Most great politicians have the skin of an elephant and the memory of a flea. After all, today’s adversary might be tomorrow’s ally.
Polls still show DeSantis as having the best chance to defeat Donald Trump in the GOP race. But they also show his prospects rapidly heading in the wrong direction. RealClearPolitics found in its average of polls that in late February, DeSantis trailed Trump by just 13 percentage points. On Monday, however, Trump led DeSantis by 37 points, with much of the gap having grown in recent weeks.
This trend line is hardly encouraging for DeSantis’s theory of the case. His bet is that Republican voters want a nominee who has a proven track record of enacting conservative policies and who models Trump’s pugnacity but is not burdened with the former president’s mountain of baggage.
Using GOP control of the Florida legislature as though it were a campaign billboard, DeSantis has loosened the state’s gun laws; lowered the threshold for imposing the death penalty; expanded school vouchers; and imposed “anti-woke” restrictions on teachers and administrators at every level of public education, including in the state’s universities. He has made it illegal for doctors to provide gender-transition care for minors. To top it off, he signed a bill establishing a six-week abortion ban, which — if allowed to take effect by the Florida Supreme Court — would be one of the most draconian in the nation.
Ta-da! Yet his poll numbers keep going down, not up.
DeSantis is not helping himself with his obsessive crusade against the Walt Disney Co., which offended him last year by criticizing his “don’t say gay” law banning discussion of gender and sexuality in public schools. Trying to punish a company for statements that had no practical impact — except, perhaps, on DeSantis’s brittle ego — seems wildly at odds with traditional conservative values.
It also seems really stupid. Disney CEO Bob Iger announced last week that the company is canceling plans for a new $1 billion office campus near Walt Disney World that would have created 2,000 jobs. Earlier this year, Iger said at a shareholders’ meeting that Disney had long-term plans to invest $17 billion in the Disney World complex — which means that Iger has 16 billion more cards to play in this poker game. How many does DeSantis have?
The Disney thing would just be a loopy sideshow if it didn’t highlight traits that could hold DeSantis back as a presidential candidate — and that would be dangerous for the nation and the world if, heaven forbid, he ever became president: paper-thin skin, a propensity to hold grudges and a tendency to go way too far.
The abortion legislation is a prime example. Last year, before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, DeSantis signed into law a 15-week ban. That restriction is now in effect, even as the state Supreme Court considers a challenge filed by Planned Parenthood and other groups that is based on prior rulings by that court protecting abortion as a privacy right under the Florida constitution.
DeSantis could have left the issue alone. But he apparently determined that no potential competitor should outflank him on abortion, so he demanded that the legislature give him a six-week ban. Lawmakers complied last month. But it is clear from polls and election results that setting the deadline for terminating a pregnancy at a point before many women even know they are pregnant goes far beyond what even many “pro-life” Americans are prepared to mandate. Perhaps that is why DeSantis announced his signing of that bill into law on a Thursday around 11 p.m. with no public fanfare.
In a phone call with supporters and donors last week, the New York Times reports, DeSantis argued that he should be the nominee “based on all the data in the swing states, which is not great for the former president and probably insurmountable because people aren’t going to change their view of him.”
But how does he imagine his six-week abortion ban, his law letting Floridians carry concealed firearms without a permit, his attempts to squelch free speech on college campuses, and his death-match against the Magic Kingdom will play in those swing states? Why would suburban women who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 vote for Ron DeSantis in 2024?
Great politicians learn from their mistakes and course correct as necessary. DeSantis seems not to understand that going full-speed ahead is a bad idea if you’re approaching a cliff.
