Over the weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual gathering, a 2024 straw poll was conducted. Two actually — one with former President Donald Trump included and one without the 45th president.
Trump won the first straw poll. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won the second, Trump-less one. (DeSantis took 21% in the straw poll with Trump, the only candidate other than the former president to gain double digit support.)
Ja, CPAC was held in Orlando, Florida — meaning that it was something of a home game for DeSantis. En, ja, die 2024 election is 1,342 dae weg (but who’s counting!).
But what the CPAC results confirmed is that, op die oomblik, DeSantis is the leading figure in the post-Trump Republican firmament. If the base of the party has a leader other than Trump, it’s the Florida governor.
How did DeSantis rise to this vaunted status? Wel, strict fealty to the former president for one. DeSantis owes his current stature almost entirely to Trump who plucked him from near-obscurity in late 2017 — endorsing the then-congressman’s Republican primary bid for governor. DeSantis, who had been running well behind state Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam to that point, suddenly became the heavy favorite — and won easily.
DeSantis has spent his first few years in office repaying that loyalty. The most glaring example is DeSantis’ handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Florida was one of the last states to issue a stay-at-home order last spring, a fact that DeSantis directly attributed to Trump’s attitude about the danger of the virus. Explaining in early April 2020 what changed his mind about the severity of the virus, DeSantis said this: “When you see the President up there and his demeanor the last couple of days, that’s not necessarily how he always is.”
Riiiiight.
Die afgelope jaar, DeSantis has pushed for schools in the state to reopen quicker than most other states, which led to a teachers union in the state suing him. He has been skeptical of the efficacy of mask wearing. And he has feuded — time and time again — with both the state and national media, accusing them of bias in their coverage of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. (Despite its large population — and the number of seniors living in the state — Florida ranks 29th in cases per 100,000 residents and 26th in deaths per 100,000 inwoners, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.)
That sort of portfolio — Covid-19 skepticism and an active dislike of the media — is the love language of Republican base voters. And DeSantis quite clearly knows how to speak it.
Donors are beginning to wake up to DeSantis’ 2024 potensiaal, ook. In February alone, the governor raked in $ 2.7 miljoen, according to the Tampa Bay Times — his best fundraising month since he became governor back in 2019.
Before the 2024 talk gets too out of hand, it’s worth remembering that DeSantis is up for reelection next November and a number of Democrats — led by state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried — are considering the race. While Florida is closely divided between the two parties, Trump’s back-to-back wins there in 2016 en 2020 suggest DeSantis would start the general election against any Democratic opponent with an edge.
Should he win that contest, DeSantis seems very likely to turn his attention to the 2024 ras. En, op die oomblik, he is in a surprisingly strong position in the early presidential jockeying.
