DeSantis Failed to Understand the New GOP: Today’s Republicans Are Yesterday’s Democrats

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has officially suspended his presidential campaign, giving American voters front-row seats to one of the most spectacular collapses in political history. Many will say that this outcome was inevitable, that there was no way to defeat former President Trump; per this line of thinking, Trump’s many indictments animated the Republican base and sucked all of the oxygen out of the room from his competitors. While there is some truth to that, it’s not the full story. The failure of the DeSantis campaign is rooted in a disastrous launch, an inability to course correct on any issue, and a determination to continue talking about things that the voters didn’t care about.

Number one on the list was an incessant desire to re-litigate Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While there are many people who disagree with the Trump White House’s approach to the pandemic, the concerns weren’t strong enough to move enough voters to make a difference. The simple truth is that most voters have moved on.

Furthermore, many Republican voters were willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt when dealing with a once in a 100-year event, while others actually agreed with his approach. In a party whose most active voters tend to be older, attacking Trump for being too cautious on COVID-19 never seemed like the best decision.

Doubling down on being “anti-woke” also backfired. Governor DeSantis was embarrassed after being outmaneuvered in his battle with Disney. He also signed a six-week abortion ban supported by many of the pro-life activists that made up the DeSantis base. Yet such a move was wildly unpopular with the general public, and gave Trump the opportunity to attack him for it, allowing the man who appointed the judges that overturned Roe v. Wade to position himself as a relative moderate on abortion. And the controversy over the Black American history curriculum and the DeSantis campaign’s disrespectful response to it did irreparable damage to the relationship between DeSantis and many Black conservatives.

But one of the fatal flaws of the DeSantis campaign was their belief that they could beat Trump by attacking him from the Right. That was an insulated, narrow minded, out of touch strategy that was doomed to fail from the start. Nearly every time the campaign tried the approach, it backfired. When DeSantis attacked Trump on the First Step Act, lying about its results and calling it a “jailbreak bill” that was met with backlash from many corners. When the campaign stupidly tried to paint Trump as being “too friendly” to LGBT voters, gay pro-Trump Republicans called them “homophobic.” When they demeaned the Trump campaign’s attempts to win over Black Americans, they were criticized by other Republicans.

DeSantis chronically underperformed among Republican primary voters of color, a growing bloc that is now 18 percent of the GOP electorate. Instead of acknowledging that and course correcting, his team oftentimes went out of their way to antagonize those voters. They cared too much about what influencers had to say, and adopted that same “own the libs above all else” mentality that’s more prevalent on social media than in real life.

The reality is that Team DeSantis was trying to sell a product that nobody wanted. You would be hard pressed to find either a Trump fan or foe whose chief criticism of him is that he isn’t conservative enough.

In other words, Team DeSantis misread the room. They went in under the false assumption that the voters agreed with their positions on the issues. They didn’t. For as much criticism as they give Nikki Haley for trying to win the votes of a party that no longer exists, they did the exact same thing. The traditional conservative or “fusionist” wing of the party is where the money is and where the think tanks are but they are now a distinct minority among the actual voters.

Today’s Republican voters are yesterday’s Democrats. They don’t agree with traditional conservative orthodoxy on trade policy, Social Security, or Medicare. They didn’t complain when Trump signed large bills that put dollars in people’s pockets during COVID. (In fact, some are supporting him because of it). They’re not opposed to him trying to win the endorsement of labor unions—many of which today’s Republican voters themselves belong to. Many of Trump’s voters like the idea of minorities supporting their candidate—including many of his white voters. They are more socially conservative than today’s progressives but not doctrinaire on those issues either; they are not offended when Trump acts like the New York Rockefeller Republican that everybody knows he still is.

The truth is that when Trump’s opponents attacked him for not being conservative enough, it was a gift to his campaign. It allowed Donald Trump, with all of his baggage, to position himself as the reasonable one in the race.

Team DeSantis and the traditional conservative wing that supported him received a reality check. The fact is many of the new Republican voters were Democrats 20 years ago, and if it wasn’t for the progressive wing of that party chasing them out, they’d probably still be Democrats. A significant portion of Trump’s voters supported former President Obama in 2008 and 2012. These aren’t converts to William F. Buckley conservatism. They view those people as the same out of touch elitists that they rejected when they were still Democrats.

While the temptation to blame their failures on the Trump indictments are great, Team DeSantis needs to come to grips with the fact that their approach only appealed to a minority of their own party. If they don’t learn that lesson now, they’ll repeat the same mistakes in 2028.

Darvio Morrow is CEO of the FCB Radio Network and co-host of The Outlaws Radio Show.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.