The DeSantis they know
He’s boring.
He has a distaste for glad-handing.
He’s charmless.
One by one, media figures look through their telescope at Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and dutifully echo the judgment. But watching DeSantis work in person leaves a different impression entirely.
DeSantis is chatting with his constituents along a walking trail in his hometown when Kimberly Baldwin catches sight of him standing on a pathway in a local park and is moved to tears when DeSantis stops talking midsentence to chat with her.
“Hi, Kimberly. How are you doing?”
“Amazing, now that I’ve met you,” Baldwin says. The two talk about her return to their mutual hometown of Dunedin after living in Miami. Her father, she says, is the deputy sheriff in nearby Land O’ Lakes, and she recently decided to go back to college.
Twenty miles away in Tampa, President Joe Biden is trying to shame him at a campaign event over health care spending. A little farther from home, former President Donald Trump is on social media lobbing insults at “Ron DeSanctimonious” and spreading unfounded insinuations about his days as a teacher.
Both men eye him as a threat to their White House ambitions. DeSantis hasn’t said he’s running, but he shared his thoughts about the former president’s antics bluntly. “Look, I have the responsibility to govern a state, and I’ve got to focus on delivering results. I’ve also got to protect the people against Biden’s policies, and so when I’m getting in fights, I’m fighting Biden,” he began.
The governor stressed that his concern is not merely for his own prospects but for the party as a whole: “I want other Republicans to do well. I don’t want any Republican to do poorly, so I’m not in a situation where taking potshots against other Republicans is something that I think is beneficial.”
It is an answer that has kept him above the fray — and left a press hungry for a fight between the two unsatisfied.
The interest in DeSantis accelerated among Republican primary voters after he made history in the midterm elections when he defeated Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Fla., by a whopping 19 percentage points, winning 62 of Florida’s 67 counties, including deep blue and highly populated Miami-Dade by 11 points.
Florida’s reopening was among the most ambitious in 2020, garnering a heap of criticism from the national press — criticism that accelerated when Florida was one of the first states to order schools to open, refusing to give in to school districts that didn’t want to resume five-day, in-person instruction by late August of that year.
Late last month, DeSantis rolled out significant reforms to the state’s higher education system that included a new focus on civics, tighter scrutiny on faculty tenure, and prohibitions on so-called diversity, equity and inclusivity programs. “The thing about it is, as a state university system, they are funded by Floridians, by taxpayers,” he said. “They don’t have the right to do whatever the heck they want to do on our dime, so we have the right and, actually, the responsibility to say, ‘What’s the purpose of higher education, what are we trying to get out of this, and what’s in the best interest of the state of Florida?’ and then put that vision into reality.”
DeSantis said he expects other states to push back against the overt politicization of public academic institutions. “I think it’s going to end up really catching fire in a lot of red states because it’s one thing that a private university can do what they want, but when you’re surviving on the state dole, we have every right to say it’s going to go in the direction that we want to go,” he said.
Last fall, the Florida legislature introduced the Parental Rights in Education bill limiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. In a broad misreading of the bill, the press and the opposition called it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. On cue, social media went ballistic, and Disney felt the pressure.
“I think most people believe it was the right thing to do. People thought because I was tangling with Disney, it was going to hurt me in the election, but in Osceola County, which is where most Disney employees live, I won for the first time as governor and (was) the first Republican who won that county in a while,” he said.
While the culture war fodder gets much of the attention, the day before our interview, DeSantis rolled out a comprehensive tax reform bill aimed directly at the middle class he grew up in — his mother was a nurse, his father installed Nielsen ratings boxes, and both hail from the Great Lakes Rust Belt. “Inflation has been the biggest problem people try to deal with. Now that’s caused by Washington. It’s not, obviously, caused by the state of Florida,” he said. “But we want to do what we can to mitigate it, so we did a billion in tax relief in last year’s budget. We just did the $500 billion toll relief, so if you’re a commuter, once you hit the certain number of tolls in a month, next month you get 50% rebated back to your SunPass. So that’s going to save the average commuter $500 a year and probably in Miami maybe $1,000 a year because there’s a lot of tolls, so that’s something that helps people,” he said.
“And then these other things with $25 under household items, no sales tax, the baby items, no sales tax, all these things I think just make a difference to middle-class families,” he said.
To the rest of the country, the presidential race may already be underway. But Floridians first and foremost need, and still have, a governor. DeSantis’s challenge is to continue to make sure that delicate balancing act, and not the barbs coming from his would-be rivals in both parties, commands his full attention.