{"id":40108,"date":"2023-12-15T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T17:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=40108"},"modified":"2023-12-15T12:00:18","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T17:00:18","slug":"letter-florida-gov-ron-desantis-political-future-is-on-the-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2023\/12\/15\/letter-florida-gov-ron-desantis-political-future-is-on-the-line\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis\u2019 Political Future Is On The Line"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Daniel McCarthy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ron DeSantis is running as the true-blue conservative in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And he\u2019s learning the hard way that Republicans don\u2019t nominate true-blue conservatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Donald Trump leads every poll<\/a> by double-digits, the Florida governor who seemed such a promising prospect just a year ago is now at risk of falling to third place. If Nikki Haley bests DeSantis in Iowa, his 2024 campaign won\u2019t be the only casualty; his hopes of ever becoming president will dim, and rivals won\u2019t fear him as they look to \u201928 or \u201932.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did DeSantis go from a 19-point reelection only a year ago to a fight for his political life today?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s been a successful governor during trying times, and he\u2019s never shy about comparing his COVID record to President Donald Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a moment when university presidents are under fire, even resigning, for their capitulation to campus radicalism, DeSantis has shown Republicans how to get tough with higher ed and compel schools like New College of Florida to change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DeSantis takes a stronger line against abortion and transgenderism than Haley does, and he insists that he\u2019s a better fiscal conservative than Trump proved to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s at the forefront of immigration battles, too, and if his foreign policy doesn\u2019t satisfy either hawks or doves, he seems attuned to the cautious disposition of Republican voters today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His record and rhetoric make DeSantis an outstanding candidate for the Republican right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in 2016 Trump taught the Republican right a lesson that it quickly forgot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A real-estate tycoon and reality TV host without a day of experience in office \u2014 and with a history of moderate or even liberal statements \u2014 swept away a whole field of GOP contenders with iron-clad conservative credentials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Republicans were looking to nominate a leader who checked all the boxes of conservative orthodoxy, they could have picked Ted Cruz or Scott Walker or practically any of the 2016 aspirants other than Trump. Yet as singular as Trump was and is, the failure of his conservative rivals was typical of how the right has fared in Republican presidential contests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two George Bushes, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney \u2014 not a single one of them was a true-blue conservative icon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither was Richard Nixon or Dwight Eisenhower. Barry Goldwater was Mr. Conservative when he won the nomination in 1964, but for a race most Republican leaders considered unwinnable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since World War II, the only conservative\u2019s conservative to get the nomination at a time when the party thought it could prevail was Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s why Reagan remains the singular totem of conservative orthodoxy and practically the only role model any Republican hopeful cites to prove his or her bona fides \u2014 though DeSantis deserves credit for referencing Calvin Coolidge in last week\u2019s debate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not that Republican voters aren\u2019t generally conservative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s simply that they\u2019re not thoroughly, consistently, and single-mindedly conservative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a politician stakes his campaign on a demonstration of how thorough, consistent, and philosophically pure he is, he might impress conservative journalists and policy wonks, but they don\u2019t pick the nominee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DeSantis isn\u2019t too conservative to win, but his campaign sells him like spinach \u2014 as if it\u2019s irrelevant whether voters like him, so long as they acknowledge that he\u2019s right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The campaign also fell for the myth of a \u201cmoment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The DeSantis reelection triumph generated endless pundit chatter about how his \u201cmoment\u201d had arrived \u2014 much as in 2014 journalists dazzled by recent successes of the Tea Party declared that a \u201clibertarian moment\u201d was upon us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And a moment was all it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have always been three problems with taking DeSantis\u2019 landslide in 2022 as indicative of his prospects in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is that his 2018 gubernatorial contest was as notable for its narrow margin as his victory last year was for its wide one. DeSantis beat Andrew Gillum in that first race by less than half a percentage point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2018 was a very good year for Democrats, so DeSantis still bucked a trend \u2014 but only barely. And a trend is the second reason his 2022 blowout needs to be contextualized \u2014 because that was a great year for incumbents in both parties, even if it was a disappointing cycle for Republicans overall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third problem with reading too much into DeSantis\u2019 reelection is specific to that race: The Democratic Party was bitterly divided in Florida that year, with a party-switching ex-Republican, Charlie Crist, at the top of its ticket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DeSantis\u2019 reelection results were rock-solid, but they were never a sign his \u201cmoment\u201d had come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now his future is on the line, and on the ballot in Iowa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Daniel McCarthy Ron DeSantis is running as the true-blue conservative in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. And he\u2019s learning the hard way that Republicans don\u2019t nominate true-blue… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[7037],"class_list":["post-40108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letters","tag-letter-florida-gov-ron-desantis-political-future-is-on-the-line"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}