Small donors add to US polarization
It is safe to say that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination have reached the flailing stage.
Yes, it’s too early to definitively write him off. But, no, his poll numbers are not encouraging, except to his opponents; his strident “anti-woke” messaging has not resonated with voters; his affectless campaign style does not make him seem any more human than the animatronic characters created by his nemesis, the Walt Disney Co.; and his successive campaign resets have not been enough to reassure some of his biggest donors that he has any idea what he’s doing.
How badly is it going for DeSantis? On Jan. 20, he was supported by 31.3 percent of Republican voters, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, and he trailed Donald Trump by just 13 points. By Thursday, however, Trump’s lead over DeSantis had tripled, to 39 points - and DeSantis’s support among GOP primary voters had been halved, to just 15.1 percent.
On Tuesday, DeSantis shoved aside his campaign manager, Generra Peck, who led his successful reelection bid last year but had never run a national campaign. He replaced her with James Uthmeier, his chief of staff in the governor’s office — who reportedly has never managed any campaign at any level.
This shake-up came after two rounds of staff layoffs. The campaign raised $20 million between DeSantis’s announcement in May and the end of June but burned through that cash at an alarming rate — for example, spending $1.5 million in just six weeks whisking the candidate and his family around on private jets, as opposed to putting them on commercial flights.
Money isn’t necessarily the problem, though. DeSantis’s ostensibly independent super PAC, pugnaciously named Never Back Down, had $97 million in the bank at the end of June after already spending more than $33 million on the governor’s behalf. Much of Never Back Down’s money came from billionaires and millionaires who can give unlimited amounts to the super PAC; an additional $82 million came in a transfer of funds left over from DeSantis’s reelection campaign.
Never Back Down’s most generous donor, Las Vegas hotel and aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow, has given the group $20 million. He said last week that he will not give a dollar more until
DeSantis shows he can attract new large-amount donors and also appeal to moderate voters. “Extremism isn’t going to get you elected,” Bigelow told Reuters.
The problem with the DeSantis campaign is DeSantis. He might still have time to find a campaign persona that captivates GOP voters, but he hasn’t found one yet.
Portraying himself as the ultimate culture warrior has not worked out. When critics attacked his new “antiwoke” educational standards for teaching that African Americans derived “personal benefit” from slavery, he angrily pushed back rather than acknowledge the error. All that this stubbornness accomplished was to create a vulnerability that other GOP rivals, such as Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), have been happy to exploit.
DeSantis blocked state funding for a practice facility for the Tampa Bay Rays after the baseball team expressed concern on social media about gun violence. He famously went nuclear on Disney after the company criticized his “don’t say gay” legislation abridging speech in schools. He told retailers and even cruise lines what kinds of safety protocols they were allowed to enforce during the covid-19 pandemic. In DeSantis’s worldview, being anti-woke apparently means being anti-business as well.
It wasn’t enough for DeSantis to sign into law a 15-week abortion ban in Florida; he demanded, and got the legislature to approve, a six-week ban. But it should be clear by now that “The Handmaid’s Tale”-type restrictions are not what most voters want. I assume his new campaign czar noticed the lopsided victory for abortion rights in Tuesday’s proxy vote in Ohio. I don’t necessarily assume that anyone can persuade DeSantis to shift to firmer ground on the issue.
When he hasn’t been igniting straw men in the culture wars, DeSantis has sought to portray himself as “Trump without the baggage,” a MAGA crusader who knows how to manipulate bureaucracies and get things done. The problem is that Republican voters don’t seem to want “sane Trump” or “unindicted Trump” - not as long as originalrecipe Trump is still on the menu.
It is true that everyone always overreacts to ups and downs in the national polls. It is also true that campaigns end when they run out of money, and that won’t happen to DeSantis anytime soon. But to bounce back, he’ll need resilience, and resilience implies flexibility. If DeSantis has any flexibility at all, he hides it remarkably well.
Eugene Robinson is a columnist for The Washington Post.
There’s an approach to political questions that the conservative in me rebels against. Let’s call it the “You can’t have too much of a good thing” fallacy.
Virtually every popular idea in American life has cheerleaders for this fallacy. You’ve surely heard someone say something like: “The only cure to the problems with free speech is more speech.” Or: “You can never have too much inclusion or diversity.”
Broadly speaking, I take the opposing point of view on nearly all such claims. This doesn’t mean I oppose free speech or diversity any more than I oppose cheesecake or Scotch. Rather, I subscribe to the view that life, and especially politics, is full of trade-offs. All medicines or poisons are determined by the dose.
Nowhere does this longstanding view earn me more grief than when the subject of democracy comes up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of democracy. I just don’t think it’s the answer to every problem any more than hammers are the right tool for every DIY project.
For years, I’ve opposed lax rules about mail-in voting and other trends that make voting too easy. Maybe it’s the journalist in me but I think deadlines are really useful and having an election day (or even an election weekend) that means something would be better. I think lowering the voting age is a ridiculous idea. Our 50-year-old experiment with democratizing candidate selection — the primary system as we know it today — has gone awry.
Such arguments were once well-received on the right and absolutely loathed on the left. They’re still mostly loathed on the left but in this populist age they’re increasingly despised on the right, too.
For instance, last week on CNN, I made a fairly conventional point about the distorting effects of the rise in small donors for democracy. Candidates who depend on small donors tend to take more polarizing positions. In part because they don’t care much about electability, they push their party to more extreme stances, making the party “brand” less appealing to moderates.
Such observations are not particularly controversial among experts. Election expert Richard Pildes writes, “One of the most robust findings in the empirical campaign-finance literature is that individual donors are the most ideological and polarizing sources of money flowing to campaigns.”
You don’t have to be a political scientist to see this. Democrats routinely waste millions on ideologically “blue state” candidates in “red” states — Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Amy McGrath in Kentucky — who pander to the views of liberal out-of-state donors rather than more conservative but persuadable instate voters.
On the right, small donations tend to flow to candidates and grifters vowing to wage war on the mythological allpowerful “establishment.” After she lost her bid for Arizona governor, Kari Lake raked in $2.5 million, 80% of which came from out of state. She promised to spend the money on court challenges to her “stolen” election but barely spent $1 for every 10 on that effort. As uncontroversial as this is in the real world, it’s now heresy in certain quarters of the right, particularly among those who make a living trying to keep small donors angry enough to provide a credit card number.
For instance, in response to my CNN comments, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) claimed I’m just angry that the fat cats I allegedly depend on have lost their influence in politics. I laughed not just because Vance’s candidacy was launched with $10 million of his former billionaire boss Peter Thiel’s money but also because, last year, the newly proDonald Trump Vance insisted that the GOP’s “red wave” failed to materialize not because of Trump’s meddling but because of the baleful power of Democratic small donors.
A common refrain among my dyspeptic critics is that small donors are enriching democracy by participating. Obviously, this is true for plenty of individual small donors. But it leaves out the fact that, at scale, they cut out the parties and disproportionately reward performative rabble-rousers on the left and right. Again, the most ideologically polarized candidates monetize the most ideologically polarized small donors who in turn reward further polarization. This monetization of fear and outrage is a big business.
Most Americans don’t vote in primaries, religiously watch cable news or make small donations. But the tiny slice of Americans who do all three have captured the primary process, and because most candidates worry more about primary challenges than general election ones, this sliver has outsized influence over politics generally. I’m not for banning small donors but if you think polarization is a problem for democracy, then it’s hard for me to see how they’re not part of it.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast.