Ron DeSantis Shows in Florida How to Play Politics as a Team Sport By Dan McLaughlin
As I have noted on a couple of recent occasions, what Republicans lack right now is a party leader who prioritizes the best interests of the party and its voters. This affects the party’s ability to recruit the best candidates, get them nominated, and get them elected. One of the essential conservative critiques of Donald Trump as a party leader has always been that everything was about Trump: He has often preferred that the party lose rather than win without him. This impulse could be tempered so long as he was in office; as president, Trump was often willing to keep his endorsements on much the same page with the candidates Mitch McConnell supported — even when McConnell’s judgments were wrong — and to back in the general people he opposed in the primary. But the fundamental problem of Trump’s character and motivations reasserted itself, first in the 2021 Georgia runoffs and again in 2022.
For a contrast, look at what Ron DeSantis is now doing. On a national level, DeSantis conspicuously stayed out of Republican primaries, but he is lending a hand where it is most wanted and needed — even at the cost of putting him onstage with extremely sketchy Republican statewide nominees such as Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake, or backing candidates such as Lee Zeldin who have a serious uphill battle. But within Florida, DeSantis was much more engaged in the primaries; now that they’re over, as Gary Fineout of Politico reported this morning, DeSantis is putting $2.5 million of his colossal $122.5 million campaign war chest into expanding the Republican majority in the Florida Senate:
DeSantis has already had a hand in helping mold the state Senate to his liking, endorsing several Republicans even though Senate GOP leaders had initially planned to support other candidates. The apparent thinking behind DeSantis’ help is that he wants to assist Senate Republicans across the board and not any one candidate. But it’s also yet another reason that DeSantis will likely expect support for his legislative agenda if — as expected — he wins another term.
This is the way.
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