What Ron DeSantis thinks he needs to do to win
What Ron DeSantis thinks he needs to do to win
He’s eager to portray himself as the most right-wing major-party candidate ever to seek the presidency
If you want to get a sense of the state of the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination here in the summer of 2023, just take a glance at the Real Clear Politics polling aggregation as represented by a line graph:
Going back a year into the past, the overall dynamic is unchanged: Former president Donald Trump leads by a lot (currently sitting at 53 percent); Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a solid second (at around 21 percent); with everyone else (just a few last summer; eight candidates now) coasting along far behind, all in the single digits, and all except former Vice President Mike Pence below 5 percent. The only two significant changes in that entire time came last winter, when the nascent DeSantis campaign closed the gap with Trump by ten points or so, and the reversion to the status quo ante at the end of March, when Trump was indicted in New York City, giving him an extra ten points of support and removing about as much from DeSantis. That’s when a roughly 15-point Trump lead became something more like the 32-point one today.
There’s a lot that could be said about this configuration of candidates, but the one that really stops me in my tracks is the realization that fully 75 percent of Republican voters support Trump, DeSantis, or the novelty candidacy of Trump mini-me Vivek Ramaswamy, leaving just 25 percent of the party interested in entertaining more “normal” (less populist) blends of the pre-Trump and post-Trump GOP.
To state the obvious, this means that roughly three quarters of one of America’s two major parties either wants to support the guy who courted the far right in his previous campaigns and policy agenda, who is currently under federal and state indictment, and who attempted a self-coup the last time he was president; or prefers an alternative who is consistently working to position himself even further out on the right.
The Right(’s) Man
The latter option is especially noteworthy. Rather than honing a message of competence (I will be a more effective Trump), DeSantis apparently believes the way to win his party’s support is to portray Trump as a cuck and a squish.
Trump was Anthony Fauci’s lapdog on lockdowns, but I stood up against public-health bureaucrats during the pandemic.
Trump believes in vaccines, but I know they don’t work and are dangerous.
Trump is unreliable on abortion, but I’m eager to ban it.
Trump left the administrative state in place during his presidency, but I will shutter the Departments of Education, Commerce, and Energy, and the Internal Revenue Service.
Trump bows down before and advances the aims of the LGBTQ activists, but I view them as a grave threat and will take them on and take them down like the ancient Greek hero Achilles played by Brad Pitt in the movie Troy, the bloodthirsty serial killer played by Christian Bale in the movie American Psycho, and an oiled-up bodybuilder resembling Conan the Barbarian.
The last of these points of contrast comes from the meme-filled video ad DeSantis’ rapid-response team shared a week ago. As many have noted, the video may be the most explicitly homophobic ad ever released by a presidential campaign—but it combines that rabid fear and hatred of LGBTQ Americans with equally explicit homoerotic imagery focused on DeSantis himself.
There is an obvious thematic and tonal overlap between the DeSantis campaign and the online culture of irreverent, masculinist antiliberalism that appears to appeal to a small but passionately committed subculture of young men. DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ video is no doubt as much fun for the members of this subculture as Trump rallies are for middle-aged Fox News viewers in the Midwest.
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