It Could Happen Here - The Desantis Campaign Death Spiral

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Robert sits down with James and Gare to talk about the nuts and bolts of Ron's disastrous campaign.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where myself, Garrison Davis, and James Stout just created a new soon-to-be-beloved fiction character, Racist Sherlock Holmes. And don't worry, we're not done workshopping it. It's not ready to go public yet. But when this bit drops,

you people are going to lose your minds. Oh. How's everyone doing today? Much better after learning about Racist Sherlock Holmes. Uh-huh. No, we didn't learn about him. He burst fully formed from our heads like Athena from the brain of Zeus. Ah, good stuff.

Speaking of the Greek and Roman pagan pantheon, James Garrison, and Roman pagan pantheon, James Garrison. You know who does kind of have the feel of a malevolent spirit in Greek mythology? Is... Ron DeSantis. Yeah, not wrong. Sure. Meatball Ron.

Malevolent Ron, that's what they call him. After all my years studying the papyri, this is, I can confirm. Yeah. Meatball Ron. I have a long essay on my sub stack about how Meatball Ron and the Egyptian deity Maat are really directly related to one another.

But that'll, you can find that on my sub stack. My Egyptology focused sub stack. Yeah, he's not a, what's the god of the sun, the god of the sun disc? The one they tried to do a monotheism for? Oh yeah, isn't that Ra? Yeah, that's that one pharaoh. I wasn't 100% sure it was Ra.

Yeah, I can see DeSantis seeing himself in those terms. No, Maat, like Ron DeSantis. I think DeSantis is more of like a Horus figure, actually. Yeah, yeah. I mean, no, because Maat, here's the thing. Maat has wings, and Ron DeSantis is currently flying over us, shading us all in the comfort of his mighty Technicolor wingspan. I'm seeing Maat.

Maat looks, there's too many colors in these, in these, in these wings. I don't know. I don't know why we got onto a comparing Ron DeSantis to, this was a mistake. Anyway, Garrison,

you just, last week we closed out on two great episodes about, uh, Fashwave and, uh, the adoption, uh, and kind of reposting of a lot of these aesthetics that had become popular on the far right via, you know, the dark Brandon memes.

And a big part of that was how Ron DeSantis somehow allowed some incredibly internet poisoned Zoomers to make an ad for him that was far too online for a presidential campaign ad. And I felt like it was time to kind of have a discussion about Meatball Ron, because obviously things in Florida are very ugly right now. As a fascist, which he definitely is, Ron DeSantis is an effective administrator, which I mean, he's good at twisting the administrative state that exists into a weapon to attack marginalized groups. He's been effective at that. What's happening legally, you know, in the laws, you know, a lot of the anti-trans laws, the anti-drag laws in Florida is very frightening. What he's been doing to the Florida education system, state education system is very unsettling. And, you know, that is a, all of that is worthy

of further discussion. But I think because the most immediate concern we have is like, is this guy going to be able to do that on a national scale, right? Which is not to say that we should just let Florida, you know, sink into the abyss. I don't believe that. But at the moment, Ron DeSantis is tied for second place against Donald Trump. So it kind of it behooves us to ask the questions purely for the purpose of self-defense. Can Ron DeSantis win? Right. Could he actually become not even the first question is like, could he become the Republican presidential candidate? Can he beat Donald Trump? And the short, good answer to that is I don't think so. It's not looking good.

Not looking good for old Meatball Ron. Agreed. And I wanted to get into why and kind of some of the fundamental flaws. As a guy who is, there was kind of this belief, fear, I think a reasonable fear among a lot of liberals and folks on the left, that because of how effective he's been consolidating and expanding his power in Florida, and because he's generally seemed like less of a, like, Donald Trump has certain competences as an authoritarian. There's things he's very good at, but he was not good at being the president. He was not good at using power. He's not an effective fascist in a lot of ways. He's not an effective fascist, right? Like, he wasn't good at picking people to, like, do things for him. He wasn't good at, he was good at hurting people in a blunt way, but he was kind of incompetent at re-raising, like a competent fascist, like Hitler

was a competent fascist, right? He was not in there long in an elected position before he had effectively made it impossible to oust him without military force. And Trump was never good at doing that stuff. And the worry is that Ron DeSantis would be. The good news is that Ron DeSantis is incompetent as a politician and a political candidate. So I wanted to kind of start with why a lot of his – the people who do form his base, which is quite shrinking at the moment. He's losing a lot of support. Why they thought he was capable of winning the primary and the general,

and when you look into kind of why a lot of sort of Republican, like legacy Republicans, the folks who often get called rhinos, why a lot of them decided to back Ron DeSantis, the best summary you're going to get comes from Phil Huffines, who was a businessman in Texas whose car dealership ran a series of ads that are like plastered forever in the memories of everyone who lived in the DFW area in the late 90s, early 2000s. And in a CNN interview a few days ago, he said this. When one looks objectively at who can beat Biden, it's going to be DeSantis. We already had a match with Biden and Trump.

Trump turns out Democrats better than anybody. DeSantis will be able to articulate more clearly what Republicans stand for, and he's not going to be bogged down in other stuff that Trump brings to the election. stand for and he's not going to be bogged down in other stuff that Trump brings to the election. I don't think that was a logical thing to think a year ago, right? Because it is true that Trump turns out the dims. The idea that like DeSantis isn't going to get bogged down in shit has become kind of fundamentally silly. Like he's gotten bogged down in the fact that a lot of his, you know, backers are invested in culture war shit that does not sell well on a national level. This whole like anti-trans crusade he's on, the anti-woke shit, is not a big vote

getter. It just gets the base behind you. And like, you're never going to beat Trump in a race to the base, you know? Trump has the core of the hard right Republican Party in his pocket, and they're not going to like move on from anybody. DeSantis' hope should have been going after independents, people on the edge, people who are unhappy with Biden. And I think when you pick this sort of hate crusade, it hasn't worked well. But Huffines decided that, yeah, this guy,

this is the dude who has a shot. I think he can actually pull it out from shot. I think he can actually like pull it out from Trump. I think he's got the ability to like get a lot of people in the middle or close to the middle. This has been proven kind of absurd over the last couple of months of stagnating poll numbers. Huffine says that the governor recently held a meeting with about 150 Texas Republicans in Dallas, where he, quote, impressed them with his stamina, youth, and performance in recent Florida state elections. And there's a number of reasons to think that this is a bad strategy, that like really laying on his performance in the last Florida election is like a good way for him to win support.

One of these has to do with the fact that like Florida is the national watchword for crazy, right? Like the rest of the country. Florida man. Yeah, even a lot of conservatives, when they're talking about madness in America, they talk about Florida. Like Florida man is an archetype.

And like, yeah, there's a lot of right-wing culture warriors who like Ron's anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT policies, but moderates and swing voters, the people he has a chance of pulling away from Trump, like if you tell them, I want to make New Hampshire more like Florida, most swing voters are going to be like, that sounds like hell. Like, I don't want to be anything like that place. Like, what a horrible, what a horrible idea. This is a sentiment that you will find among Republican thought leaders. Quote, one Republican consultant who has worked on presidential

campaigns said DeSantis was making a classic governor's mistake by talking extensively about his past accomplishments yeah put bluntly people in ohio or iowa do not want to be florida they don't care about florida and they are tired of hearing about florida um yeah because he's he's so reliant on the types of coverage that have come out uh during the past two years of legislative stuff he's done in florida and he's i guess forgetting the overall uh view of that people have of florida divorced from his own administrative uh changes yeah it's not like people are moving in droves to florida because he's defeated the woke menace and he's created a paradise like yeah he's getting high on his own supply a little bit he's getting high on his own supply. He's getting high on his own supply.

It's one thing. There's a degree of his campaign that's focused on like what he calls like the Florida miracle, the fact that Florida economically weathered COVID pretty well. And again, this would be a stronger point if like Florida's economy was booming and everywhere else was bad. But the U.S. economy overall, in terms of like the numbers that you know economists care about at least is like doing reasonably well and like of the shit that is bad in the u.s economy it's not any better like inflation is not better markedly better in florida than it is in iowa right there's

just not a good case to be made because like when you're not when you can't really drive the economic point home when you can't be like look at how much better floor is doing than your home you know it's a it's a fucking paradise compared to the you know shitty economy in ohio that's an argument you can make if there's any evidence for it but when you're like you can't really make the economic argument it all comes down to culture war stuff and most americans don't want this culture war shit going on in their backyard because it's like a gross, weird pain in the ass. So right now, the bulk of DeSantis' support comes from higher income old guard Republicans, the kind who were lukewarm for Trump from the beginning and the kind who point out rightfully that he didn't win against Biden and it's time for new blood. polling indicates it's not what most GOP voters want, which is kind of the big problem the Republicans have is that, and this is why Trump's definitely going to win, you know, as the primary campaign, is that like the hardcore of the GOP cannot be overcome by the moderates because the

hardcore is so in lockstep about what they want and what they want is Trump. The moderates don't have control of the party, but the moderates are the ones who can like actually win a general election. So yeah, it's, it's a tough situation for them to be in. And one of the things that kind of shows how fucked Ron is, is that like Ron won reelection in Florida in his last gubernatorial campaign by about 20 points a year or so ago in Florida., Trump currently has a 20-point lead on him.

Not great. Not great. No, that's a disaster. Because again, not only should you be able to bring in your home state as a sitting governor, but it shows that Ron is not popular because of his legislative achievements. He's popular because Florida is just that right wing, right? legislative achievements. He's popular because Florida is just that right wing, right? Like, that's like currently, like the electoral state or status of Florida is very conservative. And so Ron won by an overwhelming margin. But that doesn't mean people love him. They definitely

like Trump more than they like him. Bad situation to be in. And a number of early backers in DeSantis's orbit have begun to acknowledge this reality. I'm going to quote from NBC News here. Yeah, there are a number of people grumbling about it, no doubt, a DeSantis donor said. There is an overall sense, including with me, that he just has not ignited the way we thought he would. And I find that really interesting because you get versions of that a lot, that we were expecting him to really take off as soon as he started campaigning, and he hasn't. And that was our only strategy. You get this, like if you read interviews with like folks who were in the DeSantis orbit and people, because a number of his early backers have like peeled away and rescinded

their endorsements and given them to Trump. It was this hope they had that like once, as soon as he's out in front of America, Americans are going to love this guy because he's all the good stuff about trump with none of the baggage and that was just fundamentally disastrously wrong and i think one of the things we're starting to see is that the desantis people didn't have another plan for how to get this guy elected like their plan was that we think that trump's policies are popular but everyone doesn't like Trump. And no, that's actually not accurate.

The opposite is true almost. Like some of them just like Trump as a person. Yeah, a lot of them don't care about what he's done. They like the fact that he owns the libs, right? They're not thinking about it. He's a compelling character. Yeah. And DeSantis is a void of charisma. He is not a compelling character he's

actually like he's good at being like an administrator in like like yeah he's like he's very successful in doing bad things he's a guy you make your chief of staff if you're the president or something yeah yeah he's not like he's not a compelling character like the way trump is no and it's it's again it's so fascinating to me it says a lot character like the way Trump is. No, and it's – again, it's so fascinating to me. It says a lot about like the degree of bubble that all of the political class are in. And when I say the political class, I mean the people, the fairly small number of people in the left and the right, liberals and conservatives, who work on political campaigns, right? political campaigns, right? Because it's actually a pretty small community of people, of the folks who do the different jobs that are running political campaigns and that are like working as the age and legislative assistants and all that stuff for elected leaders.

And because to me, to just a guy sitting out there, like I'm worried about Ron because what he's doing in Florida, but from the moment I saw the guy speak, I was like, well, this man has no charisma whatsoever. And if you can't think about like how a guy could attract voters, if there's nothing that seems appealing about a candidate to you, if you can't understand their charisma, that's probably a good sign that they can't get elected. I am not mystified by why any president who was one in my lifetime won, right? George W. I've been in a room with George W. Bush and watched him spoke and it immediately made sense why people fucking love George W. Bush.

He had an attitude. He had an air that put people at ease. He was good at putting on a character that people found appealing in that time and place. There's a reason why so many voters who loved him, you know, especially after the first campaign where it was kind of a... But like, there's a reason why he many voters who loved him, you know, especially after the first campaign, where it was kind of a, but like, there's a reason why he got reelected. Like there's, and it's the same thing with like Bill Clinton, right?

You watch old videos of Bill Clinton on the campaign trail before he was president. You can see the charisma. You can see the way he connects to audiences. You can see the things about him that people find appealing. There's not a mystery. It's not mysterious why Obama got elected. He's a deeply charismatic man. And, you know, Joe needed a little bit of help. That's why he lost so many presidential campaigns beforehand. But next to Donald Trump, he seems like a much more appealing person. Like, I'm not mystified, and I'm not mystified by why Trump got elected.

Next to Hillary Clinton, Trump felt not like a politician, not like the same people who would let us down. There was this degree to which you should never be, if you're looking at whether or not someone can win an election, you should never be like, well, I don't get it, but I guess maybe they must have some sort of charisma because everybody is talking about them as a serious candidate. No, honestly, if you can't see anything about appealing about a candidate, then that might be a good sign that they're doomed, and I think DeSantis is fucking doomed. And this is kind of a thing that a lot of his early backers have started to realize. One DeSantis-aligned operative told NBC, from my understanding, if we don't see a bump in the polls, we're basically going to shut down the idea of a national operation. This is really something that we're probably going to see. I wouldn't be surprised if he kind of has a blowout politically pretty early in the primary season

next year, because he raised a lot of money earlier in his campaign. He raised about $20 million or so between mid-May and the end of June of this year, which actually put him ahead fundraising-wise of Trump by about $2 million or so. But the Trump campaign ended last quarter with twice as much cash on hand as Ron, alongside a still dominating lead in the poll. So Ron has raised a lot of money, which kind of speaks to the number of sort of like Republican, you know, institutional backers who hope that he could win where Trump had failed. But he blew all that shit and it didn't get him anything, right? Like he didn't raise a, he crept up a teeny amount in the polls, but he's still like tied for second with Donald Trump,

despite blowing all of that money. And I think we're going to reach a point pretty quickly where if he doesn't immediately take a state or two or three from Trump in the early primaries, any kind of hope he has for further donations is going to dry up. Because why would you keep wasting that money? We all saw how much money got wasted trying to take Trump out of the primaries in 2016. I do think people are going to be a little more gun-shy this time. There have already been a number of recent layoffs of major staffers by DeSantis. He's kind of purged a big chunk of the people who started his campaign. career is that as a politician, he has always been kind of noted as kind of weird within Florida politics because every election he's had, he's had an entirely new team of people. He does not work with the same people twice. He does not have like bring people back for his campaigns,

which is really unusual in US politics for a successful politician. When you win, you tend to bring him back a lot of the same people who helped you win the last time. And so the fact that Ron doesn't do that, that he's got such basically 100% churn in his teams, suggests a couple of things. One, he's not great to work with. And two, the people who work with him and have been successful and are good don't see him as someone with national potential, right? They don't want to keep working with him because then they get kind of trapped in the loop of being a DeSantis guy. They want to move on somewhere else because they think governor is as high as this guy can go. That is kind of one of the things that you see when you note this dude has such total turnover in his fucking teams. Now, again,

for all of the money that he spent, Ron's polling numbers have changed basically nil from when he announced his candidacy. According to New York Magazine, kind of collated a bunch of this together. In the Real Clear Politics average of polls starting July 1st, 2022, Trump had a 34-point lead over Ron DeSantis and 52.8% of the vote in national surveys, with DeSantis at 18.5%. and 52.8% of the vote in national surveys, with DeSantis at 18.5%. At present, he's got Trump's lead over DeSantis. So a year ago, Trump had a 34-point lead over DeSantis.

Now he's at 32, which is not the speed of movement that you want to see after a year of effectively campaigning. On the national surveys, DeSantis has gone from 18.5% to about 21%, which again, is just kind of like a disastrous rate of change. Now, this is just one poll. There's potentially outliers here. I've seen other polls that show DeSantis at more like 12% and tied with Vivek Ramaswamy, who is another GOP candidate. Like the fact that Vivek, who is not nearly the kind of national name that DeSantis is, is tied with him in some polls now is fucking disastrous. He and Trump are pretty close in terms of funding.

Vivek has raised only a fraction of what DeSantis has raised. So that's a pretty bad sign. Kind of a fucking disaster. One major area in which Ron lags behind Trump is his ability to draw interest in what amounts to free advertising from the media. Trump famously got about a billion dollars in free publicity in 2016

thanks to relentless media coverage of his every move, gaffe, and speech. He understood it didn't matter if it was negative. It didn't matter that they were shit-talking me. What matters is that they're keeping my face out front, right? This is a thing that will bring me support. It will bring me donors. It will make my supporters see me as like this kind of gladiator fighting for them.

He leaned into this shit. On the surface, Ron and Trump are kind of the same in their approach to the media, and that if you go to a DeSantis speech, you go to a Trump speech, they're going to call the media the enemy of the people or some variant thereof. They're going to talk about the need to control the press. They're going to support authoritarian measures against the free press. Again, if you're kind of just looking on the surface, it seems like they have the same attitude towards the media. But the way they treat journalists is completely different in that DeSantis has no strategy with the media. He just attacks them. If you're right-wing media,

if you're some podcaster he likes, he'll go on your show, he'll talk to you. But he ignores the liberal media. He ignores the mainstream media. But that's different from having a tactic for dealing with them. Trump has a strategy with the media. He will howl that they're the enemy of the people in front of crowds. He'll talk about locking up journalists. But if you read articles about him after a speech or whatever, he always gives the press their time. He knows a lot of these guys by name. He has relationships with reporters. He's had relationships with like Maggie Haberman of The Times. He's able to be like friendly with these people and social with them, which isn't like – it's not doing that to be a good person. He's doing it because like he wants them to feel comfortable around him and cover him.

And this is the thing that he's been doing longer than he's been a politician. Like Trump is primarily like a media guy. Like he is he is someone who's been able to very successfully manipulate public image and manipulate media in his favor for years, especially as like he's not like a good businessman. He's like, no, he's like a con man who is like really good. He's a good promoter. So he knows how to do this. DeSantis has none of this background. So he's just trying to copy the hostile vibe of Trump without understanding the actual media backing that Trump puts into his

relationship with advertising and with having any amount of coverage that will get Republicans to be like, oh, this is a guy that's worth voting for. Yeah. And also the kind of coverage that will get Republicans to be like, oh, this is a guy that's worth voting for. Yeah, and will also that will – the kind of coverage that will make independents pay attention to him, right? A big thing, part of how a lot of negative media coverage worked for Trump is that people would just see his name in the fucking news. And so they would wind up reading and listening to a lot of what he had to say. And because he's getting so much coverage and because all of these media outlets want to present the image of being unfair and unbiased, when Trump would go out and sit down with the New York Times, sit down with the Post, sit down with...

He would often get coverage that let him say his piece, let him make his case, because they didn't want to feel like they were being biased and he was giving them some of his time. But when you just cut the media off, like DeSantis has done, you don't get that from them. You don't get any of the benefit of this sort of idea of impartiality, which cuts down on your ability to actually reach people

who might be converted to vote for you. This is highlighted particularly well in a segment from a recent New York Times article on DeSantis' difficulty getting press coverage. Quote, Ass assigned to cover the re-election campaign of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Miles Cohen, a young ABC News reporter, found himself stymied. The governor would not grant him an interview. Aides barred him from some campaign events and interrupted his conversations with supporters. When Mr. Cohen was finally able to ask a question about the governor's handling of Hurricane Ian, Mr. DeSantis shouted him down, stop, stop, stop, and scolded the media for trying to cast aspersions.

The DeSantis campaign then taunted Mr. Cohen on Twitter, prompting a torrent of online vitriol. So on election night, Mr. Cohen decamped to a friendlier environment for the news media, Mar-a-Lago, where former President Donald J. Trump greeted reporters by name. He came up to us, asked how the sandwiches were, and took 20 questions, Mr. Cohen recalled. Mr. Trump, who heckled the fake news in his speech that evening, elevated media bashing into a high art for Republicans. But ahead of the next presidential race, potential candidates like Mr. DeSantis are taking a more radical approach, not just attacking nonpartisan news sources, but ignoring them altogether. And, yeah, I think that kind of like gets at the core of what a bad strategy this is. And it shows all of the Republicans right now because of Trump's

success in 2016, which we do have to remember was not based on converting a majority of Americans. It was based in part on like the electoral system and just raw luck that shit broke the way it did. like the electoral system and just raw luck that shit broke the way it did. But they are looking at like his success in 2016 and trying to copy that. But it's like a cargo cult thing, right? They don't actually understand what he did that worked. They see him bashing the media in his speeches. They're like, well, I'm going to be even harder. I'm not going to talk to the media at all.

And it's like, well, you have eliminated for yourself the primary benefit that Trump drew up from this. Yeah, I think the cargo cult description is great. They're trying to have the appearance of doing the Trump thing without understanding why the thing worked. And also importantly, it's not like 2016 anymore. As much as it feels like 2016 was the year that never ended, actually a lot has changed.

And also a lot of media has gotten a bit wise to the tactics that Trump did. Like they're no longer going to be blasting all of his speeches every time he says something outrageous because they know that's part of his strategy. So the same tactics, if DeSantis thinks he's going to get publicity for saying some horrible thing in his speech, the media knows what's up now. Like they've already seen this like playbook get played. It's not like it's, you can't treat it like it's eight years ago. Yeah. I think a good example of this is in 2016,

if it had come out, if Joe Biden had been the front writer, say he beats, you know, Hillary Clinton, but everything else is the same. So he's the, he's the democratic primary guy.

Say it comes out that his son has been smoking crack with prostitutes and like there's pictures of his hog everywhere and he was involved and so he gets charges against him for committing a couple of crimes. That might sink a presidential campaign in 2016. Nobody gives a shit about Hunter Biden. Like zero moderates. Not a single vote is being changed as a result of the Hunter Biden situation in 2024. It's a different landscape. And these people in 2024. It's a different landscape. And these people haven't, this is a good thing. I am frightened for when a new, you know, there's another coup in conservative politics and somebody understands that it's a different year. But we are

fortunate at this moment. And you know who else is fortunate? Who's that, Robert? The sponsors of this podcast. They're fortunate to have great pitchmen like James Stout. James, why don't you tell the people which Mealbox subscription will finally cure the gnawing pit of anxiety at the center of their life and bring them both peace and the love of Jesus Christ? Yeah, absolutely. We're probably going to have to uh we're gonna have to bleat some shit out here but absolutely when the uh no i personally love uh been a big chicken wing fan my whole life until the baby's arms from oh yeah and arrived yeah they are delicious little little fatty arms from freshly harvested babies and i've felt better

inside and out since i started eating children. Yeah, just remember our motto. Nothing's wafficking like human trafficking shit. Go to HelloFresh.com. Use promo code CHILDRENARMS for a 10% discount on your first box. Blue Apron. Actually, cut HelloFresh there. They're giving us a lot of money. It's Blue Apron we shit on.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors I know you. Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished

and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his

piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Ah, we're back.

And we're thinking about how there's one food box company who's been accused of a lot of malfeasance and another food box company who are, I think it's safe to say christ-like you know uh honestly and jesus jesus inspired to yeah at the very least yeah the reason jesus actually uh rose from the dead was to consume a breakfast uh that's right by blue apron jesus big big omelet, huge omelet guy. Anyway, I don't know. That's not really a joke.

So Ron DeSantis has long ignored any media not guaranteed to be fawningly indulgent of him for political reasons. This worked well in Florida. He's been able to get by by attacking centrist and liberal media and embracing a constellation of far-right podcasters and Fox News. But Florida is not the United States, and a governor's race is not a federal election. He simply can't succeed against Trump with the same tactics that worked in Florida's, or against Florida's, anemic state Democratic Party.

When he's tried to rebuke the naysayers who see his cause as largely doomed, DeSantis has tried to publicly downplay the significance of national polls. This is one of my favorite things. Whenever people point out, like, your polls have not moved in a year, and you've spent millions and millions of dollars he'll be like i don't trust those polls those polls don't really matter you can't trust the poll look at

how wrong the polls were in 2016 um he's called articles i've seen him use that line a lot look yeah look how wrong the polls were in 2016 okay ron yeah i I don't think, they were not off by 34 points. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can see clearly how he's making his case currently to donors in private because a memo that he sent out to a bunch of his high dollar donors

leaked recently. There's been a number of websites that have written about it, but we have like this memo, which is fascinating. It was sent out to a bunch of big dollar donors to a super PAC. So these are the people who are not limited by like campaign contributions because it's to a super PAC. So these are like the thick pockets people.

So we get an idea of how he is marketing his campaign right now that it's in a crisis. And it starts with a state of the race update with a subtitle, the ballot is very fluid. Early state voters are only softly committed to the candidates they select on a ballot question this far out, including many Trump supporters. Our focus group participants in the early states even say they don't plan on making up their mind until they meet the candidates or watch them debate. Well, we know Trump's floor is 25%, that leaves three quarters of the electorate willing to consider other viable options. What has not changed are the candidates who are realistically being courted by the electorate. As it has been for the last year, Trump and DeSantis remain the only viable options for two-thirds of the likely Republican primary

electorate. While Tim Scott has earned a serious look at this stage, his bio is lacking the fight that our electorate is looking for in the next president. We expect Tim Scott to receive appropriate scrutiny in the weeks ahead. We found low to no interest in Vivek, Burgum, and Nikki, while too many voters will not consider Pence or Christie for them to be remotely viable. Now, I agree about Pence and Christie. Neither of those people is going to be the primary candidate. But again, Vivek in some polls is right up there with Ron DeSantis. So note that neither of them is going to win. But again, Vivek in some polls is right up there with Ron DeSantis.

So note that neither of them is going to win. Great sign. Yeah. The memo goes on to note and to sort of admit that their efforts in other primary states have hit a wall. And they're basically like, we're giving up in Iowa and Ohio kind of. We're not going to be putting new resources into them. We're just going to throw everything we've got into New Hampshire. There's a couple of reasons for this, but I think it's largely that they don't think they can win in those other early states, and they know they

desperately need an early win to have any hope of building up momentum. Yeah, language like this from the memo has to have experienced Republican politicos nervous. While Super Tuesday is critically important, we will not dedicate resources to Super Tuesday that slow our momentum in New Hampshire. We expect to revisit this investment in the fall. I'm sure you will. Not a great sign, guys. I'm sure you'll be revisiting a lot of things in the fall. The memo also claims governor desantis and his message are thriving in town hall engagements so basically when ron gets in front of people they see his magnetic charisma they really like him once he gets a chance to shine in front of

them now there's been no evidence in polling uh he's been in front of people quite a bit and he's not very impressive most of the social media response to his public appearances have been people making fun of the way he eats in public like there's like six or seven different videos out that are him trying to eat something and looking like a goober and people making fun of him whereas like again trump has because he's actually charismatic trump can like sit in a truck and look like a doofus playing truck driver and everybody's like look at that guy even people who hate him are like well that's kind of endearing look at him he's hogging the horn he's pretending

to be a big truck driver um you know meatball ron i mean we call him meatball ron because of a food related gaffe uh putting ron too Putting Ron to. He's just a disaster in public. There are some useful bits in this leaked document. This is the part of the document where the DeSantis campaign is like trying to lay out what they see as his assets

as a candidate. And again, the goal of this is to get big dollar donors to give him more money. So this is them making the case as to why Ron is worth further investment. We found that when voters hear about the governor's bio, principally as a dad and as a veteran, they like him and are open to hearing more about him. This is to say nothing of his

successes on parental rights, his leadership bringing Florida's economy back during and after COVID, fighting illegal immigration and ensuring border security. That he's not just a fighter, but most importantly a winner a major paid media effort featuring the governor's bio will help us to convert three big issues that and you know that's again so the three big issues he's he's highlighting that he says like these are the things that are going to get voters onto us enough of them that we can overcome trump's 25 floor our anti-immigration stuff well i'm sorry man trump's got you beat there the wall is his right uh desantis has tried to go one step further i don't know if you saw his

press conference in texas where he uh the birthright citizenship thing yeah no just shooting people oh yeah yeah yeah i think he said quote drop a few of them yeah um he's trying to but again he doesn't just talked about what's interesting to me he opens this memo by starting like look trump's got a 25 floor of support but you know there's that other three quarters of people we can get and yet when you are talking about gunning people down at the border you're just trying to take that 25 from trump you are not reaching out to like the people who are less maniac right he's he's trying like again it's just bad strategy it's a bad strategy within the context of what his people have laid out as a strategy right like if the good strategy is go for the other 75 of the voters

well you probably don't do that by promising to be even harder on the border yeah anyway and he doesn't really even have like obviously trump didn't have a coherent border policy either uh but he had a thing right like he had a sort of shiny thing that he had three words that were very powerful build the wall and you know if desantis thinks americans are ready for shoot them all, right, you can try that. But he's not. He's like trying to do this weasel. Anyway, it's just not there's just not any evidence of an actual tactic there of an understanding of like what people find appealing and how to highlight it. He's not doing it yet.

He's not he's not. If you're a donor, he's not exhibiting the idea that he knows how to copy what Trump did and do it one better. Like your goal here, if you're running against Trump based on kind of what they lay out as what their strategy needs to be, which is get the other 75 percent of people to back us instead of Trump, you need to be – you don't need to be yes-anding. be yes anding. You are acknowledging by laying that out as the strategy that Trump, his appeal is, he's got a dedicated base of appeal, but it's limited. And so if you are trying to make the case that you're more electable than him, you need to show how you have a wider base of, like a wider appeal than he does. And you don't do that by being like, I'm even shittier on the border. than he does. And you don't do that by being like, I'm even shittier on the border. Like, anyway, just a bad strategy. Since he doesn't have a strong case to make an absolute numbers,

Ron's campaign has made the call to push heavily on the forgotten man narrative, arguing a soft conspiratorial view that a cabal of shady elites is colluding to ruin American greatness. Here's another quote from that memo. Equally important, we will offer an economic message to disrupt and win economy voters. American decline was not an accident. It was a choice. Our elites do not consider themselves Americans so much as they think of themselves as citizens of the world.

Their loyalty is not to a discreet nation, but to the bottom line on a balance sheet. And the decisions they made in leading this country over the past few decades has reflected that worldview. They have governed in their interests rather than ours and i do think there's a germ of something interesting there there's a there's this idea of like economic populism which was a a factor in trump's campaign it's interesting to me how close ron's idea is to like outright anti-seemitic conspiracy theory language. Yeah.

They don't recognize borders. They're citizens of the world, which is very similar to a lot of the arguments that the Nazis would make about the Jews, is that they're a borderless people who exist within this financial system rather than are national co-citizens, right? It's interesting to me that he's got this in that memo. Again, I don't think it's a good strategy.

I think the way Trump, Trump's just better at doing this, right? At like, he's made himself, like there's a lot of people who consider Trump like their kind of guy, like a working class dude, even though he's a billionaire with a gold toilet. I don't see that DeSantis has the ability to like win that kind of support from working people.

No, he tried really hard to go to push his, like his military record as part of a like, sort of I'm a normal dude kind of thing, but it doesn't seem to have stuck the landing at all. Like again, he just, I just did it in a clumsy and awkward way way yeah i mean in part because like the thing he's got to hang on like that he was this fucking dude doing sketchy shit at guantanamo isn't like even conservatives don't feel great about that right yeah he tried earlier to push like he was a leaguer he was a

jag officer like attached to a seal team but yeah he tried to call himself a seal yeah i think he like i i think he flew a little bit too close to the sun on that one and again like yeah he fucked up and alienated the people he was trying to appeal to and i also i do kind of wonder it was like sort of taken as read for some time that having military experience was like a positive aspect in a in a campaign that it would like win you a lot of conservative voters and whatnot i don't know that that's really the case yeah the uh i don't see a lot of evidence for it like people certainly like shout it when they serve but i don't know that it really works for them yeah i think that's more of a like a i don't know if i'm using the right phrasing here like a traditional republican value

yeah like a post-trump republican value because trump is like on record as being like no only idiots serving the military i'm a smart man and like that didn't seem to hurt him at all um but you know who else hates veterans oh yeah several of the uh the food box delivery companies they actually they just won't give them food they are they are actively every one of our supporters is wiping their ass with uh whatever flag the navy uses i assume they have a flag right oh definitely yeah yeah special navy flag it works underwater too. Very special flag. That's good. That's good. An underwater flag. That's what we need to bring nationalism to the fish. the fire and dare enter.

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Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

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Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives.

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We're back. So I wanted to close out by kind of looking at a segment of DeSantis supporters, So I wanted to close out by kind of looking at a segment of DeSantis supporters, the find people behind my favorite reliable media institution, LegalInsurrection.com. Oh, good. Now, this is a kind of libertarian right themed news website. They're like, boy, I do want you to look up LegalInsurrection.com because their website's very interesting. It like starts with this like phonetic breakdown of the phrase legalinsurrection.com because their website's very interesting. It starts with this phonetic breakdown of the phrase legal insurrection. That's their logo. Then includes a definition,

arising up against established authority, rebellion, revolt, inconformity with or permitted by law. That's a nonsense phrase because there's no such thing as a permitted legal insurrection. We had this argument actually back in around 1860,

and guess where it ended yeah like i'm not saying it's bad to have an insurrection i think some insurrections are potentially really good but they're never legal otherwise they're not an insurrection yeah that's a silly idea direction is illegality yeah like one way or the other i think it's this idea these people who like pretend to be libertarians, they still have this like sacred sort of reverence for the law.

They can't just say like, yeah, I believe in overthrowing the government. No, no, no. What I'm doing is actually obeying the real law. The people in charge are obeying laws

that are illegal and fake. But like, I know the real law. So what I'm not, I'm not a criminal. Like, no, man, just be like, yeah, i'm a criminal i want to i want to overthrow the government you know what's cool is being a criminal who wants to overthrow the government we all love this is why star wars is the biggest movie series we love criminals who want to overthrow the government that's who the founding fathers of this country war it's a very american thing to love

you shouldn't have to be like no but ours is a legal and oh fuck it you're a criminal you're cool you're fucking al capone like yeah it's very very cucked to have a legal insurrection it is very cucked anyway here's an article from legalinsurrection.com who bafflingly backs ronSantis. Florida government Ron DeSantis is serious about restoring executive branch agencies and rebuilding trust with the American people who have been shocked and appalled at the weaponization of government by the Biden administration and before that the Obama administration. The federal government, specifically the executive branch alphabet agencies,

has been completely corrupted by the Obama-Biden and now the Biden-Harris administrations. We all know it, and we're all disgusted and disheartened by the myriad ways the Obama administration targeted political opponents. That's why Trump's 2016 campaign to drain the swamp was so potent. We knew the depth and breadth of the corruption, the partisan banana republic-style attacks on political opponents, and we wanted it stopped. Unfortunately, Trump was not able to drain the swamp at all, not even a little bit. So when Biden took office in 2021, he just got to work picking up Obama's attacks on dissent with the deep state still fully embedded through the executive branch. god it's such first off it's very funny that they're trying to like make the resistance to be anything but like twitter libs uh like i do find it funny that they're like fucking trying to treat this like a boogeyman i'm just yeah like leading the marquee through the through the i don't know forest of georgia and blowing up fucking train tracks is extremely amusing to me

it's just sad but it does get it something, right? This attitude among a lot of Republicans, particularly the guys who really like DeSantis, that the deep state is really powerful. These federal law enforcement agencies are fundamentally like fighting against us and we have to build an ability to compete with them. And this is I actually think we've been mostly talking about like the weaknesses and the dumb shit about DeSantis' campaign. I think a strength he has not maybe capitalized on enough is this idea because this is something Trump proved he was unable to do. Like he didn't go in there and unseat the deep state. And DeSantis has actually been kind of effective at resisting the federal government and even sidelining some federal agencies within Florida. And there's some actual like potential for strength here with Trump's base. I don't know that this gets you moderates, but like it's weird to me that he hasn't pushed this harder. Part of that may be the fact that he's, like everything else, really bad at it. Kind of his strongest attempt to provide sort of a countervailing force

to federal law enforcement was his activation of the Florida State Guard, which 17 or so states have state guards. It's just kind of like a state version of a National Guard potentially. Florida's had not been active in a while, and he reactivated them claiming that it was going to be a force of volunteers who could respond to hurricanes and other public emergencies. But what he was actually doing was trying to create a paramilitary organization. He is in the process of attempting to do this now. These people are undergoing like military training and whatnot. He's trying to get them access to do this now. These people are undergoing like military training and whatnot. He's trying to get them access to like weaponry.

Like this is potentially kind of concerning, but he's really fucking bad at it. There was a really interesting New York Times article recently that kind of goes into the problems the Florida State Guard have had sort of spinning up.

And it's a very funny read because it's like a little kid's idea about how you would build a paramilitary organization. So on paper, the governor's office has said that one of the Guard's missions would be, quote, to ensure Florida remains fully fortified to respond not only to natural disasters, but also to protect its people and borders from illegal aliens and civil unrest. And then the New York Times article continues, the deployment this spring has been mired in internal turmoil, with some recruits complaining that what was supposed to be a civilian disaster response organization

had become heavily militarized, requiring volunteers to participate in marching drills and military-style training sessions on weapons and hand-to-hand combat. At least 20% of the 150 people initially accepted into the program dropped out or were dismissed. And if you get into this, the people dropping out are like the veterans. They're like military officers and stuff

who got into this thing and then are like, I was in the military for 20 years. You know, I did deployments here and here. And I came into this thing and it's a bunch of civilians dressed as soldiers yelling at me to do pushups and march in a field. And, like, trying to be an asshole to me because they're angry that, like, I have military experience that they think they know better. Like, it is, like, the volunteers said the training seemed poorly structured with an inordinate amount of time spent, as one of them described it, marching in fields.

of time spent as one of them described it marching in fields some of the men said that as veterans with years of experience in the military they were offended when they were yelled at by junior instructors acting like drill sergeants who disregarded their previous ranks i find this really fucking funny have you guys seen those videos coming out about like they're these classes where if you're like a rich or you know know, upper middle class dude, you can pay like 10 grand to spend five days doing a fake version of the Navy SEALs Hell Week. Like you're like grinding. Like, yeah, you're like hitting stuff with big hammers. You're like crawling on your back through rocks. like shitty painful exercises while like some dude who probably fucking got an other than honorable separation from the marine corps as a private second class like screams at you a lot and it's

you know that's what you feel while riding a one wheel have you seen that yeah rolling around on a one wheel yelling at you that you're you know just like making up bullshit reasons to be angry at you because idiots honestly have it like yeah it sounds like a weird mix of like expensive LARPing and like um and like a repressed kink thing for for these guys like yeah yeah that's what's happening yeah yeah a lot of guys who watched the movie full metal jacket and number one didn't watch all of it because like r lee ermy or whatever his name was character there like the really mean drill sergeant gets murdered after like emotionally abusing one of his recruits like kind of a big part of the movie um but just saw him like making fun like yelling at people and making up fun insults. And we're like, well, that's gotta be key to teaching people how to fight.

Garrison, have you seen full metal jacket? I have not seen full metal jacket. You'd actually probably like it. It's good. There's, there's some interesting parts of that movie. Well,

well shot, but yeah, I do think it's really funny. Like there's potentially, this is one of those things potentially very scary to have a far right elected leader building his own paramilitary force that is answerable only to him. Right? That is a frightening thing. I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about him trying this, but he's so shitty at it.

That's like dictator 101. Yeah. Yeah, like it makes sense that he would try it. I mean, like, yeah, I would never want to be a governor because I think that's an immoral thing to do. But if I if I was to be. Yeah. Authoritarian governor, I would have my own hit squad. Step one, make your own army. And it says a lot about Ron. Number one, that of all of the different things he's tried to do, this is the only one that seems like, oh, you might actually be able to get a lot of Trump voters

to switch over to you if you promise them, I'm going to do this nationwide. And you, as a guy who didn't join the army, but is pretty sure he would have been good at it, can become a militant commander in your state guard thing

that I'm going to establish. You might get some votes. I don't think you'd win a lot of moderates, but you might get the base away from Trump, right's it's just so clearly a brown shirts ripoff yeah it's just like it's so blatant that it's like it's it's like it's like it's like he's like poorly copying someone else's homework yeah like i don't a lot of his campaign has that vibe that he's like yeah poorly copying someone else's homework like I don't know that this would work. And I still think he would have it would be a long shot that he would have any chance

of beating Trump. But if he were to be like, I'm going to establish a state guard where conservatives can get access to military grade weaponry and the right to carry their handguns everywhere. Yeah, you might get I don't again, I don't think you win a general that way. But you might get the base away from Trump with that. It's at least more creative than anything else he's tried. Anyway, this is all a bad idea. I want to close by reading one last anecdote from that New York Times article on Meatball Ron's attempt to make an army.

captain who had retired from the military with a disability and later joined the state guard also clashed with instructors during initial boot camp last month raising concerns about the training in an assault complaint filed with the clay county sheriff's office the man said he was accused by the state guard commander of being the leader of the group that had been criticizing the organization and its leadership he was then forcibly pushed into a van against his objections and driven to the command post where he was fired and escorted off base. Of the nine original state guard recruiters and commanders who spent months recruiting for the organization, fewer than a third remained. The staff director, who had been a proportion of the less militarized version of the group, appointed in January, was removed from his post just two days before the inaugural graduation. The program's personnel director

was fired this week. So, good. Sounds like it's going great over there in Florida. Sounds like Meatball Ron knows how to make an army. I don't know, folks. That's my episode on the Ron DeSantis campaign and how he's doing. I hope you all enjoyed this little update. We're done. Cool.

Stay tuned for a Vivek ramaswani episode yeah uh which is just gonna be me making fart noises into the microphone you'll get everything you need on vivek here look it's gonna be trump unless he dies in which case yeah boy that could be interesting i mean i i just like descent just could have waited four years and then he could have had the backing of Trump to help. Yes. He I don't. He's such a he's such a weird little like power goblin. Because, yeah, I mean, if he was still may try to do that.

Trump has gone back and forth on people in the past, but it's such a weird call to like make this doomed play at it to build like this bad like you're going to piss some people off. Yeah. Why? Anyway. I remember us doing an episode not so long ago about DeSantis and being like, well, he'll just wait four years until Trump's out of the picture.

But no, he fucking defied our expectations by torpedoing his own presidential chances. Yeah. And that's why I love him. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,

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