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Joe Biden became president in 2021 because the alternative was four more years of Donald Trump. If Ronald Dion DeSantis, who is announcing his candidacy on Twitter today, wins the Republican Party nomination next year, it will also be because the alternative is you-know-who. Trump fatigue is a real phenomenon: even many Trump supporters think it’s time to move on, which is the key to the forty-four-year-old DeSantis’s appeal. He is Trump but he gets stuff done. He is Trump but you get two terms.
At the same time, DeSantis’s biggest problem is that he’s up against Donald Trump, one of the most effective political campaigners of the twenty-first century. DeSantis’s record as governor of Florida is impressive: he’s fought culture wars and come out on top; during Covid, he rebelled against the biosecurity consensus and won. In the November midterms, as various high-profile, Trump-endorsed candidates failed, DeSantis was reelected in Florida by over 20 percentage points.
The Sunshine State, with its large Hispanic population, culture war clashes and sharp mix of rich and poor, is often talked about as a “bellwether” for the future of national politics. But America and its politics are far too vast and sprawling to be boiled down to one state, even one as populous as Florida. Moreover, solid administrative experience as a governor is not necessarily a good launchpad for a successful presidential bid. It worked for George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. It didn’t work for Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney or Michael Dukakis, to name but five.
DeSantis is far, far behind in the polls
Reagan, Clinton and (to a lesser extent) Bush possessed a certain charismatic magic. DeSantis is an “introvert in an extrovert’s world,” as the Trump ally and Florida insider Roger Stone put it to me earlier this year. He often seems uncomfortable engaging with other humans. His “faulty robot” laugh at a meet-and-greet in Iowa last week went viral. Some pundits have compared him to Nixon, another distinctly uncozy figure, who nonetheless won the White House. But could Nixon have thrived in the internet age, when every cameraphone can catch every awkward moment?
DeSantis’s decision to announce through Twitter, and the auspices of Elon Musk, is interesting. The recently fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson has also said that he’ll be broadcasting on Twitter in the future. Is the platform finally becoming a kind public sphere for the anti-woke right? Musk also removed Trump’s Twitter, but so far the Donald has declined to tweet, preferring his own platform, Truth Social. Perhaps he might be baited into attacking “DeSanctimonious” on Twitter now, though I doubt it.
For now, even with the buzz around today’s announcement, DeSantis is far, far behind in the polls and has been slipping further back in recent weeks. That suits the Democrats fine, since their Biden reelection message appears to be essentially the same as 2020: i.e., he’s not Trump. Will DeSantis spare America from the same grim choice in 2024? It’s too early to say. For now, however, his chances look slim.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
