Team DeSantis: We’re about action, not Beltway chatter by Byron York
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/team-desantis-were-about-action-not-beltway-chatter
There’s no doubt Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has fallen far behind former President Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican nomination polls. In the last days of February, Trump had a 12.8 percentage point lead over DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, with all the other Republican challengers and likely challengers way, way back. Now, Trump’s lead over DeSantis is 29.2 points, with all the other GOP candidates still farther behind. DeSantis is actually closer to the bottom of the field than he is to Trump.
That has led to a lot of criticism of the DeSantis campaign and talk that they’re just not up to the job. “The DeSantis people are rookies,” one veteran of New Hampshire Republican politics, Fergus Cullen, told Politico recently. Reams have been written about DeSantis himself not being particularly skilled at the kind of schmoozing and glad-handing required of presidential candidates dealing with the public and donors alike.
The loudest critical voice, of course, comes from Trump, whose ratings have soared amid a politicized indictment in New York and a politicized rape lawsuit in New York. Trump has used the increased support to launch a relentless series of attacks on DeSantis. The latest comes this week from top Trump campaign officials Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who released a memo titled “DeSantis is Burning Through Cash Just to Slide Further In the Polls.”
LaCivita and Wiles accuse the DeSantis campaign of wasting millions of dollars on ineffective advertising to “fill the vacuum of leadership the governor left in Florida while campaigning (horribly) overseas in Europe.” Doing so amounts to defrauding donors, the Trump team says: “What you are witnessing is a fleecing on an epic scale. Tens of millions of donor dollars spent, while poll numbers … drop.”
Such concern trolling is obviously an irritant for the DeSantis camp. But they have a simple response: While Trump is campaigning (and fighting off legal actions), DeSantis is … governing. And DeSantis is governing in a distinctly conservative way, a way that embeds conservative principles in the laws of the nation’s third-largest state.
“While the political chattering class continues to obsess over meaningless process narratives and Beltway gossip that conservatives across the country could care less about,” an internal DeSantis political team document says, “Ron DeSantis is tuning out the noise to continue delivering historic results for the people of Florida. The governor is building on a recent string of legislative victories by this week signing major packages cracking down on crime and combatting ESG.”
The first of the two measures cited by the DeSantis political team, the crime legislation, would, in the words of a press release from the governor’s office, “strengthen pretrial detention and push back against ‘bail reform’ efforts that have made other states significantly less safe, increase sentences for drug traffickers that target children, and subject child rapists to the death penalty.”
The second of the two measures, “combatting ESG,” is a continuation of DeSantis’s battle against “woke” politics. The bill, again in the words of the governor’s office, will “protect Floridians from the corporatist environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) movement — a worldwide effort to inject woke political ideology across the financial sector, placing politics above the fiduciary duty to make the best financial decisions for beneficiaries.”
The DeSantis political team argues that those two measures alone would mark a significant achievement for the governor. But there were a lot of others, too, in his first term in office and now, with a new slate of laws concerning gun rights, school choice, and frivolous lawsuits. Finally, DeSantis recently signed the Heartbeat Protection Act, essentially outlawing abortion in Florida after six weeks. But that bill will not take effect until the resolution of a state Supreme Court case about Florida’s current 15-week limit.
Whether the abortion measure will help or hurt DeSantis if he makes it to a national general election for president is an open question. It might well hurt. But there seems little doubt that it will be a net positive in a Republican primary race, and that’s what DeSantis is in, unofficially, right now.
And in that primary race, there is no question that DeSantis has fallen far behind Trump. Yes, it’s extremely early. And yes, many things can happen between now and the start of actual caucus and primary voting next February. But Trump is clearly trying to inflict so much damage on DeSantis that the Florida governor’s record will have little impact on Republican voters. If the Trump plan works, DeSantis will take the debate stage and say, “We passed this bill and that bill,” and voters will say, “So what?”
But there’s another way to look at it. In the next 12 months, Trump will have to negotiate a minefield that no other candidate for president has ever faced. Those months will see developments in major investigations into his conduct: the local investigation in Georgia into his efforts to overturn the results of the election there; the Justice Department investigation into the classified documents matter; and the Justice Department investigation into his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021. That is on top of the politicized cases mentioned above — the New York indictment and the rape lawsuit.
That’s a lot of possibly bad news. Perhaps some of it will help Trump in the GOP primary polls, as the clearly political nature of the New York case did. But still: It’s a lot of possibly bad news. And while Trump deals with it, DeSantis plans to keep moving ahead, governing while Trump defends himself.
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