DeSantis may be GOP’s best bet for a Trump alternative

After the Republican Party suffered a surprising (well, to Republicans) defeat in the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee famously commissioned an autopsy that tried to analyze how the party had fallen short. It made a range of recommendations, but they were distilled into a plan for the party to win back the presidency mostly by shifting left on immigration.

Then, of course, Donald Trump put that vision to the torch.

After Trump went down to his own defeat, it was clear there wouldn’t be a repeat of the autopsy. Not only because the last experience ended badly, but because Trump’s narrative of a victory stolen from him would not allow it.

But just because there hasn’t been a formal reckoning doesn’t mean that Republican elites don’t have a theory of how to fix their party’s problems. It’s just that this time the theory is less a message than a man: Right now, the party’s autopsy for 2020, and its not-Trump hopes for 2024, are made flesh in the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.

The proximate cause of the enthusiasm for DeSantis is his handling of the pandemic. When the governor began reopening the state last May, faster than some experts advised, he was cast as a feckless miniTrump, the mayor from “Jaws” (complete with open, crowded beaches), the ultimate case study in “Florida Man” stupidity.

A year later, DeSantis is claiming vindication: His state’s COVID deaths per capita are slightly lower than the nation’s despite an aged and vulnerable population, his strategy of sealing off nursing homes while reopening schools for the fall looks like social and scientific wisdom, and his gubernatorial foils — the liberal governors cast as heroes by the press — have stumbled and fallen in various ways.

So DeSantis has a good narrative for the COVID era — but his appeal as a postTrump figure goes deeper than just the pandemic. The state he governs isn’t just a test case for COVID policy. It’s also been an object lesson in the adaptability of the Republican Party in the face of demographic trends that were supposed to spell its doom.

When the 2000 election famously came down to a statistical tie in Florida, many Democrats reasonably assumed that by 2020 they would be winning the state handily, thanks to its growing Hispanic population and generational turnover among Cuban Americans, with an anti-Castro and right-wing older generation giving way to a more liberal younger one. But instead, Florida’s Democrats keep falling short of power, and the Republicans keep finding new ways to win.

DeSantis’ career has been a distillation of this Florida-Republican adaptability. Raise teachers’ salaries while denouncing critical race theory and left-wing indoctrination. Spend money on conservation and climate change mitigation through a program that doesn’t mention climate change. Choose a Latina running mate while backing E-Verify laws.

Of course, all of this means he may soon attract the ire of a certain former president, who has no interest in someone besides himself being party front-runner for 2024.

And the idea that a nonTrump front-runner could be anointed early and actually win seems at odds with everything we’ve seen from the GOP recently.

The donor-class hope that Trump will simply fade away still seems naive. But the donors circling DeSantis at least seem to have learned one important lesson from 2016: If you want voters to say no to Donald Trump, you need to figure out, in a clear and early way, the candidate to whom you want them to say yes.