Ron DeSantis is struggling without the Covid issue. By Matthew Yglesias

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Ron DeSantis is struggling without the Covid issue

Matthew Yglesias

12 - 16 minutes

Los Angeles Area readers — remember to stop by today’s Member Meetup at 5:30 p.m. at Bonaventure Brewing Co. if you’re around!

Ron DeSantis seems to be flopping a bit in the polls right now, leading to heightened media scrutiny of his every decision and personality attribute. When someone is doing well, these things are often examined through a lens of “why is this guy doing well?” and spun as positive. But when someone is doing poorly, it’s all read through a very different lens and spun negatively. When Obama was up in the polls, we were told people liked his calm, cool demeanor; when he was doing poorly, he was cold and hard to relate to.

So instead of asking why DeSantis is doing poorly at the moment, I think it’s actually more instructive to look back and try to reconstruct how he became a Schelling Point for Republicans who were not “anti-Trump” but who did want to avoid renominating Trump.

After all, DeSantis’ baseline qualifications for this role — solid conservative on policy, no big blowups with DJT, less afflicted by personal scandal, more of a party man and less of a mountebank — though real, are hardly unique. Why DeSantis instead of the governor of Indiana or Tennessee or Idaho or wherever else? To the RDS heads, one of his big qualifications is his very strong performance in the 2022 midterms. But Marco Rubio also did very well. Florida has clearly been shifting right relative to the national political environment, a trend that was visible as far back as the 2012 and 2014 cycles. Rick Scott knocking off Bill Nelson in 2018 was arguably the truly impressive Florida win. If anything, the fact that the state is trending right overall cuts against the idea that DeSantis is some kind of political genius. Tim Kaine’s successful early run for governor of Virginia looks less impressive once we contextualize it with the state’s broad realignment to the left — he’s just a guy who was in the right place at the right time.

What made DeSantis a star was Covid.

Covid was a good issue for him on multiple levels. One is that precisely because Florida isn’t a red state backwater like Alabama or Nebraska, it became a Mecca for blue state Covid doves who were not otherwise particularly conservative. Another is that Covid revealed the massive disjuncture between Trump-the-cultural-phenomenon and Trump-the-chief-executive. Trump seemed overmatched by the federal bureaucracy and unable to either articulate or implement the Covid dove viewpoint. Conservatives eventually fought in court and forced Joe Biden to end the federal mask mandate on airplanes. But that mandate — like all other CDC rules — was put in place by the Trump administration. Last, even though DeSantis’ approach was extremely controversial in 2020 and rejected by most voters that fall, history took a turn in his favor over the course of 2021 and 2022. Due to a mix of changing circumstances and changing minds, DeSantis eventually won the argument both in public opinion and in the policy arena, and the Biden administration has essentially come around to his way of thinking.

That’s a significant achievement. But the problem in terms of electoral politics is precisely that he won and nobody is focused on Covid policy anymore. The original star-making turn of events became obsolete. That doesn’t doom his presidential prospects, but it does explain why his current performance is disappointing relative to past hype: the hype was driven by an issue whose salience has plummeted.

Particularly in terms of a Republican Party primary, I think Covid is a critical issue in making the case for why Trump might not be the next choice.

Obviously there are a lot of liberals who think Trump erred by not being more of a Covid hawk and more attentive to the views of public health experts. Honestly, to this day, I don’t think we really understand how or why Covid protocols became such an intensely partisan and polarized issue, but that’s what happened, and trying to figure out why is a post for another day. The point is that it happened, and Republicans became strongly associated with the Covid dove viewpoint.

And yet Trump was a weirdly ineffective leader of this political movement. He orchestrated the original national lockdown, and then instead of promulgating aggressive reopening guidelines, he promulgated sort of middling ones but then encouraged Republican governors to ignore them. He wouldn’t personally allow himself to be seen wearing a mask for months and months, but the Trump CDC recommended wearing masks. Conservatives made a big deal out of the idea that some institution called “the government” had caused a lot of problems with its overregulation of home tests and confusing insistence that you needed to be scrubbing surfaces, but that was Trump’s government!

In April, Trump did his “liberate Michigan!” tweets, which I thought were ill-considered and extreme.

At the same time, D.C. Parks & Recreation still had our city’s parks and playgrounds shut down, which I also thought was ill-considered and extreme. Around this time, I recall taking my kid, five years old at the time, down to the National Mall to zip around on his scooter. We were having fun but eventually he had to pee, at which point I was disappointed to learn that the National Park Service had closed their restrooms. When NPS facilities did start to partially reopen a couple of months later, their website was festooned with images of exactly the kind of behavior Covid doves like to mock — virtue-signaling park rangers wearing cloth masks outdoors.

The point isn’t that Trump was some kind of closet Covid hawk. If he’d actually taken a tougher line on Covid (not necessarily with regard to masking park employees while outdoors in the summer), I think a lot of swing voters would have appreciated that more moderate approach. But instead, Trump played the role of a dovish media personality on Covid while seemingly not knowing or caring that he was also the president of the United States and could have been spending time trying to get federal agencies to align with his ideas.

By contrast, DeSantis loudly and proudly opened things up in Florida — in my opinion, more flippantly than he should have, but definitely in a way that ensured public policy was, in fact, aligned with his stated views.

And while this pretty quickly became the approach taken by basically all red state governors, DeSantis really invested in picking fights with both the federal health authorities (who, again, reported to Trump) and with public health Twitter. This became central to his brand. Wyoming was a place where the Covid rules weren’t very strict, but Florida was the place where the Covid rules weren’t very strict.

Joe Biden’s first few months in office saw a steady rollout of vaccines and the relaxation of Covid restrictions at both the state and federal levels. The pace was obviously not fast enough for everyone’s taste (and too fast for the taste of others), but it seemed like we were on a path to a relatively rapid policy convergence based on Biden’s pledge to “crush the virus.”

I think if that plan had worked, people might have looked back on DeSantis’ 2020 as red meat for the base that ultimately looked a bit foolish. But the plan didn’t work. The Delta variant, in particular, drove a wedge between the Covid cautious and vaxxed and relaxed camps, which left Biden trying to straddle the gulf between them and displeasing everyone. Schools reopened in the fall of 2021, but in many places, they were still operating with special Covid protocols. The country was, in effect, split into three camps: one that favored continuing NPIs, one that thought vaccination was the end of the story, and a third that was anti-vax. The White House tried to deploy vaccination and vaccine mandates as a wedge issue against the right, but I don’t think it really worked. It was pretty easy to get vaxxed and relaxed people to say disapproving things about DeSantis’ soft anti-vax stance, but on a practical day-to-day level, continued NPIs were a burden on vaxxed and relaxed people, whereas anti-vaccine holdouts weren’t.

This was a good issue for DeSantis in a generic sense, but it was particularly good for increasing his vote share in a formerly purple state precisely because the issue didn’t track the traditional issues of American partisan politics. DeSantis was not a well-known figure pre-pandemic, and he became best known as a relatively coherent spokesperson for the Covid dove viewpoint — a viewpoint that appealed to a non-zero minority of people who were not otherwise Republicans.

But then DeSantis basically won the argument. After some court defeats and the passage of time and the Omicron variant, the Biden administration stopped pushing Covid NPIs. This has disappointed some people, but it hasn’t caused those people to become Republicans. And while Covid continues to circulate, continues to make some people sick, and unfortunately continues to kill people, it now looks like a fairly steady death burden and we’ve had no big new spikes.

That, combined with the Dobbs decision and the GOP’s debt ceiling politics, has allowed for the return of a more traditional politics that pits rich guys and religious guys against secularism and redistribution. And while DeSantis is a totally fine, normal conservative Republican politician, that’s just what he is — a normal conservative Republican. And what Trump showed in 2016 is that he can beat a bunch of normal conservative Republicans.

Since Trump’s win in 2016, conservative American politics has been stalked by the notion of “like Trump, but better-organized and more competent” since it seems like someone like that could do really well in politics. At the same time, it’s never been entirely clear exactly what that means.

The figure who Democrats spent 2017 worrying about as Trump But Competent was basically Lisa Murkowski — someone who’d be pro-gun, pro-cop, and pro-drilling but who also would cut deals on infrastructure spending and at least roughly preserve the status quo on health care. But conservatives don’t like this idea for the exact same reason that progressives don’t like the idea of winning more elections by nominating lots of Joe Manchin clones — Murkowski’s not that conservative. Instead, they pushed Trump to work with Paul Ryan to frontload an agenda of regressive tax cuts and Medicaid cuts, he did what they wanted, and it was politically disastrous. I think the best interpretation of this is simply that Republicans’ plutocratic agenda is toxically unpopular. But there’s a conservative view that “like Trump, but better-organized and more competent” should mean that you pursue the Paul Ryan policy agenda but try to cloak it in a lot of culture war trolling.

This is what I’ve called the conservative mullet — populism in the front, welfare state rollback in the back — and I thought it was telling that Chris Rufo, a leading DeSantis booster, liked this tweet.

Covid gave DeSantis a way to avoid picking sides in this dispute. He didn’t follow the path of Larry Hogan and Phil Scott and embrace Covid NPIs. He just did the conservative policy but in a way that was more organized and competent than Trump. But it also wasn’t pre-Trump right-wing politics; it was just an issue people hadn’t had to think about pre-2020.

And as Covid has faded, that’s all changed. DeSantis is the guy who wants to ban abortion in the least-religious southern state. Instead of being the guy who’s keeping Florida’s public schools open, he’s the guy who’s defunding them with vouchers. People are talking about his record as an obscure House member who voted to cut Social Security and Medicare. “Like Trump, but more organized and competent” turns out to mean “like Paul Ryan, but says ‘woke’ a lot.” This absolutely could work in a general election against Biden, but it’s not obvious that it’s a stronger pitch than just being Trump. Covid now is part of a broader mix of issues in which DeSantis is more right-wing than Trump on every issue — more hostile to retirement programs, more skeptical of vaccines, and more enthusiastic about banning abortion. And we saw in 2016 that GOP primary voters themselves are inclined to prefer Trump to someone who positions themselves as the second coming of Ted Cruz.

This doesn’t strike me as an unsalvageable situation for DeSantis, but he’d need to try to actually make the case for himself. What he wants to say, I think, is that Covid revealed fundamental weaknesses of Donald Trump’s governance, and that gives conservatives reason to prefer DeSantis. This is what I think sophisticated readers are supposed to understand the message of “Never Back Down” to be. Who is the person who backs down too much? Not Joe Biden, right? The case against Biden isn’t that he’s too compromising. So who?

It’s Trump. The idea is that Trump is weak and failed to impose his will on the executive branch and this has implications for the future, even if we are no longer arguing about Covid. But DeSantis needs to say that. And he needs to try to explain what those implications are.