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Ron DeSantis is facing mounting doubts about the strategy behind his 2024 White House bid after veering sharply to the right on issues ranging from gay rights to abortion and immigration in an effort to outflank Donald Trump.
The Florida governor’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has been stuttering since its launch in late May, with Trump consolidating his double-digit lead in national polling and DeSantis failing to make up any ground.
DeSantis appears to be further damaging his White House ambitions by embracing hardline positions and rhetoric that are in some cases even more radical than Trump’s. That posturing is generating a broad backlash without giving him any additional edge with Republican primary voters.
DeSantis faced sweeping criticism this week for a video clip promoted by his campaign attacking Trump for being too soft on LGBT+ policies. The ad promoted DeSantis as the solution using images of murderous characters from the Peaky Blinders TV series and the thriller movie American Psycho.
“He’s not only taking extreme positions — he’s talking about them in the most extreme ways possible,” said Eric Levine, a New York-based lawyer and Republican donor. “He’s marginalising himself.”
DeSantis defended the clip on conservative media this week as “totally fair game” after it was attacked as homophobic by the Peaky Blinders Twitter account, the Log Cabin Republicans, the largest group of LGBT+ party members, and Pete Buttigieg, President Joe Biden’s transportation secretary.
DeSantis’s lurch to the right has shown up in other areas recently as well. On a visit to the border with Mexico last week, he vowed to be much tougher than Trump on immigration, and called for US authorities to shoot any drug smugglers “stone cold dead” as they crossed into America.
DeSantis has already signed into law a six-week abortion ban in Florida that is among the most draconian in the country, and continues to relentlessly attack “woke” companies including Disney. At the same time he has refrained from attacking Trump on his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and his denial of the 2020 election results, or the mishandling of classified documents that led to the former president’s federal indictment.
“[DeSantis is] still losing badly among primary voters who are conservative or very conservative. And by taking such a hard position in the hope of moving some of those Trump voters he’s undercutting his electability argument,” said Adam Geller, a Republican pollster based in New Jersey.
“What voters liked about Ron DeSantis is that he appealed to swing voters, and this is why I think it’s a mis-step to run to the right,” said Gunner Ramer, the political director for the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project.
Brendan Buck, a Republican strategist and former congressional aide, said DeSantis was taking this approach because he saw it as his best chance to chip away at Trump’s support within the conservative base. But he is running out of time for it to work.
“This is clearly a party that likes to be entertained, likes the fighting, likes the drama, and that is what he’s gravitating towards. He’s trying to do what had worked for him in Florida, which is become the enemy of the left. He’s trying to play that archvillain,” Buck said.
“[But] at some point people will stop seeing him as the most likely alternative if he shows no momentum. At some point this summer he needs to show a climb.”
Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist at Penta, a consultancy in Washington, said what was “puzzling” to many about the message coming from the DeSantis campaign was that the “biggest opening” against Trump remained questions over his “electability and competence” rather than anything to do with anti-wokeism.
Madden also said DeSantis was failing to present a more positive image to voters looking for an alternative to Trump that not only could carry him through the Republican primary but into the general election as well.
“You’re at the stage where your voters are curious about your candidacy and what’s driving you to put yourself forward as leader of the free world — your biography, record, vision and the reinforcement of that,” Madden said, adding: “That opportunity is missed.”
The DeSantis team on Thursday disclosed that it had raised $20mn in the first few weeks of the campaign, while Trump’s joint fundraising committee had raised $35mn for the entire quarter, suggesting that the Florida governor has an edge in the money race.
US presidential campaign history is littered with cases of campaigns that struggled to gain steam early only to triumph in the nomination contest a few months later — including both John McCain and Barack Obama in 2008 as well as Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
And this year’s Republican race may be even more unpredictable given the multiple criminal charges and investigations facing Trump. But many Republican strategists and pollsters said some kind of course correction for DeSantis may already be overdue.
“I’m seeing a DeSantis strategy that isn’t going anywhere, “said Geller. “It’s getting late early and I don’t know how much longer they [have] to move the needle here.”