We’ve seen this movie before: Popular red-state governor tries to leverage state experience to attain national success. But DeSantis could succeed where others failed.
We’ve seen this movie before: Popular red-state governor attempts to leverage state experience to attain national success. But DeSantis could succeed where others failed.
T he decade of the 2010s is littered with accomplished, formidable, and conservative governors who flamed out in their presidential campaigns. Ron DeSantis is currently the best-known presidential prospect among Republican governors. Will his campaign disappoint in the manner of Rick Perry in 2012 and Scott Walker in 2016? Or can he shake off this history?
Perry and Walker were impressive figures. Perry had defeated the Bush family political machine in Texas. Scott Walker had become a national hero for conservatives by taking on Wisconsin’s public-employee unions and surviving a bitter recall campaign. They had solid records as both economic and social conservatives. They seemed well-placed to transfer their political skills from state politics to presidential campaigns.
It didn’t work out that way.
One problem was that they couldn’t convert their state-level economic conservatism to national politics. On the surface, Republican economic policy was consistent from the state house to the halls of Congress. The Republicans were the party of (relatively) smaller government and lower taxes.
But those superficial similarities concealed important differences. At the state level, conservative Republican governance revolved around limiting the wages, benefits, and privileges of municipal workers on behalf of property taxpayers. At the federal level, conservative Republican governance focused on cuts to old-age entitlements (often paired with tax cuts for high-earners and investors). Some Republicans like Herman Cain, Paul Ryan, and even Rick Perry himself proposed plans that combined large tax cuts for most high-earners with tax increases for some in the middle-class. Republicans usually retreated from middle-class tax increases when called on it, but the basics of the Republicans’ offer remained entitlement cuts combined with tax cuts that would mostly go to the affluent.
Those are both kinds of smaller-government politics, but they hit the median voter differently. There are a lot more property taxpayers than there are municipal workers. Therefore, when Scott Walker went after the municipal public-employee unions, he could plausibly argue that there were more direct winners than losers from his agenda. On the other hand, far more people are going to get Social Security and Medicare than are going to become affluent business owners. The median American stood to be a loser based on the direct effects of national Republican policies.
Now, of course, direct effects aren’t the only ones that matter, and Republicans were free to argue that the economic growth resulting from a trade of entitlement cuts for (mostly) high-earner tax cuts would leave everyone better off, but Republican governors were in no better position to make that argument than a Republican member of Congress. The actual tax and spending agenda that conservative Republicans succeeded with didn’t translate well to federal politics.
Taxes and spending were only one way that state and federal politics were different. Immigration was another. When questioned about his policy of in-state state college tuition for unauthorized immigrants residing in Texas, Perry said to his critics, “I don’t think you have a heart.”
Scott Walker went much further on immigration. He said in an interview:
You hear some people talk about border security and a wall and all that. To me, I don’t know that you need any of that if you had a better, saner way to let people into the country in the first place.
Perry was hurt by his “heart” comment in the 2012 cycle, and, if Walker had made it farther into the 2016 cycle, his anti-border-security comments would probably have hurt him too.
Part of what happened was that the salience of the immigration issue had increased as the 2010s went on and Perry and Walker weren’t ready. But another part is that immigration is different at the state and federal levels. The governor of Texas has to deal with the consequences of immigration policy made in Washington. The governor of Wisconsin’s opinion of immigration security on the southern border isn’t the most important criteria for evaluating his job performance. But presidents are very important for immigration policy, both in how they enforce the law and in how they work with members of Congress to shape (or block) legislation. Neither Perry nor Walker was ready for how immigration policy was evaluated at the federal level.
In the 2010s, there was one Republican governor who mastered the issues well enough to gain the Republican presidential nomination. The irony was that he wasn’t a particularly conservative governor. Mitt Romney had run for Senate in 1994 as a pro-choice moderate. As governor of Massachusetts, he had signed a health-care law that was strikingly similar to Obamacare (including a health-insurance-purchase mandate).
This record (combined with a not particularly convincing conversion story on abortion) would seem to have placed Romney in a weaker position than a governor with a more conservative record like Rick Perry (or the now-forgotten Tim Pawlenty). But Romney understood something that Perry and Walker didn’t: Coasting on your record as governor wasn’t enough.
Romney went to school on the Republican-primary voter. He figured out where the Republican-primary voter was on immigration and quickly (some might say shamelessly) ran there. He then relentlessly attacked Perry as weak on immigration enforcement.
Romney developed an in-depth defense of Romneycare. Perry wasn’t able to articulate criticisms of Romney’s law that addressed Romney rebuttals. Perry hadn’t done the work, and he looked lost. After a series of debates, Perry was visibly deflated. He recognized that he couldn’t catch up to Romney’s years of preparation by the next debate or the next month. Perry hadn’t expected running for president to be so difficult.
So where does all of this put Florida governor Ron DeSantis in comparison? It’s early, but DeSantis has picked several fights that have gotten him on the right side of the mass of Republicans who might pay attention to what a governor is doing. In the course of the Covid pandemic, he opened up Florida businesses more quickly than liberals liked. He banned mandatory masking in schools more quickly than liberals liked. He has taken on Democrats regarding the standards for teaching primary- and secondary-school students about gender and sexual identity. He has been unflinching, and — perhaps most usefully from his perspective — he consistently baits his liberal opposition into overreach in its criticisms.
That’s a good start. It’s made him famous. He isn’t Trump famous, but he is pretty well-known for a governor — comparable to Scott Walker at the peak of his recall campaign.
But that won’t mean anything if he can’t connect his record of being a fighter to the job of being president. DeSantis faced down the extreme Covid restrictionists, but, with a little luck, Covid will be a fading issue by 2024. Curriculum and teacher standards for primary and secondary school are state issues. You probably can’t run a 2024 presidential campaign by playing the hits from Florida state government 2020–2022.
He probably needs to turn his record as a fighter into a meaningful federal agenda. One option could involve reducing the capacity of powerful private bureaucracies like Internet-service providers, Internet-payment processors, and banks to form abusive cartels. It could involve legislating a code of conduct by colleges that accept public funds to operate in a nonpartisan and transparent manner, and to respect the rights and safety of political dissidents on campus. The standard Republican response to the weaponization of bureaucracy against conservatives is belligerent impotence. They promise to fight, but it is pro-wrestling and the Republicans have scripted themselves as the losers. Conservatives could use a real fighter in this, but a real fighter would require a policy agenda that can pass — and that would make a difference if it did pass.
Also, DeSantis would need to settle on an economic agenda. Right now, the Republicans don’t have much of an economic policy aside from calling for more energy production and complaining about inflation. Maybe that is the best course. It’s better than calling for a tax increase on the poor. And let’s not forget how Rick Perry showed that simply pointing to an impressive record of job creation in your state isn’t enough if it isn’t connected to a national agenda.
The challenge that DeSantis faces — which Perry and Walker also faced but failed at — is to articulate how his statewide record applies to federal politics. Unlike Perry and Walker, whose entire elected careers were in state politics, DeSantis has some experience in Washington. But the most important thing for him to keep in mind is that state and federal politics work differently. One can master both, but doing so involves putting in the work.