Glad to see something akin to my theory of the rise and fall of DeSantis is gaining traction.
His covid policy was very popular. Even his early forays into culture war stuff in 2022 (15 week abortion ban, ban on lessons about gender in K-3) worked out well for him because he successfully baited prominent liberals in politics and media into seething with rage at him for things where 60%+ of Americans agree with his position. He was also projecting general competence, such as that insanely fast repair of the causeway to that island after the hurricane. Combine all that with running against a corpse and no surprise he won in a historic landslide. Even against a non-corpse I suspect he would have been well into double digit margin of victory.
But now he's extended the gender/sexuality ban all the way thru high school, passed a 6 week abortion ban, and has people like Nate Hochman and Pedro Gonzalez as campaign surrogates. He's shifted from being anti-lockdown to outright anti-vax. And yesterday a campaign staffer retweeted a video of DeSantis with a Sonnenrad and goosestepping troops (supposedly a fan video, but I suspect Hochman made it, and there's some weak circumstantial evidence pointing to this). This flameout is impressive.
I have a theory that (1) his landslide reelection got to his head, and (2) for some reason he thinks the culture war stupidity is the root of his (now former?) popularity, which it very much is not. I promise you he did not win half the vote in Miami city proper because those folks think protecting gays from terrorist attacks is bad.
I was a huge DeSantis-for-prez booster all the way from his 2018 gov win up until around January this year. Sometimes I kick myself hard for it. But I also have to remind myself 2018-2022 DeSantis is very different from this new 2023 DeSantis.
I think that video is a perfect example of how Republican candidates are actually suffering from the same problem that many Democratic candidates are suffering from: Their volunteer and staffer base are terminally online. Trying to make a video to appeal to the 4chan crowd and using explicit Nazi symbolism in 2023 is absolutely inexcusable. The fact that the video was created in the first place and whoever in the campaign made it wasn't immediately fired/disavowed shows that they have lost all touch with reality.
I do not discount the "staffers are terminally online" argument. But, when I look at my divorced parents, who are older Boomers (i.e., a very desirable voting bloc), one is a politically disengaged ex-hippie moderate liberal and the other is a terminally online right-wing libertarian ex-hippie. Yet both are equally aware of and concerned about the bat shit crazy stuff that shows up in chain emails, spam texts, Twitter and the bowels of Facebook comments. I would not be surprised if there was an internal logic to political campaigns that see this over-exposure to very-only culture in focus groups and conclude that being too online is an effective and necessary way to reach Boomers.
That is definitely a problem on both sides, but given the very strong Democratic lean of young people, it's likely worse on the Republican side. Campaigns are often staffed by rather young people, and to be a young, politically engaged Republican already makes you very out of step with most people your age. Add the "too online" factor to it, and you have a recipe for an increasing number of crypto-fascists (and fascists who like crypto) finding jobs working for Republican campaigns.
DeSantis can't make the anti-Trump argument related to Trump's anti-democratic tendencies in some part because DeSantis probably has a lot of campaign staff whose criticism of Trump on that front would be that Trump wasn't anti-democratic enough.
My initial assumption was that surely he must have quietly fought the legislature every step of the way on the 6-week abortion ban before feeling compelled to sign it.
That assumption seems to have a high likelihood of being wrong.
It turns out that DeSantis is pretty much a bog-standard member of the most ideologically rigid wing of a Young Republicans' Club at a middling university and can't hide it for any length of time when not leashed by slim majorities.
It's like Romney or Nixon, who both signed a bunch of things passed by veto-proof majorities by Democratic legislatures (Congress for Nixon, MassLeg for Romney) and yet Romney has a moderate reputation that Nixon doesn't - because people do understand that being forced to be moderate doesn't mean that you actually are (but also, you could be).
Which is amusing because Nixon was genuinely an economic moderate with an everyman background and cared more about the working and middle classes than almost anyone who followed except maybe Biden.
He'd have acted as a brake on a GOP majority in Congress had he had one, whereas Romney would have steamed ahead at full speed.
Yeah, Romney being an institutionalist makes people think he's more moderate on policy than he really is, and Nixon being anti-institutionalist makes people think his policy positions were less moderate than they really were.
Also, he had a foreign policy that was hawkish on a day-to-day news-generating level (bombing Cambodia, etc), but was doveish (opening to China, negotiating a deal with Vietnam) on the big long-lasting decisions, which again is going to generate a right-wing/hawkish reputation with rather less reality than appearance.
The other thing that just occurred to me is that your second paragraph is a very good summary, mirrored on the center-left, of Josh Shapiro.
He won by a landslide in a swing state (admittedly against a terrible opponent but no one will remember that in a decade), the I-95 debacle left him looking damned good, he bucks the party line on offering funds for students in wildly underperforming districts to go to private school, he's strongly committed to public safety, he's trying to work across the aisle to get support for the first minimum wage bill in forever, he and his predecessor have made a lot of state government functions work better (Pennie, our insurance exchange, is excellent, and our DMVs are getting better), he pays attention to rural issues...
And unlike DeSantis, if the Democrats somehow snag a state Senate majority before he leaves office, I don't think he's going to overreach wildly.
It seems like you are a native FL or at least more familiar than I am. I'm wondering how much changing demographics of FL is a big part of the story here.
What I mean is, we can debate endlessly about how "good" DeSantis COVID policy was, but I think there is pretty strong agreement that FL remaining "open" during 2020 and early 2021 was very good for him politically. But (and I'm not the first person to suggest this), it seems very possible to me that given the national attention FL got for his COVID positions, the new arrivals who flooded the state in 2020 and 2021 were disproportionately conservative in their political bent. Obviously, FL has been a destination to move to for decades due to weather. But post 2020 it seems very likely there was more of a political bent to in-migration.
Point being, given GOP performance of all their candidates in 2022, not just RDS; it seems like GOP is benefitting from having a much more right wing electorate than even existed 5-10 years ago. Which means pushing more conservative policies may not be as off putting the median FL voter as it may have been just a few years ago. However, media narrative has not caught up to the change in FL demographics (probably still thought of as the ultimate 50/50 state given 2000 and heck Obama won it twice not THAT long ago) so it helped fuel this idea that RDS was this generational talent and put his finger on the pulse of average Americans.
Again, sort of a hypothesis. Love to know if there is any polling or research that backs this up (or debunks).
I think this is a good point. I’m not an expert, so this is, just, like, my opinion, man, but I agree that FL raced rightward due to the influx of conservatives looking for nice weather and lax COVID policies while they telecommute. So, disproportionately conservative retirees and also conservative college educated people with sufficient career clout to be able to say “I work from home or I will GTFO.” The kind of people who could afford to go to Washington for January 6. Reliable voters.
Yep, easy to forget with his antics the past 6 months that he won majority Puerto Rican counties, he won Miami and Palm Beach counties, and even in Miami city proper he either narrowly won or narrowly lost (forget which, but I think he had either 48 or 52 percent of the vote there). This was not a partisan hack coalition.
Hurricane Ian was actually great for DeSantis--I remember watching coverage during the emergency (somehow my electricity never went out for more than 10 seconds)--he actually sounded pretty good, like a serious leader, speaking to the press during and in the aftermath of the storm. Usually he has this whiny, somewhat nasal tone to his voice, which he managed to avoid during the hurricane emergency. (I guess he could only hold that pose for so long, though, once he hit the campaign trail the whiny sound was back.) Also, I think he benefitted from the fact that the hurricane gave him the chance to show his skills in terms of managing the cleanup, which impressed people who may have been less thrilled with the culture wars stuff.
Yeah, I definitely don't think new arrivals being more conservative can fully explain a 20% blowout victory. As you as say, the numbers don't add up for it to be entirely that. But I do think it's at least a contributing factor. Also, again maybe contributes to a more muted backlash to his right wing culture war shenanigans.
Of course there is the other banal reason there has been less of a backlash so far. Prior to 2022 RDS wasn't running for President. So he was a well known figure for political nerds like us and also meant political nerds like us were debating on this Substack about his latest education policy moves. But to median voters? Good chance they didn't hear much about this, but did know a family member or friend who is a teacher getting a pay raise. But that given his higher profile now, a lot of those same Democratic voters or soft supporters who voted for him in 2022 may be regretting their vote.
I've never lived in Florida. Just have paid close attention to DeSantis because I was a big fan of his until late 2022-early 2023 when he became increasingly brain poisoned by culture war nonsense.
I do think COVID era migration played a role in the margin of his reelection victory. But I think he probably would have hit a double digit margin regardless.
I think that is a really smart critique. I agree with all of it. I think I’d just piggy back off of it and Matt’s analysis by adding a few things:
1) I think DeSantis’ hard right positioning conveniently aligns with his true policy priors (mostly), and I think he thinks pandering to Republican primary voters will help him, though it clearly hasn’t loosened Trump’s iron grip on the party. Which means DeSantis has to find a different tack (perhaps just going after the president more aggressively). That may be doomed too, but apparently so is any other strategy. Unless he wants to coast so he doesn’t alienate too many voters for another possible run in the future, I think he should take Trump head on like Christie.
2) I think voters really rewarded him most for his Covid stance, and I think it was mostly due to smarts rather than luck. His studying and early recognition that politicians have to consider many factors, including economic and mental health and not just public health concerns, and his studiousness about the virus and whether opening up early would be catastrophic, took a lot of balls and was genuinely impressive. He went too far with banning localities from instituting mask mandates of their own and banning cruise lines from doing the same (so much for small government conservatism), but when he was at his best he was opening up schools and businesses in phases of reasonable time periods, promoting the vaccine (especially for seniors), and protecting seniors particularly during the worst of the pandemic.
3) Like you said, he ran against a weak candidate--in my view not so much that it was Charlie Crist’s weakness but because the Democratic Party of Florida is awful (has made some good gains in recent elections, though). I think it was something like 14% of Dem voters who voted in 2018 stayed home in 2022--a total collapse. Say DeSantis wins over 3-4% of Dems out of that 14% and Crist wins the rest--you’re then talking about DeSantis winning by 8-9% rather than just over 19%. A solid victory to be sure, but much more in line with pre-election polling, for example. I think the Democratic collapse is very much under discussed in the narrative about DeSantis’ landslide win.
4) DeSantis has been very skilled at wedge cultural issues. A case in point that I think initially won him some points but has now become a bit of a dud is the Disney quarrel. His ban on gender instruction through the third grade, which like you say something like 60% of America or more supports and wasn’t even going on in Florida anyway, was a way to set up a narrative about the Left and frame anyone who opposed it as woke. I remember National Review’s Rich Lowry, in an interview when asked about DeSantis’ feud with Disney, responding to the question with something like, “You mean you don’t oppose gender identity being taught to kids K-3?” He should know better. Unless he was disingenuously trying to defend DeSantis’ narrative, which seems possible but unfortunate. It’s now become an issue where DeSantis can’t proclaim a big victory like he wanted to because Disney has the money to fight back. It’s a sad reflection of the current GOP that it doesn’t have the balls to govern in a way other than saying “no,” and despite all the Democrats’ faults, at least they have taken some substantial political costs to make their constituents’ lives and even Republicans’ lives better (see 2010 midterms and Obamacare).
I’ve said on my blog that I want to like Ron DeSantis. I think he is clearly intelligent and has some honorable character traits that I wish he would channel more and be willing to sacrifice some of his ambition in favor of more principled political behavior. But the fact that he doesn’t and is a serial divider is enough for me to root hard against him, and if he does crash and burn in this presidential race, he will have deserved to lose.
I think that is a really smart critique. I agree with all of it. I think I’d just piggy back off of it and Matt’s analysis by adding a few things:
1) I think DeSantis’ hard right positioning conveniently aligns with his true policy priors (mostly), and I think he thinks pandering to Republican primary voters will help him, though it clearly hasn’t loosened Trump’s iron grip on the party. Which means DeSantis has to find a different tack (perhaps just going after the president more aggressively). That may be doomed too, but apparently so is any other strategy. Unless he wants to coast so he doesn’t alienate too many voters for another possible run in the future, I think he should take Trump head on like Christie.
2) I think voters really rewarded him most for his Covid stance, and I think it was mostly due to smarts rather than luck. His studying and early recognition that politicians have to consider many factors, including economic and mental health and not just public health concerns, and his studiousness about the virus and whether opening up early would be catastrophic, took a lot of balls and was genuinely impressive. He went too far with banning localities from instituting mask mandates of their own and banning cruise lines from doing the same (so much for small government conservatism), but when he was at his best he was opening up schools and businesses in phases of reasonable time periods, promoting the vaccine (especially for seniors), and protecting seniors particularly during the worst of the pandemic.
3) Like you said, he ran against a weak candidate--in my view not so much that it was Charlie Crist’s weakness but because the Democratic Party of Florida is awful (has made some good gains in recent elections, though). I think it was something like 14% of Dem voters who voted in 2018 stayed home in 2022--a total collapse. Say DeSantis wins over 3-4% of Dems out of that 14% and Crist wins the rest--you’re then talking about DeSantis winning by 8-9% rather than just over 19%. A solid victory to be sure, but much more in line with pre-election polling, for example. I think the Democratic collapse is very much under discussed in the narrative about DeSantis’ landslide win.
4) DeSantis has been very skilled at wedge cultural issues. A case in point that I think initially won him some points but has now become a bit of a dud is the Disney quarrel. His ban on gender instruction through the third grade, which like you say something like 60% of America or more supports and wasn’t even going on in Florida anyway, was a way to set up a narrative about the Left and frame anyone who opposed it as woke. I remember National Review’s Rich Lowry, in an interview when asked about DeSantis’ feud with Disney, responding to the question with something like, “You mean you don’t oppose gender identity being taught to kids K-3?” He should know better. Unless he was disingenuously trying to defend DeSantis’ narrative, which seems possible but unfortunate. It’s now become an issue where DeSantis can’t proclaim a big victory like he wanted to because Disney has the money to fight back. It’s a sad reflection of the current GOP that it doesn’t have the balls to govern in a way other than saying “no,” and despite all the Democrats’ faults, at least they have taken some substantial political costs to make their constituents’ lives and even Republicans’ lives better (see 2010 midterms and Obamacare).
I’ve said on my blog that I want to like Ron DeSantis. I think he is clearly intelligent and has some honorable character traits that I wish he would channel more and be willing to sacrifice some of his ambition in favor of more principled political behavior. But the fact that he doesn’t and is a serial divider is enough for me to root hard against him, and if he does crash and burn in this presidential race, he will have deserved to lose.
I think the moment I heard about him signing the 6 week ban was when I wrote him off (correctly or incorrectly). It really did feel like he was throwing so much of what could have been smart strategy with that, though only time will tell.
The Bulwark refers to this as the "Actuarial Strategy".
My money says that unless something fundamentally changes inside the party's Triangle Of Doom (another Bulwark description of the triple-problem of GOP voters, pols, and media), they will keep backing Trump until he dies, and then some lucky coward will win the throne and get to spend the next 30 years pretending he never capitulated to Trump and otherwise rewriting history.
I mean, it's perfectly plausible that Trump gets the nomination and then manages to squeeze out a win next year and then the party's problem is "solved" because he's term limited out so they can can move on to the next candidate in 2028.
I think the truth is both more dramatic and more boring than that.
It’s more dramatic because Trump is the raptor who’s figured out the door handles. He will plow full speed ahead into corrupting as much of the government as possible, potentially causing a broader crisis that takes him out of the picture or making the question of future elections (ED: I meant to say "primaries" more specifically) moot - either because he’s gotten the GOP to go along with a minoritarian takeover, or the attempt backfired and Democrats will have a mandate resembling the Republicans’ postbellum one.
It’s more boring because the realities of Trump’s corruption aren’t actually as monomaniacally oriented towards a takeover as people fear. His primary goal is always graft, not dominance. He’ll reboot the milking of the Secret Service by overcharging them at his properties. He’ll reboot the corrupt weapons deals in the Middle East. He actually *WON’T* exclusively reward his most loyal flunkies, both because he delights in torturing them despite their loyalty, and because the crowd of semi-sane establishment types desperately begging to ensconce themselves in his administration so they can avert tragedies will tickle his black, narcissistic ego and give him new opportunities to humiliate his intraparty enemies. [Ed: The loyal flunkies will scheme that much harder, and the sane flunkies will beg that much harder.]
One of the problems with Trump prognosticating is that his only consistent through line is the corrupt personal enrichment, which become the only pattern that can be predicted. Ideologues like DeSantis are somewhat predictable (which I think is a good quality in an executive because it manifests as trust), but the core problem with Trump as President is his unpredictability, which Matt characterizes as his only somewhat fake heterodoxy.
You cannot downplay the authoritarian takeover because it is impossible to weight its likelihood. Flip a coin: Heads, he destroys the American government and the world descends into chaos while he steals everything that isn't nailed down and makes lewd comments about his daughter. Tails, he steals everything that isn't nailed down and makes lewd comments about his daughter, but is also so erratic and incompetent that his cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment.
". . . the realities of Trump’s corruption . . . His primary goal is always graft, not dominance."
I am very curious about the psychology of Trump derangement people and have a couple serious (and, I hope, fair) questions: (1) do you think Trump really engaged in "corruption" and "graft," or are those just shorthand words for "Orange Man Bad;" and (b) is anyone on your side concerned yet that Biden is documented as taking multimillion dollar foreign bribes?
Addendum: Because I know this is going to piss off LF ;-), I just want to add... This "vie for the throne" behavior is a natural outcome of the fact that our voting system is shot-through with zero-sum dynamics. It's not a mechanistic "this behavior is a direct result of this dynamic", but rather an interdependent co-arising (look it up).
The point is, from a philosophical standpoint, a throne is just as zero-sum as a presidential primary for leadership of an authoritarian movement. There can only be one authoritarian, only be one nominee, just like there can only be one king. The rules of succession may be different -- primogeniture vs. the VP's constitutional role vs. Trump's personality cult -- but the competition over it plays out in the same predictable manner.
Right now, Trump is a monarch with gout. Everyone knows he's dying, but not like tomorrow. First-episode Robert Baratheon, if you will. And thus, everyone who's got any designs on power doesn't give a shit about actually challenging the king, they want to set themselves up to inherit his kingdom directly. The pre-existing strength and legitimacy of the throne is where the easiest path to power is, not merely having strong enough armies (or voters) to seize it by brute force.
All of that is to say... I'm not saying RCV would fix *all of it*. That's impossible. It's an interdependently co-arising ("co-evolving", if you will) system, after all. But what I *am* saying is that mitigating the zero-sum aspects of our electoral system is a clear policy path towards fixing it. We've seen that elites hectoring other elites to play more golf together -- call it the "cultural approach" -- hasn't worked, because the incentives are too strong. Well, it's time to change the incentives! It probably would work too slowly to stop the worst from happening in this current cycle, let alone the next. But there's no time like the present to get started.
For me, the problem here is one that RCV wouldn't especially help with. The French have a RCV-like system and it polarises into Macron vs Le Pen.
Since it would need a constitutional amendment anyway, we have a relatively wide range of possible reforms to look at.
What would help is having a collectively elected body that can hire and fire Presidents. You can do that with a Parliamentary system (where that collectively elected body is also the legislature, ie let Congress pick the President, which turns Congressional elections into proxy-Presidential elections like pre-seventeenth-amendment state legislature elections sometimes were as proxy-Senate election), but you don't have to go fully parliamentary.
There already is a collective body that picks Presidents; the constitutional amendment required to make the Electoral College a real thing is pretty simple, just have them elected for a four-year term (the same inauguration date as Congress), have them receive the same salary as Congresspeople, have them meet in DC instead of in the states, give them the power to replace either President or VP at any time by simple majority, and give them something to do the rest of the time (I'd suggest giving them full subpoena power to investigate the executive, and give them authority over confirming executive-branch appointments so the President's appointments don't get blocked by an opposite-party Senate - this also frees up some floor time in the Senate for legislating).
If you require states to elect the College by a proportional voting system, then you can even get a true coalition presidency, the absence of which has been a major problem in countries with multi-party systems and an executive presidency (if a multi-party coalition elects a president, and the president breaks promises made to the minor parties, they have no enforcement mechanism).
1. We don't need a constitutional amendment for RCV.
2. We also don't need one for multi-member districts, which would help us get proportional results without strictly needing proportional formulas. It would probably end up looking like a lighter version of the gerrymandering we already have... which is what most MMD systems look like.
3. France doesn't have RCV in their presidential system, they have a runoff. Part of the problem with French politics is one of the same problems we have: different constituencies electing the president vs. the legislature. It creates different sources of legitimacy. A parliament is superior because the PM is elected by the same coalition that runs the legislature.
4. I've said this numerous times, but I'll reiterate that the only reason I keep bringing up RCV is that it's the strongest among many tools to create moderation in the system. I don't expect it to do all the work; it's just that it's the most popular reform and has the biggest head of steam, which means that it's the most viable vehicle for loosening up the two-party stranglehold and bringing further reforms. To paraphrase a military saying, you do electoral reform with the proposals the American people like, not the proposal you wish they liked.
5. I've toyed with the idea of putting more teeth on the Electoral College. It's fun to imagine, but not realistically worth much more than as a thought experiment. The nice thing is that the Constitution is actually quite silent on everything BUT the EC's "day-of" procedure, so it's entirely legal to tack on a bunch of fun events, like having an "Electoral Convention" where the Electors all meet up and bargain and stuff.
But again, I don't see how we get there in any meaningful time frame. If we ever did, it'd probably be as a mechanism for a multiparty system to help resolve some conflicts there. But first, we'd actually need a multiparty system... likely as a result of some sort of MMD+STV implementation.
1. For the Presidency, you do need a constitutional amendment; you could do something close via an interstate compact like the one to abolish the electoral college, but you can't get second preference data from states that decline to participate. You can use RCV for House/Senate elections, obviously.
2. MMD can be done proportionally or non-proportionally; non-proportional approaches are why they are banned by legislation, that should be amended to allow proportional MMD. But non-proportional MMD would be worse than the present system.
3. Runoffs and RCV are closely-related and very similar systems that get similar results. A parliamentary system definitely does require a constitutional amendment.
4. This bit, I agree with
5. This bit I agree with. RCV first, then MMD (which turns RCV into STV), then resolve the multi-party/presidency problem either by switching to a parliamentary system or by beefing up the Electoral College.
To be clear, I was only referring to the House/Senate and the states. And any state that enacts RCV can easily put its EC delegates towards the RCV winner as well.
I think you are underrating the possibility of a dynastic situation here. I suspect the chances are quite high Don Jr. runs for President one day. It's not like Americans have been especially against family dynasties (hello RFK Jr!).
The other possibility is that CPI inflation continues to go down and go down enough for Fed to start cutting interest rates (even if just one or two 25 bps rate cuts), Biden gets to run on a 1984 "morning in America" redux campaign and he wins decisively. A 1984 blowout is almost certainly not possible today given current political dynamics, but I think an 08 level/margin is possible if economic conditions are right and a loss that big for GOP (which would almost certainly lead to a few senate seats flipping and losing the House decisively) would finally lead the party to moving past Trump and Trumpism. The crappy part is, if the popular vote is like 0.5% to 1% more towards Biden in 2020 this dynamic probably happens. GA, PA and AZ are called much quicker. NC likely flips. And TX while still probably going for Trump, is close enough to not be called for at least a few days which would likely help GOP realize they are in real danger of losing TX.
Look this is a hope not expectation. I don't say this at all as some sort of formality or foregone scenario. After 2016 and 2020, no way I'm doing that. But the scenario I laid out is actually a real possibility.
Also, one more thing. Sort of a side point but maybe a good future MY post. How likely is it the 2020 election will ultimately be seen as a huge outlier that probably should guide future predictions? In fact, I think even to expand? How likely is it that in 20-25 years the conclusion will be to look at all aspects of society from 2020 to 2022 as an ultimate outlier event due to COVID; inflation driven by supply chain disruption, mass protests driven at least in part by being stuck inside for months, crime increase due to general disruption in society, education outcomes etc. In regards to 2020 election and Trump's surprisingly strong performance. How much can be explained by the fact that Trump was actually campaigning and had a ground game and Democrats did not out caution regarding COVID? How much of the shenanigans that happened can be explained by the partisan divide in mail-in vote driven by partisan divide about COVID? How much was it the fact that so many median voters got a fat check from the government that Trump was in charge of.
Don Jr. is every bit the dilettante that RFK Jr. is, which is why neither will ever go very far in politics.
Don Jr. has none of his father's charisma nor showmanship. Sure, he pathologically craves attention just like his father, but HIS craving expresses itself as sycophantic jockeying along with the rest of the cronies. He's Kendall Roy but douchier and still on coke, not Bobby Kennedy. There isn't even the shell of a functioning human being inside him, hiding behind the coke and depression, like W had.
I think you're mistaking Don Jr.'s right-wing media profile for an actual potential for national appeal.
If he is nominated. and loses, he is done. He'll get the loser label. The whole "No matter how much crazy shit I do, people don't care" image will have disappeared. It is very rare for a political party to nominate anyone who's lost the election twice.
I call him Triple AAA Desantis. Could dominate Triple AAA pitching and everyone wants him called up. In the majors cant hit an off speed pitch to save his life and the fans know that.
There's always a danger going after a front runner from the direction of the opposite party as it makes you look traitor-ish. But going after Trump's disorganization, corruption, age, and electoral defeat should all be available to do in a way that looks like your looking out for the party without being ideological. But the Desantis campaign doesn't seem smart enough to do any of it.
"going after Trump's disorganization, corruption, age, and electoral defeat"
That's the superficial basis for an attack on Trump. What they *really* need to do is to understand that Trump and the Republican base live in the world of the WWE, where insults and crowd-pleasing antics are the way to popularity. Don't make a reasoned argument against Trump; insult him, try to bully him, get the crowd cheering on your side. And then when he hits back, show you can take it and not crumple but instead counterpunch effectively.
This is a contest to show whose, um, "hands" are bigger.
Among DeSantis's mistakes is to believe he can take Trump down ideologically instead of personally by showing him as weak and able to be bullied. Way to misread the room.
Maybe. I'm not sure I'm going to get my hopes up. I fear that any debate in which both are present will be stacked against Christie, such as by moderator actions that reduce any exchanges between the two, or crowd booing overwhelming anything Christie says.
Christie is a pretty sharp guy and a great debater, but he has sold his reputation as being the guy who took down the self-destructing Marco Rubio. That's like kicking a puppy and saying that that proves you can take on a Rottweiler barehanded.
Trump was able to attack from the Left on Iraq and trade when he was running, but I think he had the charisma (or whatever it is) to pull that off and get away with it.
This is totally off-topic, but I thought the Twitter X thing was a joke and was pretty shocked to find out that it is real. If Elon had continued to build electric cars and rockets while maintaining a position of relentless media-shy silence, he would be some kind of inscrutable techno-hero. I share nothing of the man's politics, near as I can tell, but this whole affair still makes me kind of sad.
I kindof admire the stubbornness of it. He founded X.com in 99. He always felt like what turned into PayPal could have been so much bigger. That he might burn down Twitter in the process of finding out if he was right seems like a win.
What I always liked about Elon was that he had gone against the tide of tech-dom. Everyone else wanted to make a gajillion dollars and "change the world" with a new social media website (twitter) or some electronic regulatory arbitrage around something already happening (Uber, bitcoin, grub-hub). Elon, having been successful in such a business, moved instead to physical-engineering-and-production businesses that actually change the material technical base of society through novel, high-risk innovation (electric cars, battery storage, spacecraft, underground tunneling).
Those are high-risk ventures that may or may not succeed, and I frankly think that some of his business practices are pretty garbage. But I respected the vision, and I was willing to concede that maybe you just get the total package, good and bad.
So if this whole time he was actually just longing to get back into the website business, that really shrinks him in my mind.
Although honestly I think it is more likely that this is a kind of midlife crisis thing where he looks back on halcyon days of youth and imagines it a way out of present troubles that does not include admitting error or going back to the grind that made you successful but apparently has not made you happy.
I say this as someone who is 43 and has some experience with such things. My genuine hope is that he gets his head on straight in a few years.
The bitch of it is, there was no possible way to do that and the subsequent several decades bore that out. He should be able to see that if he'd tried he would have failed at the time.
The only reason it happened in China is because their big internet champion arose in a near-vacuum with almost no competitors outside e-commerce, and because that champion arose at exactly the time when the mobile internet and smartphone ecosystem could support it.
Even now, WeChat is losing at the margins to specialized apps/platforms on most fronts aside from DM, basic social networking, and payments.
The only folks who use WeChat "mini-programs" to reserve train tickets or flights, book movie tickets, order take-out, find hotels, or buy shit online are those who do those things infrequently enough that there's no reason to open a purpose-specific account with a better vendor. In the China market that's a much larger chunk of business in aggregate than the US, which is just so much richer that almost everyone does these things and where individual service providers have vastly better customer experience online.
I don't think it's clear. He's said his highs and lows correspond to actual highs and lows and that he's "not medically bipolar". He's admitted he has Asperger's syndrome - if he was bipolar he'd say it. WSJ reported he microdoses Ketamine for depression and takes full doses of Ketamine at parties. I think the full doses + lack of sleep explain most of his more erratic behavior.
I’ve sort of alluded to this before but I feel like GOP took the wrong lesson from Trump’s electoral success and continuing popularity. Namely too many GOP officials (including DeSantis) think that Trump showed you can be as ideologically extreme as you want to be and not suffer electoral consequences when it’s more you can be corrupt and clownish and due to negative polarization, less of your side will abandon you than you might think*.
It’s weird but I feel like McConnell is the only one who seems to understand this and knows if you want to extreme GOP policy to succeed you need to do it more under the radar or more “removed” from the front pages. Hence obsessive focus on judges. I think it also speaks to the fact that the other real reason more extreme legislation can pass is the skewed make up of state legislatures and the fact most of the stuff passed is just not headlines news. A good example to me is this recent law in Texas passed by Governor Abbot eliminating mandatory water breaks for construction crews. I feel pretty certain that even among GOP voters, this would seem to an almost cartoonishly evil law given the extreme heat in Texas. Also, even if you are a pretty big “free market” conservative, I have to believe that even among this cohort the distortion this previous regulation causes must have been extremely trivial**. And yet the law passed. But because it’s a) not a “front page” story b) a pretty small law that only directly effects a small group of ppl, the negative electoral impact to Abbot or GOP is probably negligible.
* It seems pretty clear that Trump’s corruption and clownish has cost himself and GOP votes in every election since 2016. I think the key is for someone like me, pre 2016 I would have said this level of corruption would have been way more costly. And I don’t think I’m alone.
** honestly. Who was pushing for this? What big donor developer was like “water breaks are devastating my business. Time to get Abbott to do something.” It’s again almost cartoonishly evil.
As I understand it, the elimination of water breaks was just a byproduct of a bill banning *all* urban regulations (other than zoning), that was mainly targeted at some Houston voting rights stuff, and Denton’s fracking ban, and Austin’s plastic bag ban. The water breaks are just the thing the opposition has picked up on because of the cartoon evil.
Right, so basically part of an "own the libs" bill. I'm being simplistic I know, but I do feel like it's the primary animating motivation behind banning urban regulations (except zoning).
But again, who included the banning of water breaks in this omnibus bill. I'm genuinely wondering.
By the way, the fact that this omnibus bill bans all urban regulations EXCEPT zoning is another data point that NIMBYism is more a right wing then left wing phenomenon and excessive focus on left wing NIMBYs is the result of them being disproportionately located in places like San Francisco and New York that get much more media attention.
Yeah, it got misinterpreted by the readers of liberal media. It didn't ban water breaks, it overrode the local **mandatory schedule** for water breaks in favor of the state (or maybe OSHA) schedule. All those schedules looked to me like construction workers could die anyway if they didn't just sit down in the shade and drink water when they needed to.
I think the local requirement was 10 minutes every three hours while the state requirement was every four hours or something like that. In the meantime I figured people would be in trouble after 60-90 minutes at 100˚+ temps (or lower depending on humidity.)
I found it interesting that posting this same correction on Reddit earned me negative points: people thought I was disagreeing with their condemnation of the law rather than trying to correct their understanding. It seems like people only want validation of their feelings and find actual details and discussion to be threatening somehow. This may be part of what explains Trump's popularity, come to think of it.
(Note: I'm also finding many Redditors to be quite thoughtful)
So maybe speaks to how sloppy these bills were as opposed to deliberately being evil. But again still bad! Suggests that these "own the libs" bills are being pushed without much thought as to their actual practical impact. Or speaks to sort of a different kind of cartoonish evil. Willingness to ignore perverse outcomes or not do anything to adjust these bills because it's that much more important to "own the libs".
Well, picture the water jug being in the truck where it was parked this morning, now a couple hundred yards down the road from where you're working, which means a 5-10 minute walk there and back.
If you can't imagine a boss saying "no, do that on your own time" you haven't spent enough time down at the shitty end of the labor force.
ETA, if you really can't imagine it google heat exhaustion amongst high school football players.
There was a separate zoning bill(also an ADU bill) which almost passed but was defeated(passed the Senate but not the House). Some Republicans obviously voted against it(otherwise it would have passed), but a much larger percentage of Democrats did.
So I do not draw the conclusion that NIMBYism is more right-wing than left-wing here.
Correct. And I should add that in NYC and SF, the biggest NIMBYs are actually found in places in Long Island which a lot less Democrat than the city. Suffolk county actually went Trump. And in Long Island, its GOP voters and politicians are the loudest voices against Kathy Hochul's housing plans. Trust me, I remember getting the mailers.
"this would seem to an almost cartoonishly evil law given the extreme heat in Texas."
Don't underestimate the actual villainy of business owners willing to squeeze their employees. I have a friend who works as a truck driver for a large construction firm. The owner refuses to put air conditioners in his concrete mixing and dump trucks. These are trucks that routinely sit idling for hours on the road waiting to be called up, the drivers literally baking inside their hot metal cabs, and the owner doesn't give a shit how miserable the drivers are because it saves him money.
Heck, a big concession UPS just made is that they will now start putting a/c in their delivery trucks. Imagine sitting in traffic in Phoenix the last few weeks in a truck with no a/c.
That UPS example is terrible. This as been an issue forever too. FedEx converted years ago. I don't get it. Happy the labor market is still running hot -- pushing a lot of these corporations to make long overdue changes.
If DeSantis -- and MY -- want to keep bringing up how good Ron's COVID was they're going to have to reckon with that whole record. Keeping beaches open and preventing nursing home deaths, great. Reopening schools, good. This was partly, let's recall, already about owning the libs, i.e., the teachers' union, and would have been better if paired with more robust prevention and remediation measures, but OK. But quickly downplaying and even discouraging vaccination among the general population? MY might want to explain if that looks better with the passage of time. Too many people are still hung up specifically on NPI mandates re: COVID. I've always expected Trump to use Ron's quasi/pseudo anti-vax stance against him and to run as the GOP pro-science candidate. "I did the vaccines and they ended COVID. Why won't you say if you took the jab, Ron? I did. My family did. Mandates are problematic but vaccines are good! Believe the science, Ron." Srsly.
Yes. 60 Minutes ran an inaccurate hit piece and the result was that even Florida Democrats ended up defending his vaccine rollout against the 60 Minutes attack.
DeSantis has long since entered the Trump zone for certain journalists. It doesn’t matter if the stories about him are strictly true, as long as they’re negative.
(Let me be clear, I can’t stand the guy, but I happen to think that journalists would do well to keep their credibility with people who aren’t members of the choir. Call me old fashioned.)
Yeah in the early months of the rollout liberal states were starting up their vaccine equity committees and arresting anyone who got vaccinated out of order while basically not vaccinating anyone. iirc DeSantis just opened it up to all old people and started working with Walgreens to speed up the rollout.
Watching the vaccine rollout in the States from Europe was interesting, as there (I was in Finland, specifically), it was a whole other story: as a youngish person with no pre-existing conditions, I had to wait until June 2021 to get my first shot, followed by the second one in August. And it was all done via mass vaccination sites - no going to a pharmacy. The priority was basically age, healthcare personnel and pre-existing conditions relevant to Covid (e.g. asthma).
Having said that, when I did get my shots they were quite orderly and efficient - took maybe 15 minutes both times, even with what looked like huge lines. I even managed to get through the interaction with the nurses entirely in my pidgin Finnish!
The coda is that I then moved to the UK, where despite the slow demise of the NHS the booster rollout was done really, really well.
Funny thing is, I remember when the vaccine was first available it seemed a lot easier to find in the “red” counties--Pinellas county public health had extremely low supplies, getting a vaccine appointment there was like winning a lottery. Even Publix in St Petersburg never had enough--I ended up signing up online and getting the shot at a popup site run by the federal government at a vacant big box store in Clearwater. Had the impression that DeSantis was prioritizing Republicans to be first to get vaccine.
I remember Kamala Harris giving a really shitty, hedged answer to a question about whether she would get vaccinated. And I remember Gavin Newsome proposing that California conduct its own independent review of the COVID vaccine.
Honestly, I think we came somewhat close to the vaccine having the opposite partisan split.
Yeah, there was a lot of “Trump’s an idiot, you can’t get a real vaccine in a year or less.” I think things might have worked out very differently, regarding vaccine hesitancy, if Trump had won the election. Maybe Fauci would’ve been able to put it over.
I suspect you're right on education being a major predictor of anti-vaccine sentiment. Just anecdotally, college-educated Republicans I know were almost all vaccinated, and the whole anti-vaccine situation seems to have really tarnished the Republican brand with them.
This is kind of distorted. She didn't say she wouldn't get a vaccine Trump approved; she said she wouldn't get one that Trump was pushing in defiance of medical advice. I agree it was still a bad message for her, but she wasn't encouraging people to duck a "Trump vaccine" full stop.
Trump tried touting his vaccine success and was booed by his fans for it--and Trump is a quick learner when it comes to pandering to his crowd. The unfortunate fact is that there is a big market for anti-vax and anti-science, particularly among Republicans but even a segment of the left as well (hence RFK Jr’s appeal).
True, yet Trump has still avoided going explicitly anti-vax, unlike DeSantis. He just stopped bragging about Warp Speed at rallies. Which is a shame, it was a great accomplishment.
I think Trump really shot himself in the foot on Warp Speed with the incompetence of the vax rollout. Every story about the Covid vaccine forever after will include a discussion of the political shift to anti-vax positions on the right. And when you consider that the Jill Stein anti-vaxxer conspiracy people on the left were part of the impetus for Trump's 2016 win, I think that shift was not pre-destined (although, to be fair, religious conservatives had been kind of edging that direction for years, and especially since the HPV wars).
It's impossible to know for sure, but I think Trump's election prospects today would look a lot rosier--and the GOP would not have become overrun with anti-vaxxers--if his administration had done the (to be clear, extremely difficult) logistics legwork to make things go smoothly as soon as the FDA dropped authorization. That would have required you to have very, very competent people on the ball, and it still might have failed. Logistics at the scale is incredibly difficult. But I think it really reduced the value, and especially the political value, of a genuine success story.
I'll bring this up before and I'll bring it up again. The ultimate fork in the road moment or the butterfly effect moment that led to large sections of the right become anti-vax is Trump's "Liberate Michigan" tweet. Trump got jealous of all the positive attention Andrew Cuomo* was getting and so he lashed out and undermined his own administration's covid policies.
A lot of the momentum for being anti-mask was supercharged by that tweet. And of course he did it for the most petty and insecure reasons which is just classic Trump.
*Cuomo becoming a left wing hero for like two months is just so hilarious in retrospect. My wife's friend actually got her a "Cuomosexual" mug as a gag gift like a year ago. My wife actually uses it purely because she thinks its absolutely hilarious.
Agree with what Wendigo and Susan Hofstader are saying. But watch and see if Trump is the nominee. Yes, he got booed when touting his own vaccine. But he still took the jab. More important, despite the booing, he can say pretty much whatever he wants and not lose his people. As MY pointed out, Trump has allowed DeSantis to get to his right on abortion and doesn't seem bothered by it. I suspect Camp Trump sees DeSantis's extremism on LGBTQ rhetoric the same way. I see Trump pivoting back to Mr. Moderate in the general if he gets there, at least on select issues. Campaigning as Mr. Vaccine would work for him, he would get away with it, the hard-core anti-vaxxers in his party still would have plenty of other reasons to love him, and he has an instinct for this kind of situational tactics, much better than his foes give him credit for. Of course I may be wrong! But this scenario seems plausible to me.
The nursing home thing shows Cuomo was dishonest but I don’t think it killed a single person. The idea that Covid was being brought into nursing homes only by patients and not staff (especially given this was before we knew about masks or how Covid was spread, and we didn’t have any testing availability to even find out who had it) is ridiculous on its face. NY was hit hard because we didn’t have a response ready as a country.
I honestly think we are forgetting how much of FL's COVID "success" was attributable to the fact that early variants of COVID didn't transmit well in warm weather which meant COVID deaths in FL remained relatively low or at least not that extreme until the Delta variant hit. Even now FL covid death numbers aren't that crazy compared to other states likely becomes of the weather issue.
This is very childish. Yes literally everyone reading this newsletter knows that a) vaccines are good and b) Ron DeSantis being negative about them is bad. The point is that what drove DeSantis’ popularity was being right about COVID in 2020 and 2021. Or do you have some other, better theory of why he was so unusually popular for such a brief period of time?
Well, that is very adult of you. Both DeSantis and Cuomo were very popular governors for a time. Each did some things right and some things wrong. Decisive leadership in a terrible crisis may usually excite admiration (and some opposition). I don’t think this history is captured well by endorsing DeSantis's self-presentation as a brave independent evidence-based leader, a narrative consistent with what I think is currently a strong revisionist view of the pandemic, one I find simplistic, that depicts COVID hawks on NPIs as irrational. I would think some of his decisions were based on his study of the evidence and some on his pandering to both partisan views and the understandably strong desire of people not to have their normal lives suspended any longer. Thanks for sharing your views.
DeSantis is just Ted Cruz with a tan. He’s an unlikeable malcontent whose self serving motivations are so transparent it’s almost admirable. A couple of years from now people will think it’s hilarious that anyone ever thought he could be a serious contender for national election. The video complications of DeSantis trying to act human with voters will destroy the internet by next spring.
DeSantis was getting a ton of buzz when it was just political journalists writing for weirdos like us who give a crap about Presidential elections that are years in the future. It occurred to me around 6 months ago, that I've never heard this guy speak. Matt also kept making fun of DeSantis for being short. Why would that stuff matter to someone like me? Then I saw him do some media appearances, and wow. I think stuff like this is quite telling just how weird the political hobbyist community is. We have a very poor sense of what plays with the public and doesn't, which is funny given the subject matter.
The problem is that we have a politics interest-bias - we assume that everyone is as interested in politics (and all that comes with that interest) as we are, and therefore would be interested in wonky topics that are actually relevant to how someone might govern.
One of the hardest things about being an academic studying politics is remembering that the overwhelmingly vast majority of people really do not care about "politics" as such. Which is not to say that they exist outside of political phenomena, of course, but that their awareness of them is just much different.
Winning the primary against Trump was always going to be very hard and would probably end in failure. But DeSantis has really shit the bed with his campaign. I don't think he will have another chance at becoming President. Trump will dominate the GoP until he dies or loses his mind, either as President, or as someone who will pick handpick the GoP candidate, or as Dictator.
What really surprises me is the de Santis didn't early take the line that Trump is unelectable because over 50% of the population don't like him, while de Santis has shown that he has won two elections in a big, electorally competetive state. Sure it would have alienated the "Trump really won" crows but de Santis had to attack Trump, and this was less dangerous than directly attacking Trump like Christie has. He could have played the statesman "Yes I supported Trump, and respect him but he'll certainly lose us the election" which would have been a nicer contrast to Trump's predictable, malicious attacks that were inevitable. It almost seems that de Santis was trying to be more Trumpy than Trump when the base was perfectly happy with the genuine article. That said Trump's hold on the Republican party is such that I don't think anyone could beat him. That's bad for America, terrible for Republicans but great for Democrats.
Big problem here is that it seems like all the GOP candidates except Christie think the "trump really won" crowd is going to be a majority of primary voters so they can't even tell you what the point of them running against trump is.
Even if you believe that, it seems like as a GOP candidate you have to recognize that "actually Trump should still be president" is a losing position for you and do some work to change public perception.
I'm sure it's true that lots of republican primary voters, when asked in a poll, will say they thing Trump really won. I'm sure this is a genuine belief for plenty of them, but it also seems very much like the kind of thing people say when they want to voice their opposition to the other side but don't really have other options.
Matt wrote recently about the Democratic perception of Bill Clinton and how there were fierce defenses of him until Obama took over as the party standard-bearer and people were able to acknowledge that, yes, he was a creep. In the same vein, I think if someone in the GOP just put forward a solid case for themselves a lot of republican voters would start convincing themselves that they never really believed all the election conspiracy nonsense.
According to a large chunk of the GOP primary electorate. Trump is quite popular. In fact, according to them, he even won in 2020. It was just an insufficiently loyal party that stabbed him in the back, or else he'd still be President.
Right after January 6th, I figured that election denialism would be a big problem for the GOP's election margins, because normally parties that lose do some soul searching to win over more voters next time. Republicans either won't do that, or can't appear to do that too vocally.
For all the talk about GOP elites bringing their party closer to the middle and Dem elites pulling to the left, I think we're seeing a shift here. Whether Democrats bellyache too much or too little about not alienating voters is up to the observer, but I think they've grown more attuned to it over the last few years, compared to the GOP. There's a place for popularists, like Matt Yglesias. I don't see that very much on the right. Their more clear-headed voices are either forced into dead-end positions, keeping their heads down, or joining the grift.
Yeah, I think the Dems have gotten smart enough to do things like spending most of their paid media talking about salient issues where they have 70% approval; the Republicans often don’t do that.
The argument he could make is "the Democrats cheated against Trump in 2020 and Trump lost; they cheated against me in 2022 and I won by ten points: I know how to win against their cheating".
Right? This seems to be the obvious way to square the circle of both validating the previous choices of Trump voters, whilst encouraging them to vote for someone other than Trump.
As others say you can't possibly beat Trump whilst saying almost without qualification that he's the best thing ever. And as Matt Y says, that goes double if your only criticism of Trump is that he's too nice, when it's the most obvious fact in American politics that Donald Trump is a vicious asshole
Great article but you also need to point out that DeSAntis’s first term, and second, included a fair amount of self-serving but good environmental policy. Florida is ground zero for much of climate change and he seems to have understood that red tides and the attendant toxic slurry that blurs one’s vision isn’t great for tourism. So you could as a moderate “Jimmy Buffett/Boomer” retiree who cares about low taxes AND clean beaches vote for him without much concern following the first term.
The extent to which he has gotten the Florida legislature to turn into the Campaign to Elect Ron DeSantis, pushed for judicial initiatives that stack the court system with intellectual lightweights who check the federalist society box, and used his line item veto power in the second term to gut money unanimously dedicated to conservation efforts in my former state are under reported negative hits on his moderate image.
I suspect many Florida voters feel a lot like the mask just got ripped off in the second act and have buyer’s remorse. If the democrats had a functional political party in the state, maybe they’d have something to say about it. The party disfunction there is frankly shocking.
It does seem pretty clear that desantis won’t be in Washington or Tallahassee in a couple years. He did not understand the assignment.
The Florida Democratic party has been in the wilderness for a long time, but following the 2020 election there was an organized effort on the part of Bernie people (not suggesting the Vermont senator had anything to do with this) to take over county party organizations and run things even worse than they had been up to that point. After a couple of years of chaos, I think that’s over but it’s still going to be a challenge for them to be competitive above the local level.
As someone who begrudgingly voted for him in 2018 because Gilium was such an awful candidate, I was pleasantly surprised at how pragmatically he governed for the first two years in office. He’s been an utter disaster since Covid and I think MY hit the nail on the head in that his “Covid success” was really more lucky than anything derived from policy other being against whatever liberals were for at the time.
I am going to posit a different theory. Although Matt is correct that RDS is probably too far right, his biggest issue is that once he was introduced to the National stage, everyone learned that he was short, socially awkward, has a high voice and lacks personal charisma. I am no Trump fan, but he eclipses RDS easily on those four scales.
Yeah DeSantis had the strange position of simultaneously being the "reasonable Republican" that could have won back moderate affluent suburb voters, while also appealing to the weirdo Trump base, while also doing really well with Hispanics. Could have just stayed the course and probably been president.
I don't know whether he's personally pickled his brain in the Internet or if he's just getting terrible campaign advice from posters?
From listening to Florida politicos who have known DeSantis for a while, I think the "reasonable Republican who appeals to suburbans and weirdos" was the fluke part. They all said that the more people get to know DeSantis the more they will see how uncomfortable and weird he is.
I think that a lot of his problem was that the “reasonable Republican” thing crumbled under scrutiny— particularly once Trump himself started hitting DeSantis for being too extreme on Social Security, Medicare, and abortion rights.
NIce article. My one nitpick is this statement: "Trump made some ironclad promises". There is no such thing as an ironclad promise with Trump. If it had really mattered to him to appoint different kinds of people to SCOTUS, he would have done it. He was willing to live up to that promise because he didn't really know or care anything about the issue. So he let the Federalist Society give him short lists of SCOTUS candidates, and interestingly, if you look back at those lists, Trump consistently chose the sanest person from the options he was given. If Neil Gorsuch is too conservative for your tastes (probably a safe bet for most Slow Boring readers), you would have liked the other options even less.
Glad to see something akin to my theory of the rise and fall of DeSantis is gaining traction.
His covid policy was very popular. Even his early forays into culture war stuff in 2022 (15 week abortion ban, ban on lessons about gender in K-3) worked out well for him because he successfully baited prominent liberals in politics and media into seething with rage at him for things where 60%+ of Americans agree with his position. He was also projecting general competence, such as that insanely fast repair of the causeway to that island after the hurricane. Combine all that with running against a corpse and no surprise he won in a historic landslide. Even against a non-corpse I suspect he would have been well into double digit margin of victory.
But now he's extended the gender/sexuality ban all the way thru high school, passed a 6 week abortion ban, and has people like Nate Hochman and Pedro Gonzalez as campaign surrogates. He's shifted from being anti-lockdown to outright anti-vax. And yesterday a campaign staffer retweeted a video of DeSantis with a Sonnenrad and goosestepping troops (supposedly a fan video, but I suspect Hochman made it, and there's some weak circumstantial evidence pointing to this). This flameout is impressive.
I have a theory that (1) his landslide reelection got to his head, and (2) for some reason he thinks the culture war stupidity is the root of his (now former?) popularity, which it very much is not. I promise you he did not win half the vote in Miami city proper because those folks think protecting gays from terrorist attacks is bad.
I was a huge DeSantis-for-prez booster all the way from his 2018 gov win up until around January this year. Sometimes I kick myself hard for it. But I also have to remind myself 2018-2022 DeSantis is very different from this new 2023 DeSantis.
I think that video is a perfect example of how Republican candidates are actually suffering from the same problem that many Democratic candidates are suffering from: Their volunteer and staffer base are terminally online. Trying to make a video to appeal to the 4chan crowd and using explicit Nazi symbolism in 2023 is absolutely inexcusable. The fact that the video was created in the first place and whoever in the campaign made it wasn't immediately fired/disavowed shows that they have lost all touch with reality.
I do not discount the "staffers are terminally online" argument. But, when I look at my divorced parents, who are older Boomers (i.e., a very desirable voting bloc), one is a politically disengaged ex-hippie moderate liberal and the other is a terminally online right-wing libertarian ex-hippie. Yet both are equally aware of and concerned about the bat shit crazy stuff that shows up in chain emails, spam texts, Twitter and the bowels of Facebook comments. I would not be surprised if there was an internal logic to political campaigns that see this over-exposure to very-only culture in focus groups and conclude that being too online is an effective and necessary way to reach Boomers.
The upshot from his perspective is that most of the people who saw and paid attention to it are online.
But when you're the underdog you have to fight for votes, not just prevent people from seeing your downsides.
That is definitely a problem on both sides, but given the very strong Democratic lean of young people, it's likely worse on the Republican side. Campaigns are often staffed by rather young people, and to be a young, politically engaged Republican already makes you very out of step with most people your age. Add the "too online" factor to it, and you have a recipe for an increasing number of crypto-fascists (and fascists who like crypto) finding jobs working for Republican campaigns.
DeSantis can't make the anti-Trump argument related to Trump's anti-democratic tendencies in some part because DeSantis probably has a lot of campaign staff whose criticism of Trump on that front would be that Trump wasn't anti-democratic enough.
My initial assumption was that surely he must have quietly fought the legislature every step of the way on the 6-week abortion ban before feeling compelled to sign it.
That assumption seems to have a high likelihood of being wrong.
It turns out that DeSantis is pretty much a bog-standard member of the most ideologically rigid wing of a Young Republicans' Club at a middling university and can't hide it for any length of time when not leashed by slim majorities.
It's like Romney or Nixon, who both signed a bunch of things passed by veto-proof majorities by Democratic legislatures (Congress for Nixon, MassLeg for Romney) and yet Romney has a moderate reputation that Nixon doesn't - because people do understand that being forced to be moderate doesn't mean that you actually are (but also, you could be).
Which is amusing because Nixon was genuinely an economic moderate with an everyman background and cared more about the working and middle classes than almost anyone who followed except maybe Biden.
He'd have acted as a brake on a GOP majority in Congress had he had one, whereas Romney would have steamed ahead at full speed.
Yeah, Romney being an institutionalist makes people think he's more moderate on policy than he really is, and Nixon being anti-institutionalist makes people think his policy positions were less moderate than they really were.
Also, he had a foreign policy that was hawkish on a day-to-day news-generating level (bombing Cambodia, etc), but was doveish (opening to China, negotiating a deal with Vietnam) on the big long-lasting decisions, which again is going to generate a right-wing/hawkish reputation with rather less reality than appearance.
The other thing that just occurred to me is that your second paragraph is a very good summary, mirrored on the center-left, of Josh Shapiro.
He won by a landslide in a swing state (admittedly against a terrible opponent but no one will remember that in a decade), the I-95 debacle left him looking damned good, he bucks the party line on offering funds for students in wildly underperforming districts to go to private school, he's strongly committed to public safety, he's trying to work across the aisle to get support for the first minimum wage bill in forever, he and his predecessor have made a lot of state government functions work better (Pennie, our insurance exchange, is excellent, and our DMVs are getting better), he pays attention to rural issues...
And unlike DeSantis, if the Democrats somehow snag a state Senate majority before he leaves office, I don't think he's going to overreach wildly.
It seems like you are a native FL or at least more familiar than I am. I'm wondering how much changing demographics of FL is a big part of the story here.
What I mean is, we can debate endlessly about how "good" DeSantis COVID policy was, but I think there is pretty strong agreement that FL remaining "open" during 2020 and early 2021 was very good for him politically. But (and I'm not the first person to suggest this), it seems very possible to me that given the national attention FL got for his COVID positions, the new arrivals who flooded the state in 2020 and 2021 were disproportionately conservative in their political bent. Obviously, FL has been a destination to move to for decades due to weather. But post 2020 it seems very likely there was more of a political bent to in-migration.
Point being, given GOP performance of all their candidates in 2022, not just RDS; it seems like GOP is benefitting from having a much more right wing electorate than even existed 5-10 years ago. Which means pushing more conservative policies may not be as off putting the median FL voter as it may have been just a few years ago. However, media narrative has not caught up to the change in FL demographics (probably still thought of as the ultimate 50/50 state given 2000 and heck Obama won it twice not THAT long ago) so it helped fuel this idea that RDS was this generational talent and put his finger on the pulse of average Americans.
Again, sort of a hypothesis. Love to know if there is any polling or research that backs this up (or debunks).
I think this is a good point. I’m not an expert, so this is, just, like, my opinion, man, but I agree that FL raced rightward due to the influx of conservatives looking for nice weather and lax COVID policies while they telecommute. So, disproportionately conservative retirees and also conservative college educated people with sufficient career clout to be able to say “I work from home or I will GTFO.” The kind of people who could afford to go to Washington for January 6. Reliable voters.
While college towns are now disproportionately blue: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/21/gop-college-towns-00106974 I think that Florida has experienced this in reverse, attracting well-heeled Republican voters. I wonder if South Carolina is Florida, Jr., in this regard? Experts?
Yep, easy to forget with his antics the past 6 months that he won majority Puerto Rican counties, he won Miami and Palm Beach counties, and even in Miami city proper he either narrowly won or narrowly lost (forget which, but I think he had either 48 or 52 percent of the vote there). This was not a partisan hack coalition.
Hurricane Ian was actually great for DeSantis--I remember watching coverage during the emergency (somehow my electricity never went out for more than 10 seconds)--he actually sounded pretty good, like a serious leader, speaking to the press during and in the aftermath of the storm. Usually he has this whiny, somewhat nasal tone to his voice, which he managed to avoid during the hurricane emergency. (I guess he could only hold that pose for so long, though, once he hit the campaign trail the whiny sound was back.) Also, I think he benefitted from the fact that the hurricane gave him the chance to show his skills in terms of managing the cleanup, which impressed people who may have been less thrilled with the culture wars stuff.
Yeah, I definitely don't think new arrivals being more conservative can fully explain a 20% blowout victory. As you as say, the numbers don't add up for it to be entirely that. But I do think it's at least a contributing factor. Also, again maybe contributes to a more muted backlash to his right wing culture war shenanigans.
Of course there is the other banal reason there has been less of a backlash so far. Prior to 2022 RDS wasn't running for President. So he was a well known figure for political nerds like us and also meant political nerds like us were debating on this Substack about his latest education policy moves. But to median voters? Good chance they didn't hear much about this, but did know a family member or friend who is a teacher getting a pay raise. But that given his higher profile now, a lot of those same Democratic voters or soft supporters who voted for him in 2022 may be regretting their vote.
I've never lived in Florida. Just have paid close attention to DeSantis because I was a big fan of his until late 2022-early 2023 when he became increasingly brain poisoned by culture war nonsense.
I do think COVID era migration played a role in the margin of his reelection victory. But I think he probably would have hit a double digit margin regardless.
Being more moderate in "lockdown" was not just popular but correct. It was closer to the cost benefit response.
I think that is a really smart critique. I agree with all of it. I think I’d just piggy back off of it and Matt’s analysis by adding a few things:
1) I think DeSantis’ hard right positioning conveniently aligns with his true policy priors (mostly), and I think he thinks pandering to Republican primary voters will help him, though it clearly hasn’t loosened Trump’s iron grip on the party. Which means DeSantis has to find a different tack (perhaps just going after the president more aggressively). That may be doomed too, but apparently so is any other strategy. Unless he wants to coast so he doesn’t alienate too many voters for another possible run in the future, I think he should take Trump head on like Christie.
2) I think voters really rewarded him most for his Covid stance, and I think it was mostly due to smarts rather than luck. His studying and early recognition that politicians have to consider many factors, including economic and mental health and not just public health concerns, and his studiousness about the virus and whether opening up early would be catastrophic, took a lot of balls and was genuinely impressive. He went too far with banning localities from instituting mask mandates of their own and banning cruise lines from doing the same (so much for small government conservatism), but when he was at his best he was opening up schools and businesses in phases of reasonable time periods, promoting the vaccine (especially for seniors), and protecting seniors particularly during the worst of the pandemic.
3) Like you said, he ran against a weak candidate--in my view not so much that it was Charlie Crist’s weakness but because the Democratic Party of Florida is awful (has made some good gains in recent elections, though). I think it was something like 14% of Dem voters who voted in 2018 stayed home in 2022--a total collapse. Say DeSantis wins over 3-4% of Dems out of that 14% and Crist wins the rest--you’re then talking about DeSantis winning by 8-9% rather than just over 19%. A solid victory to be sure, but much more in line with pre-election polling, for example. I think the Democratic collapse is very much under discussed in the narrative about DeSantis’ landslide win.
4) DeSantis has been very skilled at wedge cultural issues. A case in point that I think initially won him some points but has now become a bit of a dud is the Disney quarrel. His ban on gender instruction through the third grade, which like you say something like 60% of America or more supports and wasn’t even going on in Florida anyway, was a way to set up a narrative about the Left and frame anyone who opposed it as woke. I remember National Review’s Rich Lowry, in an interview when asked about DeSantis’ feud with Disney, responding to the question with something like, “You mean you don’t oppose gender identity being taught to kids K-3?” He should know better. Unless he was disingenuously trying to defend DeSantis’ narrative, which seems possible but unfortunate. It’s now become an issue where DeSantis can’t proclaim a big victory like he wanted to because Disney has the money to fight back. It’s a sad reflection of the current GOP that it doesn’t have the balls to govern in a way other than saying “no,” and despite all the Democrats’ faults, at least they have taken some substantial political costs to make their constituents’ lives and even Republicans’ lives better (see 2010 midterms and Obamacare).
I’ve said on my blog that I want to like Ron DeSantis. I think he is clearly intelligent and has some honorable character traits that I wish he would channel more and be willing to sacrifice some of his ambition in favor of more principled political behavior. But the fact that he doesn’t and is a serial divider is enough for me to root hard against him, and if he does crash and burn in this presidential race, he will have deserved to lose.
I think that is a really smart critique. I agree with all of it. I think I’d just piggy back off of it and Matt’s analysis by adding a few things:
1) I think DeSantis’ hard right positioning conveniently aligns with his true policy priors (mostly), and I think he thinks pandering to Republican primary voters will help him, though it clearly hasn’t loosened Trump’s iron grip on the party. Which means DeSantis has to find a different tack (perhaps just going after the president more aggressively). That may be doomed too, but apparently so is any other strategy. Unless he wants to coast so he doesn’t alienate too many voters for another possible run in the future, I think he should take Trump head on like Christie.
2) I think voters really rewarded him most for his Covid stance, and I think it was mostly due to smarts rather than luck. His studying and early recognition that politicians have to consider many factors, including economic and mental health and not just public health concerns, and his studiousness about the virus and whether opening up early would be catastrophic, took a lot of balls and was genuinely impressive. He went too far with banning localities from instituting mask mandates of their own and banning cruise lines from doing the same (so much for small government conservatism), but when he was at his best he was opening up schools and businesses in phases of reasonable time periods, promoting the vaccine (especially for seniors), and protecting seniors particularly during the worst of the pandemic.
3) Like you said, he ran against a weak candidate--in my view not so much that it was Charlie Crist’s weakness but because the Democratic Party of Florida is awful (has made some good gains in recent elections, though). I think it was something like 14% of Dem voters who voted in 2018 stayed home in 2022--a total collapse. Say DeSantis wins over 3-4% of Dems out of that 14% and Crist wins the rest--you’re then talking about DeSantis winning by 8-9% rather than just over 19%. A solid victory to be sure, but much more in line with pre-election polling, for example. I think the Democratic collapse is very much under discussed in the narrative about DeSantis’ landslide win.
4) DeSantis has been very skilled at wedge cultural issues. A case in point that I think initially won him some points but has now become a bit of a dud is the Disney quarrel. His ban on gender instruction through the third grade, which like you say something like 60% of America or more supports and wasn’t even going on in Florida anyway, was a way to set up a narrative about the Left and frame anyone who opposed it as woke. I remember National Review’s Rich Lowry, in an interview when asked about DeSantis’ feud with Disney, responding to the question with something like, “You mean you don’t oppose gender identity being taught to kids K-3?” He should know better. Unless he was disingenuously trying to defend DeSantis’ narrative, which seems possible but unfortunate. It’s now become an issue where DeSantis can’t proclaim a big victory like he wanted to because Disney has the money to fight back. It’s a sad reflection of the current GOP that it doesn’t have the balls to govern in a way other than saying “no,” and despite all the Democrats’ faults, at least they have taken some substantial political costs to make their constituents’ lives and even Republicans’ lives better (see 2010 midterms and Obamacare).
I’ve said on my blog that I want to like Ron DeSantis. I think he is clearly intelligent and has some honorable character traits that I wish he would channel more and be willing to sacrifice some of his ambition in favor of more principled political behavior. But the fact that he doesn’t and is a serial divider is enough for me to root hard against him, and if he does crash and burn in this presidential race, he will have deserved to lose.
I think the moment I heard about him signing the 6 week ban was when I wrote him off (correctly or incorrectly). It really did feel like he was throwing so much of what could have been smart strategy with that, though only time will tell.
I can't help but feel that DeSantis is fading for another reason: he has all the charisma of Jeb Bush at a beige wallpaper convention.
I'm willing to bet that a large portion of DeSantis backers cooled on him once they actually heard him speak.
Everyone understands we're stuck with Trump as the recurring GOP candidate for President until he dies, right?
The Bulwark refers to this as the "Actuarial Strategy".
My money says that unless something fundamentally changes inside the party's Triangle Of Doom (another Bulwark description of the triple-problem of GOP voters, pols, and media), they will keep backing Trump until he dies, and then some lucky coward will win the throne and get to spend the next 30 years pretending he never capitulated to Trump and otherwise rewriting history.
I mean, it's perfectly plausible that Trump gets the nomination and then manages to squeeze out a win next year and then the party's problem is "solved" because he's term limited out so they can can move on to the next candidate in 2028.
I think the truth is both more dramatic and more boring than that.
It’s more dramatic because Trump is the raptor who’s figured out the door handles. He will plow full speed ahead into corrupting as much of the government as possible, potentially causing a broader crisis that takes him out of the picture or making the question of future elections (ED: I meant to say "primaries" more specifically) moot - either because he’s gotten the GOP to go along with a minoritarian takeover, or the attempt backfired and Democrats will have a mandate resembling the Republicans’ postbellum one.
It’s more boring because the realities of Trump’s corruption aren’t actually as monomaniacally oriented towards a takeover as people fear. His primary goal is always graft, not dominance. He’ll reboot the milking of the Secret Service by overcharging them at his properties. He’ll reboot the corrupt weapons deals in the Middle East. He actually *WON’T* exclusively reward his most loyal flunkies, both because he delights in torturing them despite their loyalty, and because the crowd of semi-sane establishment types desperately begging to ensconce themselves in his administration so they can avert tragedies will tickle his black, narcissistic ego and give him new opportunities to humiliate his intraparty enemies. [Ed: The loyal flunkies will scheme that much harder, and the sane flunkies will beg that much harder.]
One of the problems with Trump prognosticating is that his only consistent through line is the corrupt personal enrichment, which become the only pattern that can be predicted. Ideologues like DeSantis are somewhat predictable (which I think is a good quality in an executive because it manifests as trust), but the core problem with Trump as President is his unpredictability, which Matt characterizes as his only somewhat fake heterodoxy.
You cannot downplay the authoritarian takeover because it is impossible to weight its likelihood. Flip a coin: Heads, he destroys the American government and the world descends into chaos while he steals everything that isn't nailed down and makes lewd comments about his daughter. Tails, he steals everything that isn't nailed down and makes lewd comments about his daughter, but is also so erratic and incompetent that his cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment.
I kind of disagree with this, but the other guy’s comment is completely unhinged relative to this, so you win.
". . . the realities of Trump’s corruption . . . His primary goal is always graft, not dominance."
I am very curious about the psychology of Trump derangement people and have a couple serious (and, I hope, fair) questions: (1) do you think Trump really engaged in "corruption" and "graft," or are those just shorthand words for "Orange Man Bad;" and (b) is anyone on your side concerned yet that Biden is documented as taking multimillion dollar foreign bribes?
Addendum: Because I know this is going to piss off LF ;-), I just want to add... This "vie for the throne" behavior is a natural outcome of the fact that our voting system is shot-through with zero-sum dynamics. It's not a mechanistic "this behavior is a direct result of this dynamic", but rather an interdependent co-arising (look it up).
The point is, from a philosophical standpoint, a throne is just as zero-sum as a presidential primary for leadership of an authoritarian movement. There can only be one authoritarian, only be one nominee, just like there can only be one king. The rules of succession may be different -- primogeniture vs. the VP's constitutional role vs. Trump's personality cult -- but the competition over it plays out in the same predictable manner.
Right now, Trump is a monarch with gout. Everyone knows he's dying, but not like tomorrow. First-episode Robert Baratheon, if you will. And thus, everyone who's got any designs on power doesn't give a shit about actually challenging the king, they want to set themselves up to inherit his kingdom directly. The pre-existing strength and legitimacy of the throne is where the easiest path to power is, not merely having strong enough armies (or voters) to seize it by brute force.
All of that is to say... I'm not saying RCV would fix *all of it*. That's impossible. It's an interdependently co-arising ("co-evolving", if you will) system, after all. But what I *am* saying is that mitigating the zero-sum aspects of our electoral system is a clear policy path towards fixing it. We've seen that elites hectoring other elites to play more golf together -- call it the "cultural approach" -- hasn't worked, because the incentives are too strong. Well, it's time to change the incentives! It probably would work too slowly to stop the worst from happening in this current cycle, let alone the next. But there's no time like the present to get started.
For me, the problem here is one that RCV wouldn't especially help with. The French have a RCV-like system and it polarises into Macron vs Le Pen.
Since it would need a constitutional amendment anyway, we have a relatively wide range of possible reforms to look at.
What would help is having a collectively elected body that can hire and fire Presidents. You can do that with a Parliamentary system (where that collectively elected body is also the legislature, ie let Congress pick the President, which turns Congressional elections into proxy-Presidential elections like pre-seventeenth-amendment state legislature elections sometimes were as proxy-Senate election), but you don't have to go fully parliamentary.
There already is a collective body that picks Presidents; the constitutional amendment required to make the Electoral College a real thing is pretty simple, just have them elected for a four-year term (the same inauguration date as Congress), have them receive the same salary as Congresspeople, have them meet in DC instead of in the states, give them the power to replace either President or VP at any time by simple majority, and give them something to do the rest of the time (I'd suggest giving them full subpoena power to investigate the executive, and give them authority over confirming executive-branch appointments so the President's appointments don't get blocked by an opposite-party Senate - this also frees up some floor time in the Senate for legislating).
If you require states to elect the College by a proportional voting system, then you can even get a true coalition presidency, the absence of which has been a major problem in countries with multi-party systems and an executive presidency (if a multi-party coalition elects a president, and the president breaks promises made to the minor parties, they have no enforcement mechanism).
1. We don't need a constitutional amendment for RCV.
2. We also don't need one for multi-member districts, which would help us get proportional results without strictly needing proportional formulas. It would probably end up looking like a lighter version of the gerrymandering we already have... which is what most MMD systems look like.
3. France doesn't have RCV in their presidential system, they have a runoff. Part of the problem with French politics is one of the same problems we have: different constituencies electing the president vs. the legislature. It creates different sources of legitimacy. A parliament is superior because the PM is elected by the same coalition that runs the legislature.
4. I've said this numerous times, but I'll reiterate that the only reason I keep bringing up RCV is that it's the strongest among many tools to create moderation in the system. I don't expect it to do all the work; it's just that it's the most popular reform and has the biggest head of steam, which means that it's the most viable vehicle for loosening up the two-party stranglehold and bringing further reforms. To paraphrase a military saying, you do electoral reform with the proposals the American people like, not the proposal you wish they liked.
5. I've toyed with the idea of putting more teeth on the Electoral College. It's fun to imagine, but not realistically worth much more than as a thought experiment. The nice thing is that the Constitution is actually quite silent on everything BUT the EC's "day-of" procedure, so it's entirely legal to tack on a bunch of fun events, like having an "Electoral Convention" where the Electors all meet up and bargain and stuff.
But again, I don't see how we get there in any meaningful time frame. If we ever did, it'd probably be as a mechanism for a multiparty system to help resolve some conflicts there. But first, we'd actually need a multiparty system... likely as a result of some sort of MMD+STV implementation.
1. For the Presidency, you do need a constitutional amendment; you could do something close via an interstate compact like the one to abolish the electoral college, but you can't get second preference data from states that decline to participate. You can use RCV for House/Senate elections, obviously.
2. MMD can be done proportionally or non-proportionally; non-proportional approaches are why they are banned by legislation, that should be amended to allow proportional MMD. But non-proportional MMD would be worse than the present system.
3. Runoffs and RCV are closely-related and very similar systems that get similar results. A parliamentary system definitely does require a constitutional amendment.
4. This bit, I agree with
5. This bit I agree with. RCV first, then MMD (which turns RCV into STV), then resolve the multi-party/presidency problem either by switching to a parliamentary system or by beefing up the Electoral College.
You wouldn't need a Constitutional amendment for state-by-state RCV for President, but the improvement from that would be marginal.
Multimember Congressional districts with STV voting is something we should be seriously looking at.
To be clear, I was only referring to the House/Senate and the states. And any state that enacts RCV can easily put its EC delegates towards the RCV winner as well.
I think you are underrating the possibility of a dynastic situation here. I suspect the chances are quite high Don Jr. runs for President one day. It's not like Americans have been especially against family dynasties (hello RFK Jr!).
The other possibility is that CPI inflation continues to go down and go down enough for Fed to start cutting interest rates (even if just one or two 25 bps rate cuts), Biden gets to run on a 1984 "morning in America" redux campaign and he wins decisively. A 1984 blowout is almost certainly not possible today given current political dynamics, but I think an 08 level/margin is possible if economic conditions are right and a loss that big for GOP (which would almost certainly lead to a few senate seats flipping and losing the House decisively) would finally lead the party to moving past Trump and Trumpism. The crappy part is, if the popular vote is like 0.5% to 1% more towards Biden in 2020 this dynamic probably happens. GA, PA and AZ are called much quicker. NC likely flips. And TX while still probably going for Trump, is close enough to not be called for at least a few days which would likely help GOP realize they are in real danger of losing TX.
Look this is a hope not expectation. I don't say this at all as some sort of formality or foregone scenario. After 2016 and 2020, no way I'm doing that. But the scenario I laid out is actually a real possibility.
Also, one more thing. Sort of a side point but maybe a good future MY post. How likely is it the 2020 election will ultimately be seen as a huge outlier that probably should guide future predictions? In fact, I think even to expand? How likely is it that in 20-25 years the conclusion will be to look at all aspects of society from 2020 to 2022 as an ultimate outlier event due to COVID; inflation driven by supply chain disruption, mass protests driven at least in part by being stuck inside for months, crime increase due to general disruption in society, education outcomes etc. In regards to 2020 election and Trump's surprisingly strong performance. How much can be explained by the fact that Trump was actually campaigning and had a ground game and Democrats did not out caution regarding COVID? How much of the shenanigans that happened can be explained by the partisan divide in mail-in vote driven by partisan divide about COVID? How much was it the fact that so many median voters got a fat check from the government that Trump was in charge of.
Don Jr. is every bit the dilettante that RFK Jr. is, which is why neither will ever go very far in politics.
Don Jr. has none of his father's charisma nor showmanship. Sure, he pathologically craves attention just like his father, but HIS craving expresses itself as sycophantic jockeying along with the rest of the cronies. He's Kendall Roy but douchier and still on coke, not Bobby Kennedy. There isn't even the shell of a functioning human being inside him, hiding behind the coke and depression, like W had.
I think you're mistaking Don Jr.'s right-wing media profile for an actual potential for national appeal.
If he is nominated. and loses, he is done. He'll get the loser label. The whole "No matter how much crazy shit I do, people don't care" image will have disappeared. It is very rare for a political party to nominate anyone who's lost the election twice.
If he wins, there will be other problems...
Wondering if we’ll someday live in a world in which the answer to a trivia question is “Donald Trump and Adlai Stevenson. What a world.
Major Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan, and Thomas Dewey erasure here.
One wonders what would have happened had the major candidates in the primary not endorsed Trump for the nomination.
I will give 20:1 odds that as long as Trump doesn’t win 2024 he’s never again the nominee.
They need him to win so he'll finally have to go away, eh?
or until he wins again
Sometimes the GOP doesn’t seem to have policy but rather targets for abuse.
I call him Triple AAA Desantis. Could dominate Triple AAA pitching and everyone wants him called up. In the majors cant hit an off speed pitch to save his life and the fans know that.
There's always a danger going after a front runner from the direction of the opposite party as it makes you look traitor-ish. But going after Trump's disorganization, corruption, age, and electoral defeat should all be available to do in a way that looks like your looking out for the party without being ideological. But the Desantis campaign doesn't seem smart enough to do any of it.
"going after Trump's disorganization, corruption, age, and electoral defeat"
That's the superficial basis for an attack on Trump. What they *really* need to do is to understand that Trump and the Republican base live in the world of the WWE, where insults and crowd-pleasing antics are the way to popularity. Don't make a reasoned argument against Trump; insult him, try to bully him, get the crowd cheering on your side. And then when he hits back, show you can take it and not crumple but instead counterpunch effectively.
This is a contest to show whose, um, "hands" are bigger.
Among DeSantis's mistakes is to believe he can take Trump down ideologically instead of personally by showing him as weak and able to be bullied. Way to misread the room.
On this note, I’m pumped for Christie vs Trump. Talk about political WWE!
Maybe. I'm not sure I'm going to get my hopes up. I fear that any debate in which both are present will be stacked against Christie, such as by moderator actions that reduce any exchanges between the two, or crowd booing overwhelming anything Christie says.
Christie is a pretty sharp guy and a great debater, but he has sold his reputation as being the guy who took down the self-destructing Marco Rubio. That's like kicking a puppy and saying that that proves you can take on a Rottweiler barehanded.
Richard Hannia, who is kinda a weirdo himself, nailed it when he argued that DeSantis’ only shot is to challenge Trump to a physical fight.
Trump was able to attack from the Left on Iraq and trade when he was running, but I think he had the charisma (or whatever it is) to pull that off and get away with it.
This is totally off-topic, but I thought the Twitter X thing was a joke and was pretty shocked to find out that it is real. If Elon had continued to build electric cars and rockets while maintaining a position of relentless media-shy silence, he would be some kind of inscrutable techno-hero. I share nothing of the man's politics, near as I can tell, but this whole affair still makes me kind of sad.
I kindof admire the stubbornness of it. He founded X.com in 99. He always felt like what turned into PayPal could have been so much bigger. That he might burn down Twitter in the process of finding out if he was right seems like a win.
Oof. That makes it so much worse for me.
What I always liked about Elon was that he had gone against the tide of tech-dom. Everyone else wanted to make a gajillion dollars and "change the world" with a new social media website (twitter) or some electronic regulatory arbitrage around something already happening (Uber, bitcoin, grub-hub). Elon, having been successful in such a business, moved instead to physical-engineering-and-production businesses that actually change the material technical base of society through novel, high-risk innovation (electric cars, battery storage, spacecraft, underground tunneling).
Those are high-risk ventures that may or may not succeed, and I frankly think that some of his business practices are pretty garbage. But I respected the vision, and I was willing to concede that maybe you just get the total package, good and bad.
So if this whole time he was actually just longing to get back into the website business, that really shrinks him in my mind.
Although honestly I think it is more likely that this is a kind of midlife crisis thing where he looks back on halcyon days of youth and imagines it a way out of present troubles that does not include admitting error or going back to the grind that made you successful but apparently has not made you happy.
I say this as someone who is 43 and has some experience with such things. My genuine hope is that he gets his head on straight in a few years.
Probably depends upon if he can repair his relationship with his child. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/21/business/elon-musk-child-files-to-change-name-gender/index.html#:~:text=check%20back%20later.-,Elon%20Musk's%20child%20tells%20court%20she%20no%20longer%20wants,be%20related'%20to%20her%20dad&text=One%20of%20Elon%20Musk's%20children,way%2C%20shape%20or%20form.%E2%80%9D
Seems pretty clear to me his right wing turn has a lot to do with this.
He has seven kids. If only one is going through a Daddy-hating phase, he's batting above average.
In what way was Uber already happening?
The bitch of it is, there was no possible way to do that and the subsequent several decades bore that out. He should be able to see that if he'd tried he would have failed at the time.
The only reason it happened in China is because their big internet champion arose in a near-vacuum with almost no competitors outside e-commerce, and because that champion arose at exactly the time when the mobile internet and smartphone ecosystem could support it.
Even now, WeChat is losing at the margins to specialized apps/platforms on most fronts aside from DM, basic social networking, and payments.
The only folks who use WeChat "mini-programs" to reserve train tickets or flights, book movie tickets, order take-out, find hotels, or buy shit online are those who do those things infrequently enough that there's no reason to open a purpose-specific account with a better vendor. In the China market that's a much larger chunk of business in aggregate than the US, which is just so much richer that almost everyone does these things and where individual service providers have vastly better customer experience online.
Time to fire you and replace you with someone with a different opinion.
I think it’s pretty clear that he’s bipolar which in his case manifests itself with almost continuous (at times highly productive) mania.
I don't think it's clear. He's said his highs and lows correspond to actual highs and lows and that he's "not medically bipolar". He's admitted he has Asperger's syndrome - if he was bipolar he'd say it. WSJ reported he microdoses Ketamine for depression and takes full doses of Ketamine at parties. I think the full doses + lack of sleep explain most of his more erratic behavior.
I’ve sort of alluded to this before but I feel like GOP took the wrong lesson from Trump’s electoral success and continuing popularity. Namely too many GOP officials (including DeSantis) think that Trump showed you can be as ideologically extreme as you want to be and not suffer electoral consequences when it’s more you can be corrupt and clownish and due to negative polarization, less of your side will abandon you than you might think*.
It’s weird but I feel like McConnell is the only one who seems to understand this and knows if you want to extreme GOP policy to succeed you need to do it more under the radar or more “removed” from the front pages. Hence obsessive focus on judges. I think it also speaks to the fact that the other real reason more extreme legislation can pass is the skewed make up of state legislatures and the fact most of the stuff passed is just not headlines news. A good example to me is this recent law in Texas passed by Governor Abbot eliminating mandatory water breaks for construction crews. I feel pretty certain that even among GOP voters, this would seem to an almost cartoonishly evil law given the extreme heat in Texas. Also, even if you are a pretty big “free market” conservative, I have to believe that even among this cohort the distortion this previous regulation causes must have been extremely trivial**. And yet the law passed. But because it’s a) not a “front page” story b) a pretty small law that only directly effects a small group of ppl, the negative electoral impact to Abbot or GOP is probably negligible.
* It seems pretty clear that Trump’s corruption and clownish has cost himself and GOP votes in every election since 2016. I think the key is for someone like me, pre 2016 I would have said this level of corruption would have been way more costly. And I don’t think I’m alone.
** honestly. Who was pushing for this? What big donor developer was like “water breaks are devastating my business. Time to get Abbott to do something.” It’s again almost cartoonishly evil.
As I understand it, the elimination of water breaks was just a byproduct of a bill banning *all* urban regulations (other than zoning), that was mainly targeted at some Houston voting rights stuff, and Denton’s fracking ban, and Austin’s plastic bag ban. The water breaks are just the thing the opposition has picked up on because of the cartoon evil.
Right, so basically part of an "own the libs" bill. I'm being simplistic I know, but I do feel like it's the primary animating motivation behind banning urban regulations (except zoning).
But again, who included the banning of water breaks in this omnibus bill. I'm genuinely wondering.
By the way, the fact that this omnibus bill bans all urban regulations EXCEPT zoning is another data point that NIMBYism is more a right wing then left wing phenomenon and excessive focus on left wing NIMBYs is the result of them being disproportionately located in places like San Francisco and New York that get much more media attention.
No one “included” water breaks in this bill. They just didn’t specifically *exclude* them.
Yeah, it got misinterpreted by the readers of liberal media. It didn't ban water breaks, it overrode the local **mandatory schedule** for water breaks in favor of the state (or maybe OSHA) schedule. All those schedules looked to me like construction workers could die anyway if they didn't just sit down in the shade and drink water when they needed to.
I think the local requirement was 10 minutes every three hours while the state requirement was every four hours or something like that. In the meantime I figured people would be in trouble after 60-90 minutes at 100˚+ temps (or lower depending on humidity.)
I found it interesting that posting this same correction on Reddit earned me negative points: people thought I was disagreeing with their condemnation of the law rather than trying to correct their understanding. It seems like people only want validation of their feelings and find actual details and discussion to be threatening somehow. This may be part of what explains Trump's popularity, come to think of it.
(Note: I'm also finding many Redditors to be quite thoughtful)
So maybe speaks to how sloppy these bills were as opposed to deliberately being evil. But again still bad! Suggests that these "own the libs" bills are being pushed without much thought as to their actual practical impact. Or speaks to sort of a different kind of cartoonish evil. Willingness to ignore perverse outcomes or not do anything to adjust these bills because it's that much more important to "own the libs".
IIRC there’s already a state labor law that mandates breaks, just not explicitly water breaks, so the effect here will probably be nil.
Well, picture the water jug being in the truck where it was parked this morning, now a couple hundred yards down the road from where you're working, which means a 5-10 minute walk there and back.
If you can't imagine a boss saying "no, do that on your own time" you haven't spent enough time down at the shitty end of the labor force.
ETA, if you really can't imagine it google heat exhaustion amongst high school football players.
There was a separate zoning bill(also an ADU bill) which almost passed but was defeated(passed the Senate but not the House). Some Republicans obviously voted against it(otherwise it would have passed), but a much larger percentage of Democrats did.
So I do not draw the conclusion that NIMBYism is more right-wing than left-wing here.
Correct. And I should add that in NYC and SF, the biggest NIMBYs are actually found in places in Long Island which a lot less Democrat than the city. Suffolk county actually went Trump. And in Long Island, its GOP voters and politicians are the loudest voices against Kathy Hochul's housing plans. Trust me, I remember getting the mailers.
Remember Trump's "protect the Long Island housewives" tweet? Sort fits with the thoughts expressed here https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/zoning-emerging-as-a-political-issue/
Also, absolutely hilarious that Trump's go to anti-zoning tweet is based on some 1950s "Leave it to Beaver" version of Long Island.
"this would seem to an almost cartoonishly evil law given the extreme heat in Texas."
Don't underestimate the actual villainy of business owners willing to squeeze their employees. I have a friend who works as a truck driver for a large construction firm. The owner refuses to put air conditioners in his concrete mixing and dump trucks. These are trucks that routinely sit idling for hours on the road waiting to be called up, the drivers literally baking inside their hot metal cabs, and the owner doesn't give a shit how miserable the drivers are because it saves him money.
Heck, a big concession UPS just made is that they will now start putting a/c in their delivery trucks. Imagine sitting in traffic in Phoenix the last few weeks in a truck with no a/c.
That UPS example is terrible. This as been an issue forever too. FedEx converted years ago. I don't get it. Happy the labor market is still running hot -- pushing a lot of these corporations to make long overdue changes.
If DeSantis -- and MY -- want to keep bringing up how good Ron's COVID was they're going to have to reckon with that whole record. Keeping beaches open and preventing nursing home deaths, great. Reopening schools, good. This was partly, let's recall, already about owning the libs, i.e., the teachers' union, and would have been better if paired with more robust prevention and remediation measures, but OK. But quickly downplaying and even discouraging vaccination among the general population? MY might want to explain if that looks better with the passage of time. Too many people are still hung up specifically on NPI mandates re: COVID. I've always expected Trump to use Ron's quasi/pseudo anti-vax stance against him and to run as the GOP pro-science candidate. "I did the vaccines and they ended COVID. Why won't you say if you took the jab, Ron? I did. My family did. Mandates are problematic but vaccines are good! Believe the science, Ron." Srsly.
IIRC Ron started out pro-vax and had a very strong rollout. But then in the fall of 2021 he started hedging, and now he's an outright antivaxer.
Yes. 60 Minutes ran an inaccurate hit piece and the result was that even Florida Democrats ended up defending his vaccine rollout against the 60 Minutes attack.
Yep, I remember that and the Rebekah Jones hitpiece very distinctively.
(Fun fact: one of the Panhandle districts had its 2022 House election between Matt Gaetz and Rebekah Jones. Utterly cursed ballot. Poor voters.)
Shame y'all don't still have paper ones, at least people could have burnt them...
DeSantis has long since entered the Trump zone for certain journalists. It doesn’t matter if the stories about him are strictly true, as long as they’re negative.
(Let me be clear, I can’t stand the guy, but I happen to think that journalists would do well to keep their credibility with people who aren’t members of the choir. Call me old fashioned.)
Yeah in the early months of the rollout liberal states were starting up their vaccine equity committees and arresting anyone who got vaccinated out of order while basically not vaccinating anyone. iirc DeSantis just opened it up to all old people and started working with Walgreens to speed up the rollout.
Watching the vaccine rollout in the States from Europe was interesting, as there (I was in Finland, specifically), it was a whole other story: as a youngish person with no pre-existing conditions, I had to wait until June 2021 to get my first shot, followed by the second one in August. And it was all done via mass vaccination sites - no going to a pharmacy. The priority was basically age, healthcare personnel and pre-existing conditions relevant to Covid (e.g. asthma).
Having said that, when I did get my shots they were quite orderly and efficient - took maybe 15 minutes both times, even with what looked like huge lines. I even managed to get through the interaction with the nurses entirely in my pidgin Finnish!
The coda is that I then moved to the UK, where despite the slow demise of the NHS the booster rollout was done really, really well.
Funny thing is, I remember when the vaccine was first available it seemed a lot easier to find in the “red” counties--Pinellas county public health had extremely low supplies, getting a vaccine appointment there was like winning a lottery. Even Publix in St Petersburg never had enough--I ended up signing up online and getting the shot at a popup site run by the federal government at a vacant big box store in Clearwater. Had the impression that DeSantis was prioritizing Republicans to be first to get vaccine.
I remember Kamala Harris giving a really shitty, hedged answer to a question about whether she would get vaccinated. And I remember Gavin Newsome proposing that California conduct its own independent review of the COVID vaccine.
Honestly, I think we came somewhat close to the vaccine having the opposite partisan split.
Yeah, there was a lot of “Trump’s an idiot, you can’t get a real vaccine in a year or less.” I think things might have worked out very differently, regarding vaccine hesitancy, if Trump had won the election. Maybe Fauci would’ve been able to put it over.
I suspect you're right on education being a major predictor of anti-vaccine sentiment. Just anecdotally, college-educated Republicans I know were almost all vaccinated, and the whole anti-vaccine situation seems to have really tarnished the Republican brand with them.
This is kind of distorted. She didn't say she wouldn't get a vaccine Trump approved; she said she wouldn't get one that Trump was pushing in defiance of medical advice. I agree it was still a bad message for her, but she wasn't encouraging people to duck a "Trump vaccine" full stop.
“2021 was stupid” is basically accurate on any topic at all.
And 2020. Both years led a lot of people - myself included - to develop legitimately disordered (i.e. insane) thinking.
I think your memory is correct. This article was from just a couple days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/us/politics/ron-desantis-covid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Trump tried touting his vaccine success and was booed by his fans for it--and Trump is a quick learner when it comes to pandering to his crowd. The unfortunate fact is that there is a big market for anti-vax and anti-science, particularly among Republicans but even a segment of the left as well (hence RFK Jr’s appeal).
True, yet Trump has still avoided going explicitly anti-vax, unlike DeSantis. He just stopped bragging about Warp Speed at rallies. Which is a shame, it was a great accomplishment.
I think Trump really shot himself in the foot on Warp Speed with the incompetence of the vax rollout. Every story about the Covid vaccine forever after will include a discussion of the political shift to anti-vax positions on the right. And when you consider that the Jill Stein anti-vaxxer conspiracy people on the left were part of the impetus for Trump's 2016 win, I think that shift was not pre-destined (although, to be fair, religious conservatives had been kind of edging that direction for years, and especially since the HPV wars).
It's impossible to know for sure, but I think Trump's election prospects today would look a lot rosier--and the GOP would not have become overrun with anti-vaxxers--if his administration had done the (to be clear, extremely difficult) logistics legwork to make things go smoothly as soon as the FDA dropped authorization. That would have required you to have very, very competent people on the ball, and it still might have failed. Logistics at the scale is incredibly difficult. But I think it really reduced the value, and especially the political value, of a genuine success story.
I'll bring this up before and I'll bring it up again. The ultimate fork in the road moment or the butterfly effect moment that led to large sections of the right become anti-vax is Trump's "Liberate Michigan" tweet. Trump got jealous of all the positive attention Andrew Cuomo* was getting and so he lashed out and undermined his own administration's covid policies.
A lot of the momentum for being anti-mask was supercharged by that tweet. And of course he did it for the most petty and insecure reasons which is just classic Trump.
*Cuomo becoming a left wing hero for like two months is just so hilarious in retrospect. My wife's friend actually got her a "Cuomosexual" mug as a gag gift like a year ago. My wife actually uses it purely because she thinks its absolutely hilarious.
Agree with what Wendigo and Susan Hofstader are saying. But watch and see if Trump is the nominee. Yes, he got booed when touting his own vaccine. But he still took the jab. More important, despite the booing, he can say pretty much whatever he wants and not lose his people. As MY pointed out, Trump has allowed DeSantis to get to his right on abortion and doesn't seem bothered by it. I suspect Camp Trump sees DeSantis's extremism on LGBTQ rhetoric the same way. I see Trump pivoting back to Mr. Moderate in the general if he gets there, at least on select issues. Campaigning as Mr. Vaccine would work for him, he would get away with it, the hard-core anti-vaxxers in his party still would have plenty of other reasons to love him, and he has an instinct for this kind of situational tactics, much better than his foes give him credit for. Of course I may be wrong! But this scenario seems plausible to me.
My prediction if Trump is the nominee: vaccinations will play zero role in the general election campaign. Same for COVID as a whole.
(If DeSantis is the nominee, he'll make it an issue and it will hurt him.)
There is a fringe left segment but RFK Jr mostly appeals to republicans, all the good polling and attitudes were because of the Kennedy name
The nursing home thing shows Cuomo was dishonest but I don’t think it killed a single person. The idea that Covid was being brought into nursing homes only by patients and not staff (especially given this was before we knew about masks or how Covid was spread, and we didn’t have any testing availability to even find out who had it) is ridiculous on its face. NY was hit hard because we didn’t have a response ready as a country.
I honestly think we are forgetting how much of FL's COVID "success" was attributable to the fact that early variants of COVID didn't transmit well in warm weather which meant COVID deaths in FL remained relatively low or at least not that extreme until the Delta variant hit. Even now FL covid death numbers aren't that crazy compared to other states likely becomes of the weather issue.
This is very childish. Yes literally everyone reading this newsletter knows that a) vaccines are good and b) Ron DeSantis being negative about them is bad. The point is that what drove DeSantis’ popularity was being right about COVID in 2020 and 2021. Or do you have some other, better theory of why he was so unusually popular for such a brief period of time?
Well, that is very adult of you. Both DeSantis and Cuomo were very popular governors for a time. Each did some things right and some things wrong. Decisive leadership in a terrible crisis may usually excite admiration (and some opposition). I don’t think this history is captured well by endorsing DeSantis's self-presentation as a brave independent evidence-based leader, a narrative consistent with what I think is currently a strong revisionist view of the pandemic, one I find simplistic, that depicts COVID hawks on NPIs as irrational. I would think some of his decisions were based on his study of the evidence and some on his pandering to both partisan views and the understandably strong desire of people not to have their normal lives suspended any longer. Thanks for sharing your views.
DeSantis is just Ted Cruz with a tan. He’s an unlikeable malcontent whose self serving motivations are so transparent it’s almost admirable. A couple of years from now people will think it’s hilarious that anyone ever thought he could be a serious contender for national election. The video complications of DeSantis trying to act human with voters will destroy the internet by next spring.
DeSantis was getting a ton of buzz when it was just political journalists writing for weirdos like us who give a crap about Presidential elections that are years in the future. It occurred to me around 6 months ago, that I've never heard this guy speak. Matt also kept making fun of DeSantis for being short. Why would that stuff matter to someone like me? Then I saw him do some media appearances, and wow. I think stuff like this is quite telling just how weird the political hobbyist community is. We have a very poor sense of what plays with the public and doesn't, which is funny given the subject matter.
The problem is that we have a politics interest-bias - we assume that everyone is as interested in politics (and all that comes with that interest) as we are, and therefore would be interested in wonky topics that are actually relevant to how someone might govern.
One of the hardest things about being an academic studying politics is remembering that the overwhelmingly vast majority of people really do not care about "politics" as such. Which is not to say that they exist outside of political phenomena, of course, but that their awareness of them is just much different.
Ted Cruz doesn’t have a tan? I thought he would have made it to Cancun by now
Winning the primary against Trump was always going to be very hard and would probably end in failure. But DeSantis has really shit the bed with his campaign. I don't think he will have another chance at becoming President. Trump will dominate the GoP until he dies or loses his mind, either as President, or as someone who will pick handpick the GoP candidate, or as Dictator.
I don't understand why he didn't wait until the next election. There was never a way for him to defeat Trump.
What really surprises me is the de Santis didn't early take the line that Trump is unelectable because over 50% of the population don't like him, while de Santis has shown that he has won two elections in a big, electorally competetive state. Sure it would have alienated the "Trump really won" crows but de Santis had to attack Trump, and this was less dangerous than directly attacking Trump like Christie has. He could have played the statesman "Yes I supported Trump, and respect him but he'll certainly lose us the election" which would have been a nicer contrast to Trump's predictable, malicious attacks that were inevitable. It almost seems that de Santis was trying to be more Trumpy than Trump when the base was perfectly happy with the genuine article. That said Trump's hold on the Republican party is such that I don't think anyone could beat him. That's bad for America, terrible for Republicans but great for Democrats.
Big problem here is that it seems like all the GOP candidates except Christie think the "trump really won" crowd is going to be a majority of primary voters so they can't even tell you what the point of them running against trump is.
Even if you believe that, it seems like as a GOP candidate you have to recognize that "actually Trump should still be president" is a losing position for you and do some work to change public perception.
I'm sure it's true that lots of republican primary voters, when asked in a poll, will say they thing Trump really won. I'm sure this is a genuine belief for plenty of them, but it also seems very much like the kind of thing people say when they want to voice their opposition to the other side but don't really have other options.
Matt wrote recently about the Democratic perception of Bill Clinton and how there were fierce defenses of him until Obama took over as the party standard-bearer and people were able to acknowledge that, yes, he was a creep. In the same vein, I think if someone in the GOP just put forward a solid case for themselves a lot of republican voters would start convincing themselves that they never really believed all the election conspiracy nonsense.
According to a large chunk of the GOP primary electorate. Trump is quite popular. In fact, according to them, he even won in 2020. It was just an insufficiently loyal party that stabbed him in the back, or else he'd still be President.
Right after January 6th, I figured that election denialism would be a big problem for the GOP's election margins, because normally parties that lose do some soul searching to win over more voters next time. Republicans either won't do that, or can't appear to do that too vocally.
For all the talk about GOP elites bringing their party closer to the middle and Dem elites pulling to the left, I think we're seeing a shift here. Whether Democrats bellyache too much or too little about not alienating voters is up to the observer, but I think they've grown more attuned to it over the last few years, compared to the GOP. There's a place for popularists, like Matt Yglesias. I don't see that very much on the right. Their more clear-headed voices are either forced into dead-end positions, keeping their heads down, or joining the grift.
Yeah, I think the Dems have gotten smart enough to do things like spending most of their paid media talking about salient issues where they have 70% approval; the Republicans often don’t do that.
The argument he could make is "the Democrats cheated against Trump in 2020 and Trump lost; they cheated against me in 2022 and I won by ten points: I know how to win against their cheating".
But he's not adept enough to do that.
Right? This seems to be the obvious way to square the circle of both validating the previous choices of Trump voters, whilst encouraging them to vote for someone other than Trump.
As others say you can't possibly beat Trump whilst saying almost without qualification that he's the best thing ever. And as Matt Y says, that goes double if your only criticism of Trump is that he's too nice, when it's the most obvious fact in American politics that Donald Trump is a vicious asshole
“he would have lost by a much larger margin in 2020 and taken the GOP House majority down with him. “
huh? Democrats had a House majority after 2018 and kept it in 2020.
Maybe he means that GOP wouldn’t even win back the house in 2022, which is probably true in an environment with less inflation
I think he was talking about the Florida state house.
Great article but you also need to point out that DeSAntis’s first term, and second, included a fair amount of self-serving but good environmental policy. Florida is ground zero for much of climate change and he seems to have understood that red tides and the attendant toxic slurry that blurs one’s vision isn’t great for tourism. So you could as a moderate “Jimmy Buffett/Boomer” retiree who cares about low taxes AND clean beaches vote for him without much concern following the first term.
The extent to which he has gotten the Florida legislature to turn into the Campaign to Elect Ron DeSantis, pushed for judicial initiatives that stack the court system with intellectual lightweights who check the federalist society box, and used his line item veto power in the second term to gut money unanimously dedicated to conservation efforts in my former state are under reported negative hits on his moderate image.
I suspect many Florida voters feel a lot like the mask just got ripped off in the second act and have buyer’s remorse. If the democrats had a functional political party in the state, maybe they’d have something to say about it. The party disfunction there is frankly shocking.
It does seem pretty clear that desantis won’t be in Washington or Tallahassee in a couple years. He did not understand the assignment.
The Florida Democratic party has been in the wilderness for a long time, but following the 2020 election there was an organized effort on the part of Bernie people (not suggesting the Vermont senator had anything to do with this) to take over county party organizations and run things even worse than they had been up to that point. After a couple of years of chaos, I think that’s over but it’s still going to be a challenge for them to be competitive above the local level.
As someone who begrudgingly voted for him in 2018 because Gilium was such an awful candidate, I was pleasantly surprised at how pragmatically he governed for the first two years in office. He’s been an utter disaster since Covid and I think MY hit the nail on the head in that his “Covid success” was really more lucky than anything derived from policy other being against whatever liberals were for at the time.
I am going to posit a different theory. Although Matt is correct that RDS is probably too far right, his biggest issue is that once he was introduced to the National stage, everyone learned that he was short, socially awkward, has a high voice and lacks personal charisma. I am no Trump fan, but he eclipses RDS easily on those four scales.
Tbf, for me, I remember Matt pointing out what a dweeb DeSantis was, when the media was breathlessly talking about him as some sort of Super-Trump.
Yeah DeSantis had the strange position of simultaneously being the "reasonable Republican" that could have won back moderate affluent suburb voters, while also appealing to the weirdo Trump base, while also doing really well with Hispanics. Could have just stayed the course and probably been president.
I don't know whether he's personally pickled his brain in the Internet or if he's just getting terrible campaign advice from posters?
From listening to Florida politicos who have known DeSantis for a while, I think the "reasonable Republican who appeals to suburbans and weirdos" was the fluke part. They all said that the more people get to know DeSantis the more they will see how uncomfortable and weird he is.
I think that a lot of his problem was that the “reasonable Republican” thing crumbled under scrutiny— particularly once Trump himself started hitting DeSantis for being too extreme on Social Security, Medicare, and abortion rights.
NIce article. My one nitpick is this statement: "Trump made some ironclad promises". There is no such thing as an ironclad promise with Trump. If it had really mattered to him to appoint different kinds of people to SCOTUS, he would have done it. He was willing to live up to that promise because he didn't really know or care anything about the issue. So he let the Federalist Society give him short lists of SCOTUS candidates, and interestingly, if you look back at those lists, Trump consistently chose the sanest person from the options he was given. If Neil Gorsuch is too conservative for your tastes (probably a safe bet for most Slow Boring readers), you would have liked the other options even less.