- Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t officially decided whether he’ll seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination – But already the contradictions are sharpening between his prospective general-election strengths and his emerging strategy to win the Republican primaries.
- DeSantis is pursuing an aggressive strategy of keeping Florida businesses and schools open during the pandemic – This strategy has enabled him to win about three-fifths of Florida’s college-educated white voters in a year when this demographic provided crucial support to Democrats in many other states.
- DeSantis has ignited a series of culture-war firefights – Including censoring how schoolteachers talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation, and a potential ban on abortion after six weeks.
- DeSantis’ agenda has found a receptive audience in Republican-controlled states – PEN is tracking copycat bills in many of the other 21 states where Republicans hold unified control of the state legislature and the governorship.
- DeSantis’ agenda may be less appealing than the sum of its parts – Many polls show that a majority of voters worry less that kids are being taught values their parents don’t like than that culture-war fights are diverting schools from their real mission of educating students.
- The whole of DeSantis’ agenda may be less appealing than the sum of its parts – Democrats see DeSantis embracing ideas that will cast him as a threat to the values held by the coalition that turned out in big numbers to resist the Trump-era GOP in each of the past three national elections.
Published February 16, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Ronald Brownstein’s original post The Contradictions of Ron DeSantis
