With four more stops ticked off this week, Ron DeSantis has certainly been working hard on the campaign trail. However, this week has continued to expose major flaws in the campaign as he continues to suffer in the polls against former President Trump.
DeSantis unveils immigration plan
DeSantis made another trip to the Southern border with Mexico on Tuesday the 26th to burnish his credentials on immigration, this time in Texas (having visited Arizona earlier in the race). Speaking at a smaller event in Eagle Pass, a small border town about two hours from San Antonio, he launched his new immigration platform, the first piece of serious detail we have seen so far from the campaign. Perhaps acknowledging that the hyperfocus on “woke” issues thus far has not been particularly effective, DeSantis returned to an issue which both the GOP base and wider population has been consistently concerned about as successive presidents have failed to solve the problems at the Mexican border. He touted his track record on immigration as Florida governor, backed up by Texas Congressman Chip Roy, who also introduced him.
New Hampshire town hall
Following this Texas stop, DeSantis returned to New Hampshire to conduct some damage limitation needed after a less-than-ideal swing through the Granite State earlier in the month in which he took considerable flak for his apparent inability to take questions or interact with voters. Polling in the state has been particularly poor for the campaign, with Chris Christie beginning to emerge as a potential challenger for second place in some polls. This time round, he took no chances, taking part in a town hall event in Hollis in order to attempt to dispel the growing perception that he is poor at dealing with people. The event attracted some controversy as it drew the ire of the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women, an influential group in GOP primary circles, who were hosting an event with Donald Trump at the same time. The two events served as a stark contrast between DeSantis’s mild attacks on Trump and Trump’s gleeful pummelling of DeSantis, illustrating this key problem for the campaign thus far. Indeed, once again Trump dominated the coverage which was mostly framed as a head-to-head in which Trump came out on top.
New York fundraiser
After an underwhelming trip to New Hampshire, DeSantis moved out of the spotlight to hold a series of private fundraisers with high dollar donors in New York. One of the fundraisers was held in the suburban Rockland County where the county GOP chair generated some media coverage complaining that the event had not been coordinated with the local party. This was off the back of a Siena College poll in which Trump hit 61% and DeSantis took just 31% of voters who stated that they would vote for someone else. Unfortunately for him, the stop at Grimaldi’s pizza shop in NYC with Fox News anchor Jesse Waters to bemoan the idea that Democrats might ban coal-fired ovens is unlikely to shift many voters given the limited size of the Republican-voting, coal-fired pizza oven-operating electorate.
Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia
Finally, DeSantis moved on to Philadelphia to speak at an event held by Moms for Liberty, a controversial and increasingly influential group within the GOP which fights against the mention of LGBTQ+ rights and race (amongst other things) in school curriculums. The group was recently added to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-government extremist organizations. This, however, was not off-putting for DeSantis, who has been campaigning on a markedly similar platform to Mom’s for Liberty.
Pride Month ad sparks Republican outrage
Amongst all of this campaigning, the DeSantis campaign released a bizarre and telling ad which attracted condemnation from not just Democrats, but also Log Cabin Republicans, the most prominent LGBT conservative organization. The ad attacked Trump for saying that he would protect LGBTQ+ citizens and various comments on trans issues before cutting to a montage of DeSantis’s policy actions targeted to that community.
This section was interspersed with clips of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer character from the movie American Psycho, and Jordan Belfort, the criminal playboy as portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street, whose images have been somewhat idolised for a certain type of overly online younger conservative with particular interests in masculinity and the so-called “alpha-male”.
The whole ad was characterised by numerous rather niche references to online alpha-male culture, and edited in a style that will be familiar to those of us unfortunate enough to have been subjected to this kind of content in our feeds before but completely bizarre to anyone who is blissfully unaware. Log Cabin Republicans were unequivocal, stating that the ad “ventured into homophobic territory.” This ad was clearly an attempt to differentiate between the allegedly pro-LGBTQ+ Trump and apparently anti-LGBTQ+ DeSantis.
The issues arising from this ad from a political perspective are twofold. Number one, most obviously, is that any campaign running on a blatantly anti-gay platform has no chance of getting their candidate elected president in this day and age. This stuff is not mainstream in the Republican Party let alone the country. Furthermore, it illustrates a more pressing issue for DeSantis. It demonstrates his campaign staff’s complete lack of understanding of how to win this race. This ad was completely filled with weird niche memes and references to alpha-male culture which would go straight over the head of 90% of the GOP primary electorate (and the vast majority of the country). A good illustration of this is that the fact that most of the media coverage of the ad completely misinterpreted the references. Trying to explain what they all mean would take another entire article. DeSantis’s staff are way too online, so caught up in their own incredibly narrow hyper-masculine, anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter bubble that they can’t see the bigger picture.
A week in decline
Ron DeSantis has been on the campaign trail for more than a month now and yet things just seem to be going backwards. Polling remains tragically second-rate as he takes a statistical and verbal pounding from Trump every single week. To his credit, he has been on the campaign trail relentlessly, but his message is no longer cutting through as it was at the turn of the year (or even before his campaign launch) and he can’t seem to get a handle on the race or the media coverage even as Trump gets himself into ever deeper legal trouble. His staff clearly are not on the right wavelength, as illustrated by the desperate attempt at a political ad detailed above. It’s still a long way to go to the Iowa caucuses, but radical changes need to come soon to change the momentum of the race if DeSantis has any real ambition of becoming president.