The Abortion Issue Will Destroy Ron DeSantis

Ron DeSantis, the newly re-elected governor of Florida, is all but at the top of the GOP political universe. Although he still trails Donald Trump in most 2024 primary polls among republican voters, he is the only republican who has ever looked like he can actually beat the MAGA King, with the small exception of Ben Carson's two months of frontrunner status in the fall of 2015. But if Ron DeSantis can truly depose Donald Trump, it will not because he defeated the Trump political brand. His appeal to republican voters does not rest on a large swath of principled conservative voters who are fed up with Trumpism - the bullying, the cruelty, the disregard for compromise and civility, and the hatred of democratic principle. Such a voter, with the exception of a lonely 5-10% of the GOP, simply doesn't exist anymore. There is no such thing as a Never-TrumpISM voter. Ron DeSantis represents the new phase of Trumpism. Trump's original 2016 candidacy, especially within the republican primary, represented three main pillars of the GOP electorate's priorities: White America's backlash to "political correctness" and changes in social culture, fear of immigration in a time when terrorism from ISIS was prevalent in the news, and dismay due to the aftershocks of the Great Recession. Donald Trump was able to grasp those three pillars with mastery by being the candidate nobody had ever seen. Conservatives across the country felt like they couldn't express their true feelings of hatred towards black people, brown people, women, and gay people - and although their previous candidates for President such as Mitt Romney were staunchly conservative on economic issues (people often forget that Mitt Romney supported the privatization of Medicare and a universal 20% tax cut) - their politicians refused to say the bigotry out loud. But when Donald Trump could go on national television and say the most fucked up shit, the open expression of feelings that racists and misogynists had been bottling up for years (if not decades), its no mystery why he won the nomination in 2016.

A Opportunity for DeSantis

To be clear, Donald Trump, simply due to the advantage of having been President, must be considered the frontrunner for the 2024 republican nomination until proven otherwise, which would have to be a victory by Ron DeSantis in a state primary previously won by Trump in 2016. But there are three big roadblocks for Donald Trump's easy path to the nomination that he must disarm before the early months of 2024. First, Donald Trump is out-of-touch with his own base on the issue of vaccines, having been the President who authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce the COVID-vaccine. Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, has become the champion of anti-vaxxers, banning cruise lines from Florida that require the vaccine, and even going so far as to question the safety of the vaccine, not just saying the throwaway line of mainstream GOP governors spouting lines about "freedom of choice" while still promoting the vaccine's benefits. Second, Donald Trump is no longer a novel character who can appear on the scene and excite people with something new. He is the most well-known politician in America, if not the world, and his commodity and value is set in stone. Ron DeSantis has the opportunity to shove through these two lanes of opportunity to unseat the MAGA King, but the third weakness for Donald Trump is also the very thing that could bring down Ron DeSantis.

The third and most important weakness of all is that the MAGA agenda and ideology has become more focused and directed on nameable policy positions. Instead of a chaotic rage at "political correctness" and "drain the swamp," conservatives have their eyes set on specific areas in which they can advance the MAGA agenda. To name a few, they want to control how the education system promotes diversity of race and religion, they want to stop the normalization of transgender people being welcome in society, they want to push back on the new culture of inclusion by punishing companies that serve their own monetary interests by promoting this new positive shift in culture. This presents a really big fucking problem for Donald Trump, because he isn't governing anything - he's stuck eating Cheetos while sitting the toilet in Mar-a-Lardo. In the meantime, Ron DeSantis controls a newly minted two-thirds Republican majority in the Florida state legislature, and can use it to essentially campaign for himself by passing any "anti-woke" MAGA bill he wants.  Such bills might be purely performative, and even if they are doomed to fail in state or federal courts, it provides a consistent meal of red-meat for the MAGA base that gives them a vision of the right-wing Presidency they can expect to see from Ron DeSantis. Every MAGA bill that Ron DeSantis signs into law over the course of 2023 gives him the opportunity to take a tangible set of results and make the argument that he should be elected as the new MAGA King, not Donald Trump, who is just an angry man in Palm Beach with no specific policy objectives. 

This political opportunity for Ron DeSantis is best exemplified by a single tweet posted by Ben Shapiro on Election Day just minutes after Ron DeSantis was projected to win re-election:

It's MAGA vs MAGA

For us remaining members of the American electorate who are allied against the fascist MAGA movement, whether or not we all necessarily agree on benign policy positions such as the tax code, we cannot be fooled by any media narrative that presents this looming GOP food-fight as MAGA conservatives vs Anti-MAGA conservatives. Wrong! This is Old MAGA vs New MAGA - it's like two variants of COVID fighting for dominance. No person would say the Delta and Omicron variants of COVID were a different disease - they were born and raised as genetic material 100% based from the original COVID, and simply mutated into a more insidious form. Ron DeSantis is just a new variant of the original MAGA disease, and his political DNA was born and raised from one source: MAGA. He is just as much a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump, and we cannot allow the media ecosystem to argue otherwise.

Ron DeSantis' Big Weakness

With Ron DeSantis' new republican supermajority in the Florida state legislature comes his intractable liability: the issue of abortion. In every single southern state controlled entirely by the republican party, abortion is banned either entirely or at no more than 6 weeks into pregnancy, unless blocked by its state courts. Except there's one GOP southern state that isn't like the others: Ron DeSantis' Florida. It's only banned at 15 weeks, and while such a ban that puts victims of late-term miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies should not be acceptable in the 21st century, over 95% of abortions occur before 15 weeks, making Florida's law small potatoes compared to its former Confederate state neighbors. Now, if Ron DeSantis was governing alongside a Democratic majority in one or more chambers of the legislature, like Republicans Glenn Youngkin in Virginia or Joe Lombardo in Nevada, he would have plausible deniability for explaining why he couldn't pass an abortion ban. But any political operative working for the Religious Right knows that DeSantis owns the GOP state legislature. He has been able to bend them to his will to pass bills punishing corporations once beloved by the state GOP like Disney, and forcing republicans in the state legislature to pass an egregious gerrymander of its House seats. If Ron DeSantis woke up tomorrow morning and decided to ban abortion in Florida without exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother, the legislature would have it done by the end of February. Ron DeSantis' muted attitude on the issue of abortion is no accident - banning it is deeply unpopular, and would have put his re-election bid at risk this last November. But the Religious Right still holds the golden key to the Republican nomination, and in their eyes, if Ron DeSantis can't manage to form a strong enough spine to pass an abortion ban with a GOP supermajority, how can they expect him to do jack shit as President with a Senate containing fewer than 60 republicans. The Religious Right will never allow Ron DeSantis to become the new MAGA King if he cannot achieve a victory for them on abortion in Florida, and they will remind him of that fact every single day after he announces his candidacy for the Presidency in the coming months if he does not act. And in the meantime, the Religious Right will continue to support Donald Trump, the man who overturned Roe v Wade, even if he can't win the general election, because that's how they can bend DeSantis to their will. That's why Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, has been firing shots off at DeSantis about his flaky position on abortion, because it allows her to stay in bed with the Christian right, it puts her in the media spotlight, and she can angle to be Trump's VP pick by fighting a proxy war against DeSantis before the primaries even start.

So if DeSantis is forced to act aggressively on the issue of abortion in the coming months before the summer debates kick off the campaign, it is certainly conceivable, albeit still unlikely, that he can unseat Donald Trump as the MAGA King. But the instant he puts his pen on the paper of an abortion bill, he has given President Biden and his team at the White House the political opportunity they have been salivating for to use against a possible candidacy by DeSantis. Biden's crucial liability against DeSantis is that DeSantis can win the electoral college by turning out the MAGA base in the same waves of turnout produced by Donald Trump, but turn suburbanites who voted for Romney in 2012 back to the GOP by fooling them into thinking that he's the Anti-MAGA republican, rather than King MAGA II. But if DeSantis is tied in knots over signing a draconian abortion law, Biden will crush him with suburbanites in Arizona, Georgia, and the three midwestern blue wall states just as he crushed Trump with them in 2020. 

Essentially, Ron DeSantis can choose to make a play for the general election voters against Joe Biden by moderating on the issue of abortion, but he will be defeated soundly by the political forces on his right in the religious wing of the GOP. Or, he can make a power play to finally unseat Donald Trump by passing a new cruel, medieval total abortion ban, but he will lose to Joe Biden in the general election and open the possibility of handing democrats the keys to overturning Dobbs. Ron DeSantis looks strong on paper, and his current political moves are certainly effective tactical decisions to clear the field as the new MAGA candidate, but the abortion issue will soon rip Ron DeSantis to shreds. 

Keep an eye of the Florida legislature's moves on abortion in the coming months. That will be a clear sign of Ron DeSantis' next move in this sick game of Fascist Chess happening in the Republican Party.