DeSantis and largely would prefer to face Trump. The former president obviously loathes DeSantis and trashes him at every opportunity. And everybody from Nikki Haley to Asa Hutchinson sees DeSantis as an obstacle to where they want to be — the last remaining non-Trump option in the GOP field, as our Jeff Blehar lays out.
This means there is an enormous appetite for any article, narrative, or coverage that decrees, “DeSantis sucks.”
Lord knows the man isn’t perfect and has his flaws. But there’s a reason DeSantis has risen to where he is. He became the face of opposition to sweeping lockdowns during the pandemic, and looks largely vindicated by that stance. He racked up a long list of policy victories that are indisputably conservative.
And just which political figure constitutes the baseline for charisma?
President Biden is both a consummate back-slapper who indisputably loves talking to people and an unpredictable buffoon capable of boasting that he has a higher IQ than the questioner or suddenly blurting out “You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier,” “You’re a damn liar,” or “You’re full of s***.” The 1988 version of Biden was derailed by this, but the 2020 version was not. But Biden’s endless long-winded braggadocio was insufferable enough that one time, one of Biden’s Senate colleagues, enduring another meandering monologue, passed another senator a note saying, “SHOOT ME NOW.” But Barack Obama got over it and selected Biden as his running mate.
I’m told that former president Donald Trump is charismatic. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie sings of Trump’s “soft edges” and how the former president is “funny, he has stage presence, and he has a kind of natural charisma.” Jen Psaki warns of Trump’s “evil charisma,” and Ed Kilgore warns of his “sinister charisma.” That said, the former president does have his critics; Donald Trump Jr. recently said, “Trump has the charisma of a mortician and the energy that makes Jeb Bush look like an Olympian.” (Clearly, he meant DeSantis.)
Perhaps it is more useful to ask whether DeSantis can be perceived as sufficiently charismatic compared to his rivals, rather than whether he is charismatic in and of himself.
The other version of the charisma argument is whether DeSantis is good at “retail politics,” the brief personal face-to-face interactions during a stop at a restaurant or rally. One problem with this argument is that the higher you go in politics, the less retail campaigning matters.
Every cycle, there’s at least one candidate who bets their campaign on the idea of retail campaigning, and naively believes that they can shake enough hands in enough diners to win the Iowa caucus or New Hampshire primary. It never works out. (Back in 2007, then-Connecticut senator and presidential candidate Chris Dodd moved to Iowa, and it didn’t do a darn bit of good.)
Even if a candidate is really good at retail politics, he can’t scale that advantage. The candidate’s time and energy is finite, and he can only make so many appearances in one day. Even in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, which see candidates visiting all the time, caucus-goers and primary voters are never going to meet most of the candidates and have a personal interaction with them. By the time a “Super Tuesday” rolls around, the candidate can’t shake hands with people at restaurants in four states simultaneously.
No, most primary voters learn about candidates by watching them or hearing them through mass media and the Internet. Which would you rather have: a candidate who wows people when shaking hands in diners in Des Moines, or a candidate who shines as the best candidate in a nationally televised primary debate with perhaps 20 million people watching?
The final version of the charisma argument is that somehow DeSantis is failing to, or is going to fail to, charm donors. You can find deep-pocketed GOP donors who have come away underwhelmed by DeSantis. Billionaire John Catsimatidis recently complained that DeSantis didn’t even return his phone call. (I suspect those with a ten-figure net worth are used to being treated extremely well, moving through the world in a constant bubble of obsequiousness.)
But DeSantis was a record-breaking fundraiser as governor, he’s sitting on a campaign war chest of $110 million as of late April, and his campaign raised more than $8 million on its first day. Does this look like a campaign that will be derailed by a lack of money?
Isn’t that an indicator that a whole lot of Republicans are watching DeSantis and concluding, “Eh, he’s charismatic enough”?
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it this weekend, the New York Times did a long piece on Biden’s age, and noted that the presidential staff schedules most of his public appearances between noon and 4 p.m., and leaves him alone on weekends as much as possible. We effectively have a part-time president, a conclusion that is enraging the Biden fanbase on social media — who insist that when we don’t see Biden outside of those hours, it’s because he’s so sharp, on top of every breaking issue, and bursting at the seams with mental and physical energy. Apparently, this world has plenty of Democrats who choose to believe Biden is living out a real-world version of the hilarious Saturday Night Live “Reagan the Mastermind” sketch.