Ron DeSantis is sitting in the ballroom of Pittsburgh’s Wyndham Hotel facing the famous confluence of three rivers. The waterways carry coal barges, kayaks, jet skis, and bass boats. It is a scene that reflects the area’s past and developing future.
There is also an invisible wall here, and it’s a big reason DeSantis has come.
The Florida governor has emerged as an early favorite for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and candidates are already jockeying for position. If former President Donald Trump doesn’t run again, DeSantis is expected to mount a bid and to be formidable. In that way, his decision will be a clear indication of the future of the GOP. And if DeSantis’s decision is to run, and if he is to win, he’ll need to knock down the same “blue wall” Trump did in 2016. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are Democratic-leaning states. Trump won them in 2016 but lost them to Joe Biden in 2020.
DeSantis’s emergence as a front-runner is due, in part, to a favorable reevaluation of Florida’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The usual suspects in national media had originally compared him unfavorably to New York’s Andrew Cuomo, but they have changed their tune substantially as Florida emerged as a success story under DeSantis and Cuomo was discovered to have covered up New York state’s statistics, having not handled the crisis competently. In contrast, as time wore on, accusations against DeSantis that he hid data disintegrated. He has also jumped into the fray against Big Tech, which is sure to be a major issue in the primaries, by signing a recent bill forcing social media companies to be transparent about their decisions to ban users from their platforms, and threatening harsh penalties for banning political candidates. As the Washington Examiner’s Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in April, DeSantis “had a meteoric rise” in her polls surveying GOP voters, “with a particularly strong lead among the ‘Trump first’ voters of the party.”
DeSantis and his wife Casey obviously have deep roots in Florida, and three children there. But the governor has family connections in western Pennsylvania, too, not just political ambitions. This is where his family is from. There are “pictures of me as a baby in Steelers regalia,” he told the Washington Examiner in an interview before he made a speech at the Allegheny County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner. Still, he admits he has long rooted for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
DeSantis’s father, Ron, is from Aliquippa in Beaver County, and his mother, Karen, is from Youngstown. The two met at Youngstown State University. DeSantis’s grandfather was once the chairman of the Mahoning County Republican Party. His uncle is a Roman Catholic priest in the Mahoning Valley.
Alleghany County itself is solidly blue, but David La Torre, a Harrisburg-based media strategist who worked for former Gov. Tom Ridge, told the Washington Examiner DeSantis was smart to come to the region.
“This might seem like just a location to some or just local politics to others, but this locality symbolizes so much more and has massive national ramifications,” La Torre said.
And while it is early to read too much into anything, DeSantis and his supporters must be encouraged by the enthusiastic reception that greeted him here. Outside the Wyndham, traffic is wrapped around Penn Avenue as cars filled with interested potential voters stream to see him. Inside, the crowd is decidedly younger than one might expect — a good sign for both the party and DeSantis.
Republican strategist Michael DeVanney says the event broke fundraising and attendance records. “We would have had more, but we were limited to 750 people,” he said. The event was initially capped at 450, but Gov. Tom Wolf eased restrictions a few days before, and the extra 300 seats sold out in a single day. “DeSantis is seen as a governor who got how you manage your state during a pandemic right, especially on nursing homes and opening up businesses,” DeVanney said, adding, “It resonates and it will resonate elsewhere. Pittsburgh is a great place to have confirmed that.”
The Pandemic
Florida began its pandemic response with DeSantis’s initially unpopular call to ban visits to the state’s 4,000 long-term nursing care facilities. His aim was to keep the coronavirus out of places most vulnerable to it, so he also prevented hospitals from returning COVID patients to their original nursing homes.
For Florida’s seniors, DeSantis’s decision was a lifesaver.
Hospitals wanted to transfer patients because they were told, “You’re going to run out of beds in a week. You’ve got to clear space,” DeSantis recalls. But “those models were garbage. And I refused to do that.”
His decision led to plenty of ink depicting him as ignorant and arrogantly dismissive of expertise, a science denier who endangered the lives of the elderly. It turned out, of course, to be just the opposite. Elderly COVID patients were transferred instead to recovery facilities where they could be isolated from non-COVID patients.
Later in the pandemic, DeSantis was accused of jumping the gun when he reopened schools, barbershops, construction sites, and many other businesses before the rest of the country. During last summer’s coronavirus infection spike, COVID czar Anthony Fauci said, “Certainly, Florida … jumped over a couple of checkpoints.” When DeSantis moved the state into phase three of reopening, which lifted all capacity restrictions on restaurants, Biden criticized him as irresponsible.
But DeSantis did not flinch. Neither did he shut down his state again.
That is probably one of the reasons that DeSantis polls so well among Trump supporters, despite the wide differences between his personality, experience, temperament, and policies and those of the former president. “He doesn’t just go with the flow. … He decides what he thinks is right and is prepared for the consequences,” La Torre said.
DeSantis stressed his willingness to change course when scientific models don’t pan out or when initial predictions prove wrong. “What happens in real time is really what matters,” he said. “It was pretty clear to me after about two weeks, three, four weeks into this, that we needed to get people back to work, back to school, we needed to do all that.”
He says he wasn’t choosing the economy over fighting COVID. He decided not to do what others were doing “because I thought those policies did not, in fact, stop the spread.”
The Politician
DeSantis is only 42 years old but already has quite a resume. After completing his undergraduate degree at Yale, and then working a stint as a prep school history teacher, he went to Harvard Law School and then was commissioned into the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, serving as an officer at both Guantanamo Bay, where terrorists are imprisoned, and in Iraq. He was a federal prosecutor before being elected to represent Florida’s 6th Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 2013 to 2018.
Rep. Mike Kelly says the governor has transformed himself into a confident leader. “I served with DeSantis in Congress for a couple of terms. He was as quiet as a mouse. Now look at him,” Kelly commented to the Washington Examiner.
Congress gave DeSantis a crash course in how to swim against the surging left-leaning tide. Washington, he said, “is hard-wired against conservative beliefs and principles and policies. The bureaucracy is liberal. The media is very partisan in the Democrats’ favor, and obviously, the Democratic Party is very, very aggressive and it’s everywhere.”
Disenchanted with Washington, DeSantis decided to jump into the 2018 race for Florida governor. He began the primary race as an underdog but won a convincing victory over Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. Trump’s endorsement helped.
The 2018 election was tougher than the primary. DeSantis faced Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum at the same time that outgoing Gov. Rick Scott was running for Senate against three-term incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson. Both Republicans won, but only narrowly.
DeSantis says the country faces severe challenges emerging from the national emergencies of the pandemic. He was shocked by how easily so many people gave up their basic freedoms when the panic hit. “Our adversaries are looking at how the West responded to this,” he said. “And they’re thinking, ‘Man, if we can instill panic and fear, we can get them to close down their whole society, cripple the strongest economy in the world, like the United States did.'”
He wants to present Florida as an example of how coolheadedness can prevail and make it unnecessary to limit freedom. The response to the pandemic showed politicians willing to pander to fear rather than follow the evidence, and many in the public went along with them. “I was really surprised at how a lot of people were just willing to throw any of their freedoms overboard.”
But he is optimistic that the public has emerged from the pandemic more skeptical of government overreach, and more levelheaded in judging costly, heavy-handed government mistakes. People now know it would’ve been better had the country “not panicked ourselves into doing dumb things like closing schools for a year,” he said.
DeSantis’s vindication came late in the pandemic but in time to make it a theme of his reelection campaign next year. He’ll need to win that before focusing on 2024, but he has already started to build a national conservative following. On June 2, he signed a bill banning transgender athletes from competing in girls sports, a policy area in which he recognizes that the common sense of the great majority of people is being thwarted and chaffed by the militancy of zealots.
He is also tussling with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over “vaccine passports,” but on this, DeSantis is on the side of his state rather than of majority opinion. He pushed to fine cruise lines that refuse to accept unvaccinated passengers. The CDC wants ships to meet a high threshold of vaccinated passengers on each cruise. A compromise is likely, and the public is on the side of the CDC: 80% of cruise enthusiasts want the restrictions. It’s an early reminder to DeSantis that his gubernatorial imperatives will sometimes clash with his desire to extend his national appeal.
Former Florida Gov. and current congressman Charlie Crist has announced that he will seek the Democratic nomination. Nikki Fried, Florida’s commissioner of agriculture and the only statewide elected Democrat, has also filed to run. They’ll both try to exploit any missteps by DeSantis in next year’s election and, perhaps more important to their party, find DeSantis’s vulnerabilities in advance of the presidential contest.
DeSantis says his reelection message is simple: “We’re going to keep Florida free. The question is, do you want a leader you can count on? I think I’ve proven Floridians can count on me. If your job’s on the line, I’m standing with you. If the media attacks, that’s my job as a leader to take those slings and arrows on behalf of the people.”
How often is he asked about his presidential aspirations?
“Well, it’s not infrequent. Let’s just put it that way,” he said, laughing. “I won very narrowly in ’18. If I had lost, the state would look a lot different right now. And so, I think ’22 gives us the opportunity to go around and let people know here’s what we’ve done. We’ve got an incredible record. And I think winning, and winning convincingly … I think that’s going to set Florida on a great trajectory for a decade or more.”
