What Ron DeSantis has in common with Kamala Harris and Scott Walker
Once seen as a promising – or frightening – Republican alternative to Trump, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ candidacy seems to be tanking. The main indicators are his failure to secure party endorsements and his decline in polls among Republican potential primary voters. There are lots of theories, and as Seth Masket points out, a lot of them rely on candidate characteristics – including the same ones that were recently cited as DeSantis strengths.
For me, what DeSantis calls to mind is a specific category of presidential hopeful: the one that seems perfect, even obvious on paper, and yet never achieves lift off once the contest starts in earnest. Other recent candidates in this category are vice president Kamala Harris on the Democratic side and, on the Republican side, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. They’re interesting candidates, seemingly emblematic of their respective parties, and yet unable, thus far, to come close to winning the presidential nomination.
But looking closely at the candidates can only get us so far. What actually draws these candidates together is that, despite seeming to have the right combination of characteristics to be broadly appealing to the party coalition, they actually exposure party fissures that are newly emergent and not fully formed yet.
Going into 2015, Scott Walker seemed like a candidate who could appeal to the different factions of the Republican Party. He was “battle-tested” and disciplined, and had risen to national prominence in Republican circles by pushing a controversial bill that weakened public sector unions in Wisconsin. It has had lasting changes in the state, and formed part of a national movement of such actions at the state level. But as a presidential candidate, Walker never took off with voters or in the endorsement primary. What Walker wasn’t was much of a populist. He was very much a creature of the party establishment, and he was very economically conservative. Maybe no one would have identified these as the key divisions in the Republican Party at the time – the Tea Party’s anti-establishment rhetoric hadn’t made much difference in the 2012 presidential contest, and the party’s official rhetoric is pretty uniformly conservative on economic issues. But Trump got the nomination on exactly these appeals – indicting the failures of the establishment, promising to protect and even expand popular government programs, and, of course, the third pillar: immigration. This was yet another division that had been lurking in the Republican coalition, between nativists and those more open to immigration. Walker’s position on the issue was unclear, with earlier statements indicating that he was closer to the typical business position on the issue – more open, and miles away from Trump’s border wall stance.
Looking ahead to Kamala Harris in 2019, the California Senator seemed poised to be a very competitive candidate. She was a vocal opponent of Trump and earned national attention questioning administration officials in Senate hearings in 2017. She also seemed like a sort of Obama political protégé, highly polished and ready to embody the diversity of the Democratic coalition.[1] Nominating an African American woman seemed like a reasonable way to demonstrate the party’s progressive outlook and speak to women who felt burned after Hillary Clinton’s defeat. But Harris’s poll numbers never recovered from a decline in August 2019, though she did a bit better in the endorsements game than Walker. Like Walker, her candidacy didn’t make it to Iowa or New Hampshire. It would be tempting to write her off as a poor candidate, but she polled well as a vice presidential pick. Harris, too, aggravated a couple of key fault lines among Democrats. The electability question reflects a long-standing tension among Democrats about the party’s need to represent a diverse array of constituents, including African Americans – a reliable and core Democratic group while also needing to appeal to an electorate that has often proven averse to prioritizing Black interests. In 2020, a risk-averse approach won out. The other intraparty issue is related – probably the one that cost Harris any kind of following with progressives – was her record as California Attorney General and as a district attorney. The refrain “Kamala’s a cop” might have kept her candidacy from taking off among. It also exposed a sore spot among Democrats that has yet to be resolved, with presidential candidates not wanting to appear either too close to the police nor too critical. It’s also worth noting that Biden was not especially progressive on these issues, but his record was so long and varied that it sort of washed out, while Harris’ experience as AG was a substantial portion of her political resume. Biden’s selection of Harris as his vice president shows that these challenges weren’t fatal to her political rise. There were also notable issues with her campaign, and the challenges of standing out in a crowded field. But it’s worth considering how these crucial factors – evolving and emerging fissures – hindered her with key elements of the party.
Which brings us to DeSantis. The political press was presenting him – sometimes in ominous tones – as the more effective and disciplined alternative to Trump. He was elected by narrow margins as Florida’s governor in 2018, held up as an early sign of Trump’s influence over the GOP. In 2022, another poor showing for Republicans, he was overwhelmingly reelected – in what was once considered a highly competitive state. But there are signs of trouble in this campaign. His bid for endorsements hasn’t gone very well, and his poll numbers have fallen while Trump’s have risen, even though he was once Trump’s closest competitor.
DeSantis has leaned hard into the culture wars, claiming that Florida is “where woke goes to die,” and picking a fight with Disney over its opposition to the governor’s policies on LGBTQ rights. And it seems possible that DeSantis, too, has stumbled into some intra-party disagreements that weren’t really the main ones on the radar. First, while the Republican party electorate is a lot more socially conservative than the country as a whole, a hard right turn on cultural and social issues isn’t necessarily a winner there. Six-week abortion bans, which DeSantis has recently signed, are wildly out of step with public opinion (as of 2022, around a third of Republicans supported abortion rights). About 25% of Republicans want to see drag shows banned entirely – enough to be a substantial force within the party, but well shy of a majority faction. Trump has somehow managed to continue his strategic ambiguity on these issues, despite being the person who appointed the Supreme Court justices that allowed Roe to fall. But he’s dodged the substance, and perhaps now people expect even less policy substance from him. DeSantis, on the other hand, has staked out very clear positions.
The other piece is the weaponization of government against one’s political opponents, another area where DeSantis seems determined to out-Trump Trump. And this, in particular, might account for why the elite support isn’t there. Conventional conservatives may not feel warm to the idea that the government should be in the business of aggravating big corporate interests. And astute political observers will note that using office this way is the kind of thing that brings down presidencies. It smacks of Watergate and Nixon’s worst tendencies, of smallness and paranoia and smoking gun tapes.
When people talk about DeSantis’ personal characteristics, they emphasize his weirdness, his awkward social skills, and – you knew it was coming – that horrifying pudding story (link includes video). But these aren’t just about candidate qualities – all of this stuff stands in for a larger battle in the party about just how much to flout norms, to employ bad manners (especially when not accompanied by folksy populism), to display disregard for the feelings of others.
Trump, of course, isn’t exactly free of this kind of baggage. But he has a weird ability to keep things vague and to shy away from a real back-and-forth with a formidable foe. He’s also evaded most efforts to hold him accountable for abuse of power thus far – though his luck may be running out.
It's possible that DeSantis’ standing will improve when he kicks off his campaign officially, or if Trump’s legal troubles take an even worse turn. But if he does follow this well-worn path of strong nominees who falter as their candidacies begin, we should look past the obvious narratives about candidate traits. We can learn a lot more by looking at the party dynamics that these short-lived candidacies reveal.
[1] The internet seems to have mostly memory-holed this cringe-fest, but I digress.