Ron DeSantis Is Coming For MAGA Voters

gotta thank the President for his support of Florida. I mean, I'm kind of excited that he's here about tell you, I'm really excited to have Milania as a Florida resident. Let me just say, Mr President, given your change of registration, welcome home to Florida a simpler times back when everything was buddy buddy down in Florida. Donald Trump, as you heard there, was all too happy then to take credit for the rapid rise of rhn De Santis, Florida's governor.

I endorsed Ron, and after I endorsed me, took off like a rocket ship. And to Santis, well, he was all too happy to let him for the time being. Anyway, these days, the relationship between the former president and the Republican Party's new star is a little frost here. It's no secret to Santis is weighing whether to challenge Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, and it's really no secret

that Trump is not happy about it. In the past, that might have meant that Santis would come under attack not just from Trump, which is happening, but also Trump's legions of supporters, which is not happening. In fact, some early pole show Republicans preferring to Santis over Trump. What is going on. One person who knows is Umberg's national political correspondent, Joshua Green. He's just written a big story about De Santis for Business Week, and he's here with

me now in our Washington studio. Josh thanks for being here, my pleasure, Joshuay is Ron De Santis suddenly the big Republican of the moment. So Republicans went into the mentoral elections expecting a big red wave. It didn't materialize. By and large, their candidates lost in the battleground states. They

didn't manage to win back control of the Senate. But the one big exception to that trend was Ron De Santis, who won a landslide re election race for Florida governor into the process one not just Republican voters, but a lot of Democrats and independence too, many of whom think that he might even be the Trump slayer that if he runs for the Republican presidential nomination is most people expect that he might finally be the person who can

depose Trump and loosened Trump's warlord grip on the Republican Party. These had for the last seven years. And of the reasons I suppose that Republicans would actually want to have a Trump's layer is because when reason the Republicans lost so badly in the midterm elections is because Trump put forward so many candidates who were not palatable beyond the very narrow base of die hard Trump supporters. That's exactly right.

I mean, if you look at the menagerie of folks that Trump put forward, from mem at Oz to herschell Walker, yeah in Georgia, you know, to all sorts of kind of lesser House candidates who disappointed and lost. It cost Republicans control of the Senate, and it cost them a bigger majority in the House of Representatives, and we can already see the problems that's causing the party in terms of the fights over who's going to be the next

Speaker of the House. But backing up a step, what it really showed to people, even Republicans who are fairly Trump positive. This marked the third election in a row that Republicans have underperformed with Trump at the top of the ticket. Mid term elections big blue way for Democrats, and of course Joe Biden won. Uh here we are in two with inflation rampant and right track run track

numbers very negative for Democrats. I mean, all the fundamentals showed that we were headed for a Republican wave and instead this Trumpet ticket and these candidates underperformed. I think it was a wake up call for a lot of people who are perfectly willing to go along with Donald Trump as long as the party was winning, but now recognize that with Trump at the top of the ticket, they're losing, and so they're searching for a new standard bearer.

And Rhonda Santis might be that guy. And something you said earlier is pretty significant, I think. And that's even though the Sanders is a very conservative Republican and made his bones as a die hard Trump supporter before separating himself. He still managed to win Democrats and independence in large numbers. What did he do to attract people who you would think, in this really polarized environment would run away from a

guy like that. I think the real thing he did was he was very COVID skeptical, and Florida became famous, you know, if not infamous during the pandemic. De Santis was the guy who was most aggressive about opening businesses, fighting back mask mandates, keeping kids in real school, and in the travels I had through Florida campaigning with him. In the week leading up to the mid terms, a lot of people who are not hard core Republicans said, hey, you know, looking back two years from now, De Sante

has got a lot right on COVID. We sort of appreciate that he was a good governor. My kid got to stay in school, My husband didn't lose his job because his business stayed open. So from a governing standpoint, a lot of people in Florida seemed to have been happy with how he performed, and I think that's reflected

on the landslide reelection. He wonted November. The question now, though, is can you appeal to a slightly different class of voters, Republican primary voters, and make himself appealing enough to those voters that they will loosen their ties to Donald Trump and transfer them to somebody else. And of course, this is the big danger that any Republican hoping to succeed Donald trumpas do. He's got to attract those Trump voters while not alienating them by turning off Trump himself, and

Descenders appears to have done that. In your story, you write that Descenders figured out away two be the next candidates to succeed Trump without getting kind of machine gunned

down by him. Yeah. I mean to say, this is interesting because he kind of cracked the code for solving a problem that a lot of Republican presidential hopefuls have been trying to solve and have been unable to and that is, how do you run for president in a Republican party that is still fundamentally controlled by Donald Trump? So what did he do? Well? What most people did?

And I'm thinking about people like Mike Pence, for instance, the former Vice president and former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo had along with a lot of Trumpey senators like Tom Cotton from Arkansas Ted Cruz from Texas. What most of those people have done over the past five years is glorify him, fluff his ego, attacked his opponents in hopes that he would look kindly on them and wouldn't tear them to shreds when they decided to run for president.

They created a problem for them, though, and it's that they came off looking like secondary figures, beta males to Trump's alpha males. One Republican put it to me to say, this is interesting because he went in a different direction when he was running for governor in He went on Fox News a bunch because he was ranked third in

the time in the Florida Republican gubratorial primary. Understood that he needed Trump's endorsement, and further understood that the best way to get that endorsement was to go on TV and sort of flagrantly praise and defend Donald Trump, who at that time was fighting off Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. He didn't even identify a crime. He said, Oh, come, he's doing a counter intelligence investigation. Just go try to find something we needed. Insurance policy to prevent Trump from

getting elected. There's one thing to have a bias, there's one thing to have an appearance of impropriety. This is actually taking a bias and basically saying you're going to use the machinery of government to prevent the American people from making a choice. That's very disturbing. So to Santa spent a ton of time on Fox News, just like the other guys, praising him. It worked. Trump noticed, endorsed him. It vaulted him to the Florida nomination and eventually to

the governor's office. But De Santus did something interesting at that point. He stopped praising Trump. He stopped genuflecting and sort of presenting him. Once he became governor, It's kind of a beta to Trump's alpha, and it allowed to Santa's to do something that none of the other guys had been able to do, and that is to emerge as his own figure. Josh, So, now Ronda Santa Is

is governor of Florida. He's stepped into his own and you writing your story that as he began to eye the White House, he realized he had one more big thing he had to do. So what to Santa's did that. I think it's pretty ingenious. Is he understood he had to kind of go out and create his own issue portfolio that would get people excited. Right, every Republican in the age of Trump understood that the way to get attention is to have these big, loud, messy cultural fights,

most of which revolved around Trump. What De Santis did was he realized that he needed to have big, large, messy cultural fights that didn't revolve around Trump, so that De Santis himself could kind of be the alpha male in these fights. So one of the things Trump did when he became president was he fundamentally reoriented what it meant to be a Republican and good standing. In the past, it had meant that you subscribe to a certain set

of policy commitments. You know, optimistic, pro business, small government. You know, think Ronald Reagan, Shining City on a Hill, small government. The government was the problem. Exactly what Trump did was he sort of turned it into an issue of grievance. So from the moment he came down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his campaign, he was attacking immigrants. The Chinese are our enemies, the liberals are our enemies.

Creating all sorts of enemies and grievances that really had a powerful effect, as we saw on Republican voters and changed what the party diod for. It was that other people were responsible for the ills in your life exactly, and that he was the guy who's going to right those wrongs. Of course, with Trump, there was a big personal element to all this that he too was being victimized by, you know, whether it was Robert Muller or

mean Democrats, um. And so he had a lot of grievances to air too, and that sort of became what Republican politics was about in the air of Trump. I think one thing that DeSantis recognized early on was that if he wanted to emerge as his own figure, he had to come up with a brand of politics sort of rhymed with Trump is um, but wasn't about Trump specifically.

So one of the things he did from the very get go of his term as Florida governor was to start these big fights, whether it was over immigration or wokeness is a big theme of his but it was about something that DeSantis was orchestrating, and that focused on DeSantis in the state of Florida. It didn't focus on Donald Trump. Josh, please stick around. We'll continue talking after the break, Josh, he said to Santis began building his own portfolio of enemies to attack who people would associate

with him instead of Trump. What are some examples of that. I mean, if you look a few months ago, De Santis did this immigration stunt where somebody from his administration lured a bunch of venezuel And immigrants onto a flight to Martha's Vinue with promises that they would get jobs and aid, flew them there, dropped them off. There were no jobs in aid, and it became this big kerfuffle

in conservative media. Um, we had Media Matters for America, the Watchdog group do a study for us for this piece, and they found out that Fox had devoted a hundred and forty eight segments to the santiss immigration stunt. Got people really riled up. Put De Santis at the forefront of this controversy on immigration, which we know that Republican voters care about and are prime to react to. And it made the Santis the centerpiece of the story. And if you look at what he's done in his recent

political career, he's run that playbook again. And again and again. And one of the things I write about in my new business cover story is that one of the bad guys the Santisist has chosen is actually corporate America, which has historically been the Republican Party's great ally. What do Santus is trying to do is kind of forge a politics. It's a lot like Trumpism. It revolves around grievance, but it isn't backward looking. He's not trying to, you know,

restore the Reagan era of sunny optimism. He's drumming up a new set of grievances for people to get upset about. And there's a lot of evidence that that what he's doing is working, that Republican voters are listening to this and responding to this, whether it's fighting against what he calls wokeness and corporate America, the idea that CEOs and business people have been kind of captured by social justice and environmental warriors and are undermining sort of the basis

of US capitalism. We can't just stand idly by while woke ideology ravages every institution in our society. We must fight the woke in our schools, We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology. The state of Florida is where woke goes to die. A great example of this is to Santus's fight with

the state's marquee employer, Disney. Last year, Florida past what critics dubbed it Don't Say Gay law, which limited what teachers could teach children about gender and sexual identity in the classroom, and one of the people who came out

and criticized the law was Disney CEO Bob Chappeck. De Santis did something that in any previous political era would have been unthinkable, and he went to war with one of the state's largest employers in Disney, threatened them, called a special session of the legislature to punish them by stripping them of a special tax break, and used Disney to start a big national fight over the issue of what he calls corporate wokeness, the idea that CEOs and

business leaders have been captured by perfidious liberal social justice and environmental warriors in a way that is sort of threatening to the fabric of American society. And this turned out to be a very resonant fight. Again, it put around to Santis on Fox News every night. It introduced to a lot of Republican voters a whole new set of grievances that they hadn't really known about before. That

kind of got them excited. And once again it put to Santis in the role of being the prime driver of a crisis that had nothing to do with Donald Trump. It let him emerge as the big figure. And his ability to run that play again and again and again, I think explains how it is that he's managed to emerge from Trump's Republican Party as probably the most exciting Republican presidential prospect heading into the primaries. We'll be right back, Josh.

You write that one of the other differences between Trump and DeSantis is that the Sensis is very effective as a governor. As an executive. De Santis as governor, understands how to use the power of government in pursuit of his political goals. So Trump would throw an awful lot of tantrums and fire people and hire people, but at the end of the day, he didn't really use the power of government to accomplish a lot, or he seemed

like he was unable to do it. De Santis is Harvard trained lawyer and a very capable chief executive who has used the powers of the government to punish companies like Disney that he's gone to war with. It's sort of remarkable from the standpoint of you don't usually see

a government attacking businesses in their own party. But it's also remarkable because it's sort of the opposite of what Republicans traditionally say they want and don't want from government, and that is to kind of be left alone and for business to operate independently. One of the kind of wild things that it's governed doing research for this East was,

you know. De Santis was elected to Congress as a libertarian minded congressman from a district outside Jacksonville, and as part of his campaign, he wrote a book sort of attacking Obama and venerating the First Principles of America. And in that book he wrote the bullying of private industry was part and parcel of the modus operandi of the

Obama administration. What's so amazing and ironic about De Santi's Times government is that he used the powers of the De Santis administration to bully companies like Disney very successfully in a way that has built up his political image and made him into a real viable, if not the leading Republican contender for the nomination. Josh, you describe all the attention and success that De Santis is having, especially among Republicans, that of course has already attracted the ire

of Donald Trump. What does that mean for De Santis now that Trump wants a big supporter is on his bad side. Trump has been very frustrated with Rohn to Sandis for a while because, as we said earlier to Santus, once he became governor, stopped Jenny flecting to Trump, and Trump felt as though he were being slighted. That frustration

finally bubbled to the surface. Just before the elections. Trump was in a rally in Pennsylvania and referred to him as Ron the Sanctimonious, which is Trump's new nickname for him. Not quite as good as Crooked Hillary or Lion Ted. But you got the sense that Trump was sort of very frustrated, but to Sant's just ignored it. And I think the fact that Republicans with a lot of Trump candidates to the top of the ticket performed as badly

as they did in the mid terms. Has kept other Republicans from going after to Sandis like Trump's attacks really haven't had that much of effect. Most Republican lawmakers and voters seemed to have ignored them, and it's allowed to Santus to continue to emerge as this exciting potential Trump replacement if he gets into the presidential race. And I guess that comes down to one of the other signatures

of Trump, which is fear. He makes p Fear him is one of the reasons why people are afraid to run against him, because if they don't fear him personally, they fear his very loyal voters. And in your story you write that De Santis has actually been very effective

at creating an aura of fear around himself. Yeah. I mean, one thing that the Santis managed should do in Florida through his attacks on Disney and other enemies, is to really instill a degree of fear among businesses, among other Republicans. It's almost Trumpian in its nature. I mean, being down there, people are really afraid of him. They don't want to get in his crosshairs, and that's an important quality I

think for Republican leader to have. I mean, one thing that Republicans love about Donald Trump is the fact that he's sort of a strong man who can smite their enemies. I think any key to Santa's replacing him is going to rely on to Santa's being able to kind of expand what he's done in Florida to the nation at large. He needs to show that he's sort of a big, strong guy who can stand on his own. But that's going to mean standing up to Donald Trump at some point.

It's important to strike a note of caution here because there's a long history of governors who seemed like they were all powerful and the next big thing about to take off like a rocket ship, and they ended up blowing up at a launchpad. The guy who comes to mind last cycle former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who seemed like this big deal, raised a ton of money, and then his campaign kind of withered and died within a matter of a few months. So it's always a little

risky kind of projecting forward. But De Santis has a number of advantages for Republicans, and there are a number of reasons why I think he should be taken seriously. One is he's managed to raise a ton of money. He raised two hundred million dollars for his re election race, and he also won over a lot of voters independence, even some Democrats that Republicans have struggled to win under Trump. So he offers a kind of alternate path forward from the one that the party would be following if they

simply nominated Trump to be president again. And that has a lot of appeal for people. But the real question about De Santus is can he get up on a debate stage at electorn opposite Donald Trump and go toe to toe with him. So far, nobody who's attempted that has survived, and De Santis has been notably quiet on

the issue of Trump himself. But if he wants to have that nomination, Trump is already a candidate for he's going to have to have a showdown with him at some point, and I think we'll see at that point whether he kind of has the moxie, in the charisma, in the stamina to go head to head with somebody like Trump who is so skilled performing on television but also at politically his competitors as we saw in the Republican primaries. Josh Green, thanks for coming on the show.

Paul's Pleasure. You can read Joshua Green's business week story on Ron de Santis at Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take, the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Read Day's story and subscribe to our daily newsletter at Bloomberg dot com slash Big Take,

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