Though he left little doubt about his ultimate ambition over the six months since his landslide re-election as governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis made it official on Wednesday, May 24. He is joining the fast-growing field in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. And while there was roughly zero doubt he would do so, the story of his entrance into the Donald Trump-dominated fray was less about the fact that he announced so much as how he announced. Revealing his official candidacy during a conversation on Twitter Spaces with its new boss and resident superstar, Elon Musk, DeSantis may well have accelerated an ongoing trend, shifting the center of political gravity away from traditional media and toward social media in general and Twitter in particular.
But with hundreds of thousands seeking access to the ground-breaking announcement, Twitter was overloaded, the system crashed, and who-knows-how-many were not able to listen to the audio-only announcement, discussion, and question-and-answer components of an event months in the making. This failure to launch will undoubtedly be exploited heavily by his opponents, feeding into the narrative promoted in pro-Trump circles that DeSantis is not ready for prime time – at least not yet.
When he did finally get started several minutes late, DeSantis’ message – and accompanying slogan – centered around his intent to forge “our great American comeback.” He proclaimed that American decline is not inevitable; it is a choice. His overarching theme was that we must restore sanity – he used that word and its antonym insanity several times. Referring to his controversial stance on COVID shutdowns, he spoke of how he was very lonely in those decisions, but he “held the line when freedom hung in the balance.” He promised to “never surrender to the woke mob and bring the administrative class to heel.”
Responding to what he termed a “political stunt” by the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP in issuing a travel advisory about his state to people of color, DeSantis deftly asserted that, while crime explodes in Democrat-run cities across the nation, the crime rate in Florida is at a 50-year low. He cited the fact that his land of sunshine contains more black-owned businesses than any state in the nation and is second in math and third in reading among black students. And then he stuck the landing by revealing that NAACP president Leon W. Russell lives in – wait for it – Florida.
But while he spoke on many subjects, there was one word he did not utter. You guessed it: Trump. He did say the federal bureaucracy failed the country during the pandemic, even as he avoided direct criticism of Trump, for basing crucial decisions on politics over medicine. At the same time, he followed Trump in promising to build a wall on the southern border, to reverse Biden’s policies that have led to record illegal immigration, and to restore the energy independence achieved during the Trump administration.
In the end, though, the line of the night might have belonged to Musk who, in response to DeSantis mentioning how much he had paid to acquire Twitter, said: “Twitter was expensive, but free speech is priceless.”
DeSantis Faces a Growing Field of Candidates
Ron DeSantis (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The state of this race has changed substantially from November, when DeSantis was riding high, and Trump was all but written off. And it may change several more times before a nominee is finally chosen. But for the time being, one can’t help but think that the best-laid plans of so many candidates have taken a major and unexpected hit. Not just DeSantis, but fellow candidates Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, and little-known but impressive Vivek Ramaswamy, plus other prospective candidates such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Chris Christie, initially based their candidacies on the assumption that the GOP was ready to move on from Trump. But they have now paradoxically fallen victim to the transparent targeting of Trump by his enemies under false pretenses, as Democrats obviously try to tempt or induce the Republican faithful to nominate Trump.
Given the baked-in reality that the geriatric Joe Biden offers little in the way of his own merit, beyond not being Trump, the left clearly believes that the 45th president is the only Republican they are certain to beat. But while the decision to draw Republicans into voting for Trump does not exactly constitute a riverboat gamble considering how toxic Trump is to so many, there is considerable downside risk for Democrats. Can they truly count on vanquishing Trump again when the country is in economic and cultural decline, and the alternative to the status quo is a president who already stewarded a vibrant economy free of inflation and the threat of recession – which increasingly mark the current political landscape – and the Biden administration? God knows what the left might do if Trump manages to win again.
So, how can DeSantis overcome a huge deficit in recent surveys amid the stinging barbs of not just Trump but now Haley, who expended part of her ad budget on labeling DeSantis as merely a Trump apostle, closing with an expression first employed by Barry Goldwater, GOP presidential nominee in 1964: a choice, not an echo. This is evidence that, despite what the polls look like at the moment and corporate media’s portrayal of him as a declining political asset, Trump and the others in the field know just how well-funded and organized the DeSantis campaign is. He has drawn multiple big-money donors away from Trump and has a plan to outwork Trump by visiting all 99 counties in Iowa and spending huge amounts from his ample campaign war chest there and in New Hampshire, understanding that he must either win or be highly competitive in those first two contests in order to effectuate a final mano a mano with Trump. That is when we would get to see how he not only delivers a punch but – especially with Trump in his face – how he takes one.
While he had made a name for himself as an outspoken cultural warrior, particularly since the overnight radicalization of the country in the wake of the George Floyd affair, DeSantis also has demonstrated extraordinary electoral success, administrative initiative, and competence. He has pushed through several pieces of legislation – on school choice, illegal immigration, sexual indoctrination of children, vaccines, and, most famously, Disney – further cementing Florida as a deep red state.
The governor’s leadership in the aftermath of the state’s most devasting hurricane (Ian) in some 90 years was so effective that even Biden had to admit it was “remarkable.” And to demonstrate his appeal in the undeniably critical battleground of Florida, not only did he score a lopsided victory over a well-known establishment Democrat in his 2022 gubernatorial race but his down-ballot influence also led to GOP dominance of the legislature. Republicans now control 70% of seats in the state house, and even more impressive is that his party pitched a shutout against Democrats across the Sunshine State by securing every single statewide office for the first time ever. Deep red indeed.
Anyone expecting DeSantis, facing a yawning gulf between him and Trump in the polls, to go quietly into the night is in for a rude awakening. As a strapping 44-year-old fighter, not unlike his bombastic rival, and proven vote-getter, his future is undoubtedly long and bright. What remains to be seen is whether the time for the fulfillment of his ultimate ambition is now.
