‘Slitting throats’ doesn’t help
Ron DeSantis is eager to become president—to sit, as it were, in Lincoln’s chair— so he can start “slitting throats.” Washington, formerly The Swamp, will be The Abattoir.
Perhaps the folks at the New Hampshire barbecue had a delicious frisson of danger—the thrill of proximity to a roughneck—when DeSantis said that in taking on “these deep state people” he will “start slitting throats on Day One.”
Try to name a president who talked that way; maybe Richard Nixon on the tapes he assumed would never become public—a discouraging precedent.
Florida’s Republican governor has a penchant for advertising his toughness—something truly tough people need not and do not do. There are, for example, his startlingly many references to kneecapping. In a tweet he boasted that “We have kneecapped ESG”—environmental, social and corporate governance investment criteria—“in the state of Florida.” President Biden “is deliberately trying to kneecap our domestic energy production.” “We kneecap [local police departments] with our clemency power.” Florida Democrats seeking a special legislative session devoted to gun violence would “kneecap” law-abiding citizens. He said that whoever leaked the draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was trying “to kneecap a potential majority” of the justices.
If DeSantis wonders why polls show that he has regressed in his costly competition with Donald Trump, he might rethink his evident decision to leapfrog the former president on the spectrum of loutishness. What comes after the promise of throat-slitting? A Corleone-style vow to put the severed heads of horses in the beds of the woke?
Inhibitions on verbal coarseness perish in contemporary American culture, which Twitter shapes and reflects. Polls indicate that since the DeSantis campaign’s stumbling start in a technologically botched Twitter event, his public exposure has coincided with a widening of the gap between his support among Republicans and Trump’s. This is probably not coincidental.
His decision to launch on Twitter was symptomatic of his larger and persisting problem—an elementary misreading of the American public. Seventy-five percent of Americans rarely if ever tweet; 25 percent of Twitter (now X) users generate 97 percent of all tweets. The presence of Republican primary voters among Twitter obsessives is probably not large.
Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh thinks DeSantis is better than his presentation of himself. (Mark Twain popularized another wit’s jest: “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”) Ganesh notes that DeSantis, who speaks “in a sort of monotone nag,” could “illuminate a stage by getting off it.”
But Ganesh correctly cautions that DeSantis can still prevail because tenacious plodding can lead to the White House. (As Nixon demonstrated. Again, not an alluring example.)
But the fundamental challenge for DeSantis, as for his rivals courting the Republican nominating electorate, is to keep his eyes on the prize: the presidency. CNN’s Ronald Brownstein notes that 80 percent of the states—40 of 50—have voted for the same party’s presidential nominee in at least the last four elections, “a level of consistency unmatched through the 20th century.”
This, says Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report, suggests “a very narrow battleground for the Electoral College in 2024.” Currently, 235 electoral votes are rated Lean/Likely/Solid Republican, and 247 rate as Lean/Likely/Solid Democrat. “Just four states (worth 56 votes) are considered Toss-Ups: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.”
How is Florida’s aspiring throat-slitter going to do in Pennsylvania? A Franklin & Marshall College study shows, Walter says, that two in five of the state’s moderate voters (39 percent) were registered as Republicans in 2020, but only one in four (25 percent) are now. Three-quarters of moderates are now registered Democrats (53 percent) or independents (22 percent).
For Republicans to carry Wisconsin for the third time in nearly 40 years (President Ronald Reagan in his 49-state landslide in 1984 and Trump in 2016) they must, in the words of one analyst, “stop the bleeding in the ‘burbs.” There, moderates—especially college-educated women—are decisive. The key to Arizona is Maricopa County (Phoenix and surrounding suburbs), which only two major statewide Republicans have won since 2016. Republicans have lost ground in Atlanta’s most important suburban counties, Cobb and Gwinnett, which Trump in 2020 lost by 14 points and 18 points, respectively.
So, the Republicans’ 2024 nominee might want to avoid bloodthirsty language about visiting violence on political adversaries. The moderate voters who decide our elections will flinch from candidates who talk as though they come from a milieu in which people say things like: “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.” (Disclosure: The columnist’s wife, Mari Will, is an adviser to presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott.)