ANALYSIS:
The answer is finally in. For months Washington’s political class obsessed about this week’s midterm elections, wondering whether grim predictions for Democrats would translate into a thumping at the ballot box. They didn’t, and one man is getting the blame: Donald Trump. Now, in the election’s wake, all eyes are on a different set of surveys - among Republican voters about who they want to be their party’s next presidential candidate. A new name is on the rise: Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old governor of Florida who owes his start to Trump, but now may come to usurp him.
On a bad night for his party, DeSantis vastly outperformed, crushing his Democratic rival by 20 points, up from the three-point margin of victory Trump secured over Biden in the vital swing state two years ago. Swing-state no more. Wrenching Hispanic support from Democrats, DeSantis has pulled Florida - a vital prize on the path to the White House at presidential elections - firmly and definitively into the Republican camp. Few in that camp, bruised by last night’s small margin of victory elsewhere, will have failed to notice.
All the more so because Trump’s performance, even though he wasn’t on the ticket, was miserable. After a host of Trump-endorsed candidates flopped with voters, The Donald’s grip on the party he once seemed to hold in the palm of his hand could finally be slipping. Two years ahead of an election which may be the Republicans’ to lose against an enfeebled Joe Biden or an underwhelming Kamala Harris, the likely picture of America’s next first couple is changing. For Donald and Melania, read Ron and Casey.
Yet if DeSantis owes Trump, 76, his career, has pinched a policy or two, and assumed his mantle as a hammer of the “woke”, the two men could, in many ways, hardly be more different.
It’s not just their age. Where Trump was born into wealth and privilege, DeSantis grew up in a modest blue-collar household, his father a TV engineer, his mother a nurse. His rise - to Yale and Harvard - then into the military and up the ranks of the Republican Party as a congressman, seemed to epitomise the hard-work-can-get-you-anywhere attitude that lies at the heart of the American dream. Even today, his net worth is a few hundred thousand dollars, rather than the billions that Trump boasts of.
The irony, of course, is that when push came to shove in the 2018 race to become Republican candidate for Florida governor, it was connections, not elbow-grease, that secured DeSantis’s success. Against all the odds, he won, beating the heavy favourite to land the nomination. Few doubt it was down to a single message from a president whom DeSantis had relentlessly defended on Fox News: “Congressman Ron DeSantis is a brilliant young leader, Yale and then Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida,” Trump tweeted. “He loves our Country and is a true FIGHTER!”
Once in office, though, differences began to emerge again. The governor went out of his way to appeal to moderates - pardoning four black men in a wrongful rape case dating back 70 years, boosting pay for teachers and legalising marijuana for medical use. Then came the pandemic.
Covid was the game-changer in DeSantis’s governorship. Like Trump, he came to see it as an oppressive burden on a free society, where mitigation measures - lockdowns, masks in schools - were every bit as bad as the disease itself.
Unlike Trump, however, this was a position DeSantis - a studious, lawyerly, almost reclusive figure with few friends - arrived at after relentless trawling through reports and data. As other parts of the country, like liberal New York, shut down, Florida opened up. While direct comparisons are never easy, when Covid began to ease, Florida had not only prospered more, its death toll was lower than the Big Apple. DeSantis, in the biggest call of his career, affecting millions of lives, had been vindicated.
Success propelled him on to the national stage, and his name was linked to the 2024 White House race for the first time. To this day he remains tight-lipped on a bid. But since the pandemic, his policies have become more overtly right of centre, perhaps in recognition that to have a shot at the presidency, he will have to appeal to Trump voters.
Today he talks in bold terms of his Catholic faith - his family has Italian roots - and in the most uncompromising terms about immigration. Earlier this year, he famously flew 50 Venezuelan migrants to that east coast cradle of privilege, Martha’s Vineyard, to see how well-meaning liberals would feel confronted with the realities of a soft-touch border policy. Naturally, the outrage only boosted his popularity back home, even among Florida’s Hispanic population who themselves fled Cuba’s regime in decades past.
Promising to make Florida the “the brick wall against all things woke” has proved catnip, too.
But such lines are not purely, or mostly, self-glorifying bombast, à la Trump. Instead, DeSantis skillfully positions himself as the champion of the voter. His policies and campaign ads present him as on the side of legal residents against immigrants; law abiders against criminals; even on the side of the individual conservative against big business, like the local titan Disney, which dared criticise his ban on discussing homosexuality with children under the age of nine.
Yet big business is not deterred from financing his campaign - he raised almost US$200 million (NZ$340m) for this election, a record. His promise of delivering Trump policies without erratic Trump behaviour is increasingly intoxicating for conservatives. As Daniel McCarthy, former editor of The American Conservative magazine, puts it: “DeSantis still represents a turn to the right for the Republican Party, but he’s someone who does it in a very effective way, whereas Trump does it in a very idiosyncratic way to say the least.”
Key to DeSantis’s appeal in the American suburbs is his family life - his three small children, Mamie, Madison, Mason, and, above all, his wife Casey. Like Melania, she is always stylishly turned out, but she is far more than mere adornment to her husband’s political career.
In fact, as his closest advisor - even dubbed co-governor by some - the two-for-the-price-of-one political package they form is closer to the team of Hillary and Bill Clinton than the Trumps. She interviews candidates to join his staff. When Hurricane Ian wrought havoc on the state in September, they strode through the wreckage in matching outfits. To his sometimes wooden persona and delivery, she adds humanity and warmth.
Earlier this year, Casey DeSantis described in a campaign ad, her voice choking, how her husband had supported her after she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, through tortuous chemotherapy, and raised their children when she could not. It was hugely successful. She is now in remission.
Such media skills are no surprise. After a middle-class upbringing in Ohio and a university degree in economics, Casey DeSantis (née Black) moved to Florida to become a TV presenter, and her knack for spinning simple, powerful stories that connect with normal people has been the foundation of the couple’s political strategy. These days, when he announces a policy, she will endorse it on social media, describing why as “a mom of a 5-, 4- and 2-year-old” it works for them. Without her, few imagine he would be governor, let alone a hot tip for the White House.
There is a long way to go. Trump’s lead among Republican voters in the last survey before the midterms was still gargantuan: some 25 points. But that is already well down from earlier this year, when 40- and 50-point margins over DeSantis made him a shoo-in as presidential candidate. After these results, it will surely fall again. America is waking up to a political landscape in which Democrat attacks on “MAGA Extremists” have proved highly effective, with swing voters concerned, notably, by landmark anti-abortion rulings from Trump-appointed Supreme Court judges. Suddenly, a new calculation is emerging - one in which Trump’s much anticipated “very big announcement” next week, expected to be a declaration he will run again in 2024, is music not to the ears of the Republican Party strategists but to Democrats.
Trump, of course, is unlikely to give up. He is already playing the victim. “I think if they win, I should get all the credit, and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all,” he said of Republican candidates as votes were being counted. “But it will probably be just the opposite.”
And, as Daniel McCarthy points out, “if anyone can perform a miracle in future, [Trump] can. He is still the most charismatic [Republican figure] and able to generate larger crowds across the country than any other contender. He will also be very nasty in any primary battle.”
DeSantis’s best strategy, McCarthy says, is to avoid such a head-to-head and let Trump make his case. “If he doesn’t gain momentum and it looks like the Republicans are going to lose in 2024, DeSantis can come riding to the rescue.”
Trump is definitely rattled. The giveaway is the abuse he has started directing at his one-time protege. Previous rivals have been dissed and dismissed as “Lying Ted Cruz” and “Little Marco Rubio”. Now he is lashing out at the man he has started calling “DeSanctimonious”.
“I [could] tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering,” the last president said of the man who may well be the next president. “I know more about him than anybody, other than, perhaps, his wife.”
It has taken just four years to move from endorsement to threat. But after these midterm results, Ron DeSantis may conclude that if he wants to make it to the very top, he needs to listen to his wife more, and Donald Trump less.