Why Culture Warriors Never Get To Be President
By turning extremist rhetoric into policy so he can run as the hard-ass from Hell, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have succeeded in destroying his political career
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We always knew, as fellow Substacker Michael Cohen put it a year ago, that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential ambitions faced a serious stumbling block: he is “a smug and charmless jerk — and smug and charmless jerks who struggle to cover up the fact that they are smug and charmless jerks don’t usually get elected president.”
But a blockbuster story in Politico this morning adds a new twist to the DeSantis campaign death watch: apparently, he is rapidly losing allies in his own state. As Gary Fineout and Kimberly Leonard write,
College boards, stacked with DeSantis appointees, are rejecting job candidates with ties to the governor.
The chair of the Republican Party of Florida urged executive committee members to attend all GOP candidate events — giving cover to party faithful who want to attend a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump.
And the board that oversees many of Florida’s affordable housing programs this month placed on leave its executive director, who was helped into the job by a top DeSantis adviser.
Think about it: top Republican leaders are creating air between themselves and a governor who, less than a year ago (a midterm election which, you might recall, went poorly for the GOP) was so popular that he smashed his Democratic centrist opponent Charlie Crist with almost 60% of the vote.
It’s a stunning turnaround. DeSantis’s reactionary bills have, among other things, torn apart the state’s public education system, and the Republican-dominated legislature has had enough. “State Rep. Daniel Perez, the Miami Republican in line to become the next state House speaker, urged his GOP colleagues this week to move more carefully in the future,” Fineout and Leonard report.
Is popular sentiment in Florida turning fast against a party that, only a year ago, seemed to have a firm lock on a formerly blue state? It could be. But let’s be real. Targeting LGBTQ children, demanding and signing a six-week abortion bill even after it became clear that the issue was a loser for the GOP, and slandering all education about the nation’s racial history as racist do not seem to be issues for the Republicans who are quiet quitting their state party leader. However, DeSantis’s assumption that the legislature lives to serve him has earned him enemies who see his falling poll numbers as an opportunity to push back. One anonymous Tallahassee lobbyist told Politico, “There’s no love lost between the Legislature and DeSantis. ... They are faking it. They are waiting long enough to see the king drained of all his power. It’s a slow-motion coup.”
Interesting that this person should use the word “coup”—it’s as if the GOP were a totalitarian organization or something. Fineout and Leonard report that most members of his party are still afraid of DeSantis, but a thorough drubbing by Trump in Iowa and South Carolina could put some starch in their spines. Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell, who represents Tampa, predicts that, barring an unlikely resurgence, DeSantis will emerge from his broken presidential campaign as a lame ducky.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Yet, all of this raises an important question: is it possible to ride a culture wars agenda to the White House? History says no. The candidacies of televangelist Pat Robertson, who challenged Vice President George H.W. Bush on a Christian values platform, and populist Patrick J. Buchanan’s “pitchfork” campaign against Bush in 1992, both reshaped national politics, but neither one came close to winning. Of course, neither candidate had the media infrastructure that we have today to get their stories out to right-wing voters, something that may have inflated DeSantis’s candidacy far beyond his capacity to win a national election. And even though they laid the groundwork for Trump, neither Robertson or Buchanan had to run a campaign in a party that had become slavishly devoted to an unprincipled, incoherent reality TV star.
But the Robertson and Buchanan campaigns demonstrate a similar trajectory we should take a hard look at as we evaluate DeSantis’s failure to launch. Each had unexpected success in early primary states as they shocked the Republican system by how far to the right they were willing to go, and the contrarian things they were willing to say. Those monir successes were followed by a swift collapse in both fundraising capacity and voter interest as the primary system barreled towards states that had large numbers of convention delegates. Robertson came in a surprising second to Kansas Senator Bob Dole in the 1988 Iowa caucuses, and won the Washington State caucuses on Super Tuesday. But he only seemed able to win caucuses, not elections He failed to dislodge Bush in any other Super Tuesday contest, despite spending $3.1 million. Four years later, Buchanan did not win any primaries. After coming in a surprising second in New Hampshire, calls for Buchanan to drop out escalated when he was plastered in the March Super Tuesday contests.
The timelines for presidentials are, of course, much longer now, which may have made the DeSantis campaign, which was well-funded and had strong name recognition, seem more plausible than it was. In fact, the 2024 Republican nominating contest began almost as soon as they started cleaning up the broken glass in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And DeSantis, who had to run for re-election as governor in 2022, spent almost two years teasing the campaign; for example, he refused to speak when, in the only debate before Florida’s election day, Charlie Crist asked if he planned to serve a complete second term.
DeSantis plastered Crist, but in retrospect, that outcome may have been over-read as DeSantis actually being popular in what had, until quite recently, been a blue state. Despite Florida’s high mortality rate duringthe pandemic (the state is ninth in deaths per 100,000 souls), DeSantis’s early reversal on quarantining, masking, school closures, and mandatory vaccinations brought migrants to the state between 2020 and 2022 who wanted to live that way, despite the risks, and a semblance of normal life that did not exist elsewhere.
As importantly, the Florida Democratic party knew they were running a losing candidate in 2022. Elected governor as a Republican in 2010, Crist became an independent after losing a statewide Senate primary to Marco Rubio in 2010 in a failed attempt to win the seat anyway. In 2012, he endorsed Barack Obama and became a Democrat. A further problem was Crist’s age: compared to the young, vigorous DeSantis, Crist was 65 in 2022 (and frankly, looked a lot older.) But from the beginning of the campaign, it was clear that party demographics had shifted: there were simply more Republicans in the state than Democrats, and that would have been decisive in the end anyway.
And of course, in the governor’s race, DeSantis didn’t have to run against the Other Florida Guy, who was busy licking his wounds, hiding classified documents, and responding to subpoenas at Mar-A-Lago.
The Florida story is only the latest piece of evidence that DeSantis is doomed. There are many theories about why he not only can’t compete with Donald Trump in the race for the 2024 nomination, but is also losing supporters to former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (currently running second to Trump in Iowa), tech fascist Vivek Ramaswamy, and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Slipping support in New Hampshire has been ascribed to the Trump indictments, which have caused MAGA Republicans to rally around their Trumpster Fire. Also, prospective DeSantis voters who then actually meet him decide they would as soon vote for a fire hydrant. A second theory is that DeSantis’s strategy of attacking Trump and defending him against prosecution makes him incoherent.
But I have two other theories that don’t focus so tightly on DeSantis’s shortcomings.
The first is that the slow creep towards the more moderate Haley and Christie candidacies suggests an emerging group of Republican primary voters that are tired of the circus-like, policy-free atmosphere that the GOP has cultivated since Trump was elected in 2016. It won’t be enough, but DeSantis is just trouble they have already seen in a different package. We know that even Trump has lost strength among independents—so why would DeSantis pick up those voters? I would suggest that any combination of a Haley-Christie ticket could do better in 2024 than either a Trump or a DeSantis candidacy in which either man chose Jesus H. Christ himself as a running mate.
But the second is that conservative politicians who are not extremists may go along with culture wars rhetoric, they may find that such policies express their values, but only as long as it benefits them. Making that rhetoric into reality has put a small minority of citizens in charge of the majority, and it hasn’t been pretty. Book bans, turning a great liberal arts college into a baseball school, stigmatizing queer and trans children, sending undocumented immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard at Florida taxpayers’ expense, slandering a major corporation for welcoming the children of gay and lesbian parents to their theme park, removing duly elected local officials, and stripping libraries and schools of classic literature and curriculum are policies that have made Florida toxic. And they make the state and local politicians who vote for, and implement, these policies vulnerable to a wholesale political reordering of the state should Democrats ever get themselves together to fight back effectively.
Back to the independent voters, who represent what amounts to a third party: they are unlikely to welcome government takeovers of their public schools, state medical boards, and libraries. Fifty percent of independents have an unfavorable view of the Florida governor (35% a very unfavorable view), and only 10% have a very favorable view. The best number is this one: 23% of independents don’t think about DeSantis at all.
There’s another wrinkle, which is that this lack of enthusiasm will hurt DeSantis badly in the early primary contests that determine momentum and commitments from big donors. Why? Because there are a number of early primary states where independents are allowed to vote, and they are a clear weathervane of DeSantis’s prospects. In Iowa, independents can’t vote, but they can register on the as late as the day of the caucuses if they wish to; undeclared New Hampshire voters can vote in either presidential primary; and the delegate-rich South Carolina and Alabama primaries (February 24 and March 2) are wide-open.
Conclusion? DeSantis’s hardline policies have made him a polarizing figure and a danger to those who are implicated in turning his culture war into actual policies. Which is why you can reshape a party with a culture war—but a culture warrior can’t be president.
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What I’m Reading:
I’ve been eying it in hardback for months, but Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022) is out in paper, and it is breathtaking. It’s about the family legacy of Junius Booth, a legendary Shakespearean actor: his second to youngest son was John Wilkes Booth, a lesser actor and the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Along the way, it explores the middle ground of slavery in Maryland, where the Booth family lived—and leased enslaved people. Hard recommend.
Short takes:
Yes, the Senate is still arguing about clothes. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) is circulating a resolution to restore the dress code that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) just ditched. “One person familiar with the resolution said it would essentially return the Senate dress code to what it was last week, which required senators to wear coats and ties or business attire when on the Senate floor,” writes Alexander Bolton at The Hill. “Schumer’s decision appeared aimed at catering to first-term Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), whose hoodie was a signature look on the campaign trail in 2022 and who wore a dark short-sleeved collared shirt and dark shorts to work Thursday.” The good news? It’s bipartisan, so maybe these guys could get together on something else, like child poverty or voting on those military promotions held hostage over abortion. (September 21, 2023)
Pulitzer-prize-winning investigative and political reporter Lucy Morgan at 82. In addition to her work uncovering corruption in Florida (a truly Sisyphean task), she ran the Tallahassee bureau for the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) for several decades. “The subjects of Morgan’s stories would tail her car, tap her phone, even flash firearms to try to throw her off track,” Morgan’s colleague, Jay Cridlin, writes. “But those who feared her pen also respected her. After winning that Pulitzer for investigating Pasco’s sheriff, leading voters to push him out of office, the Florida Sheriffs Association asked her to speak to a group of new sheriffs about how they ought to do their jobs.” (September 21, 2023)
And the beat goes on…New Hampshire Democrat Hal Rafter just won a special election in a swing district, putting his party within one seat of flipping the legislature to blue. And that’s with three special elections yet to come! Democrats will defend a safely blue seat on November 7 (which would tie the legislature) and another at a time yet to be scheduled. And there is a third, Republican, seat to try for because, as Jeff Singer writes for the Daily Kos, “in New Hampshire, nothing is impossible. Both, as it happens, are in Coos County in the state's far north: Hatch's 6th District voted 55-43 for Biden and 58-41 for Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan last year, while Merner's 1st District went for Donald Trump 53-45 and also favored far-right Republican Don Bolduc 50-46 in his challenge to Hassan.” (September 19, 2023)
Petard. Hoist here.
Don’t you consider Trump to be a culture warrior?