Ron DeSantis (center), riding higher in 2021
Florida Governor and would-be 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has had a very bad week. First, on Monday, DeSantis continued his war against The Walt Disney Company, threatening to build a state prison or competing theme park next to Walt Disney World. Thus far, DeSantis has been on the losing end of his fight against the very well-lawyered Disney, which began when the gay-friendly Disney criticized DeSantis’ new “Don’t Say Gay” law. And this latest statement by DeSantis seems petty, as well as possibly unconstitutional.
Then, on Tuesday, DeSantis traveled to Washington, D.C. to gain support from Republican members of Congress for his all-but-announced presidential campaign. But instead, three Florida Congressmen took the opportunity to endorse DeSantis’ main rival, Donald Trump. Moreover, in one especially embarrassing instance, Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas literally walked out of a meeting with DeSantis and announced that he is endorsing Trump for President.
Given that DeSantis and Trump are the two clear front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination (with Trump ahead and gaining in the polls), there is little doubt that DeSantis’ troubles benefit Trump. Indeed, Trump piled on DeSantis on Tuesday by attacking his incompetence in the Disney matter, writing, with either typical name-calling or a typical Trump spelling mistake, “DeSanctus is being absolutely destroyed by Disney.”
The question is, do these DeSantis failures help or hurt the Democrats for the 2024 presidential election?
On the one hand, Republican presidential election infighting should help the Democrats, as the candidates bash each other, thereby doing the other party’s job and fanning negative media stories about the battling candidates. For example, such intra-party battles between candidates Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan hurt Republicans in 1976, giving the Democrats the presidential election victory that year. The same thing happened to the Democrats in 1980, when Ted Kennedy‘s tough primary challenge to incumbent President Jimmy Carter helped take down the Democrats and hand the White House to the Republicans. So perhaps Democrats should be rooting for (and even supporting) Ron DeSantis to run a vigorous campaign against Donald Trump.
On the other hand, if DeSantis and Trump are able to go head-to-head for many months, that means that Democrats would need to expend time and resources fighting both candidates the whole time. If, instead, DeSantis crashes and burns quickly, as some are saying is now happening (and assuming there is no other strong Republican challenger to Trump), then Democrats can focus all of their energies on defeating Trump, who has plenty of troubles, legal and otherwise, of his own.
Now, none if this is to say that DeSantis has poor political prospects. By most measures, he is a very popular second-term Florida Governor, where many Republican voters in the state seem to like his style of authoritarian overreaching. Likewise, if we look at what the Republicans did in the 1980 presidential election, the top two candidates, Ronald Reagan and George H.W Bush, battled each other bitterly for the nomination. However, when Reagan eventually defeated Bush, he unexpectedly asked Bush to be his running mate. Bush accepted, and the team went on to win a massive victory against an unpopular Democratic president (the aforementioned Jimmy Carter). We cannot rule out the possibility of such an eventual joining of forces between Trump and DeSantis this time, whoever wins the nomination, including DeSantis if he turns his campaign efforts around. Furthermore, like Ronald Reagan in 1980 (as well as Richard Nixon in 1968 and George H.W. Bush in 1988), DeSantis, who is only 44 years old, could come back from a defeat in this election cycle to run successfully for president in 2028 or beyond.
In any event, it is probably fair to say that Democrats have little or no control over the Republican candidates and voters for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. At this point, therefore, the best thing for Democrats to do may be to fully prepare their opposition research, talking points and attack ads for battle against both Trump and DeSantis for some time to come.
Photo by Matt Johnson, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/3CBpK0
