People know that DeSantis can take a punch, but they need to see him take the fight directly to Gavin Newsom.
Charlie Cooke and Henry Olsen have each weighed in on the run-up to Ron DeSantis’s big debate tonight with Gavin Newsom — a debate that looms larger than it did when it was first proposed because DeSantis is now fighting to keep his presidential campaign afloat. Olsen properly analogizes it to the debate between Ronald Reagan and Robert F. Kennedy in 1967 and reviews which arguments may work better than others for DeSantis in contrasting Florida with California. But just as important, what DeSantis needs for his presidential campaign is combat.
If you’ve watched the first three Republican presidential debates, you may have noticed that DeSantis and Nikki Haley have taken divergent strategic approaches: DeSantis has done whatever possible to ignore the other people on the stage and hammer home his own message, while Haley has excelled in back-and-forth arguments, especially with Vivek Ramaswamy. Some of Haley’s moments have perhaps gone to excess in personally insulting Ramaswamy (although it is hard to disagree with even her harshest assessments), but the important thing is that they make really good television. And DeSantis’s bite-sized versions of his stump speech do not. The DeSantis approach has been a low-risk way to get through the multicandidate debate circus, and he has had his strong moments, but he has done very few things as memorable as the Haley–Ramaswamy wrangles.
Some of that is temperamental and strategic: DeSantis is disciplined, he doesn’t get distracted easily, and he doesn’t like criticizing other Republicans if he can be talking about something that unifies Republican voters. He’s relentlessly prepared but not that good at spontaneous wit. He cut his teeth as a military prosecutor in courtrooms, where assembling a bulletproof case was more important than the kinds of theatrics rewarded in civil jury trials, and his demeanor is prosecutorial.
Tonight, he has an adversary that every Republican instinctively loathes: the smug, preening governor of the state that’s an icon of progressive anti-humanism and nonsense. Newsom will be hard to pin down: He’s smooth and slippery and, if press reports are accurate, he wants to use tonight to flack for Joe Biden and hit Donald Trump rather than discuss the topic at hand. DeSantis should resist invitations to defend Trump — the man he’s running against — but if Newsom wants to talk about Biden, that’s just as good for DeSantis as talking about California. Either way, the important thing is to deliver what he hasn’t shown thus far: some sort of viral moment of him taking the fight directly to an ideological foe. People know that DeSantis can take a punch and be undeterred, but they may have forgotten that a lot of what made him a national figure was sparring with hostile reporters. That’s also the only way in which this debate might reach beyond its immediate audience and transcend spin. It won’t matter what is said about this debate or how many people watch it; it could matter a lot more if people see with their own eyes a side of DeSantis that they want to see in a Republican leader.