The Dispatch Podcast - DeSantis, Decider

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

Back from Florida, David M. Drucker published his DeSantis profile on The Dispatch this week. Now, he's joined by Marc Caputo, National Reporter at The Messenger, to discuss their respective experience covering the governor, as they attemp to grok the DeSantis playbook. Show Notes: -WATCH: David M. Drucker interviews Marc Caputo -DeSantis the Decider -Marc Caputo's Twitter  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. I'm David Drucker, a senior writer for The Dispatch, and welcome to another edition of The Dispatch podcast. On this episode, Mark Caputo, a national political reporter for The Messenger, a new publication that launches in May. Mark Caputo is a veteran political reporter based in Miami, Florida, and I recently sat down with him to discuss my trip to Tallahassee for the dispatch in my deep dive on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his

his expected bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Mark Fruill is a national political reporter with The Messenger, and he's based in Florida. And that's why we're talking today, although actually Mark, the reason I decided to have you on, is you're the only national political reporter I know besides me with as much gray hair as you have. And so I'm tired of feeling like I'm old and decrepit and left out of whatever the young kids have going on. So I'm like, I'll call Mark and that'll make everything okay. We need a support group, I think is the important thing. I don't want to get canceled because I'm follically challenged.

Listen, all kidding aside, you've been recovering the state of Florida, Republicans and Democrats, in Florida, as well as nationally, but you've been a sort of Florida guru for me for many years. Every month or so, you publish something, and we'll get to your new gig in a minute, but every month or so you'll publish something, and I'll just have an extremely bad day because it's a story I didn't get what you got. I mean it as a compliment, but I wanted to talk to you about a state that a lot of people are focused on, but in particular, your state's governor, Ron DeSantis, top Republican for the Republican presidential nomination, other than Donald Trump, if he runs.

And I wanted to open up by just kind of asking you, if you've noticed an evolution in how Ron DeSantis conducts himself politically and governs in Florida from when he first took office in the governor's mansion until now, or has it been a pretty consistent thing? And it's only the rest of us of only in the past couple of years taking notice. There was a real change with Ronda Santos, not because he was really preparing to run for president, but because of COVID. And the way he approached COVID with kind of more of a laissez-faire approach, the tremendous amount of criticism he received from both a scientific community, from Democrats, from the news media echoing that, sort of changed him as a governor, as a political character, and made him a national

political figure, especially among Republicans. That's really the way he handled the media, the way he handled the expert class, the way he handled Democrats criticizing him. That's what made conservative parts go pitter-patter for. So I decided to get out on your act, get in on your action a little bit. And the week before last, I was in Tallahassee for a couple of days, talking to Republican insiders who work with the governor, who know him, who've also worked under a number of previous governors, now Senator Rick Scott before him, then Republican Charlie Chris, before him, Jeff Bush. One of the things that I took notice of was that whether they liked Ron DeSantis personally or not, whether they were excited about his presumed presidential bid or not,

they all said to me that here is a guy who's extremely smart and they didn't say, well, you know, he went to Yale in Harvard Law School, but they felt that more than many governors they have worked with, or at least not since Jeb, that here's a guy that does a lot of his own homework. It's a policy walk. It synthesizes a lot of information and then calls it up on command to develop policy proposals, to make his case to others. And that he just doesn't get pertur, he doesn't get thrown off course or scared away when people say, that's going to cause you a lot of political trouble. People are going to get mad about that. He just doesn't seem to care. What I wanted to ask you is, maybe that's their view. Is that the view that Floridians have

that you have had watching the government since COVID? I don't know if it's that he doesn't care. It's that he sort of invites it or likes it because, again, that was sort of a secret sauce to some of his success. I think one of the things that DeSantis has either discovered or increased his capacity for is doing controversial things that make him a national political story, that make him a figure that Republicans talk about. You've seen it time and time again. You had it with COVID. You had it with the don't say gay, kind of a misleading term to describe the parental rights and education bill. That is, teachers can say gay, right? You saw it with the migrant flights where, you know, kind of a political stunt might be the best way to describe it, and certainly

the way critics have described it, where they rounded up migrants in Texas and flew them to Martha's Vineyard to make a point. These are things that in the past would seem kind of be on the pale or sort of political suicide under kind of conventional thinking. DeSantis knew quite the opposite, that this is a way to keep his name out there and to keep conservatives, Republicans coming back, asking for more. And that's why he is where he is. So is he scared of these fights? No, he's not scared of these fights because they've benefited it. I think what's changed now is Donald Trump sees him as a threat and has, you know, adjusted himself accordingly and is just slowly and steadily tossed more and more bombs at him. And that's something that DeSantis isn't

quite used to is being attacked by the de facto leader of the party. Certainly, if you look at the polling of the frontrunner, at least when you look at the national polling for the Republican presidential nomination in Donald Trump. Yeah, and I want to get to that in a moment. But I just want to continue along this track here. Who do you think, from your reporting, how do you understand the real Ronda Santas? Do you understand him to be the sort of more conventional Republican that we knew in Congress?

It's still socially awkward and kind of strange in times, but from his voting record in the House from the issues that he spoke out on. rather conventional Republican, or was he always this culture warrior? It's just that the issues had not presented themselves. And obviously, nobody anticipated, to say the least, the coronavirus pandemic, which then opened up all of these other issues, including focusing parents on what their kids were learning in public schools, whether they could even attend public schools versus having to settle for remote learning.

So maybe this is who disand is just as a function of issues that occurred later in his political career, where do you think this was always there? I guess it's always there. You know, I could think the moment probably met the man. We just didn't see this, you know, you don't see a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic by definition, right? And the way he handled it and the way he suddenly became, again, a national figure, put him in just kind of a different category. or the way the national media covered him.

And then the suite of issues that he decided to press forward on. And time and time again, he would kind of push the boundaries and find that they weren't quite boundaries. And in fact, they were a pathway to more success. So I would say it's probably an evolution. You know, I didn't have a lot of conversations with him prior to being governor or even after being governor. He is sort of a loner.

He doesn't like dealing with the mainstream media. It doesn't like dealing with the media at all, but mainly the media he does deal with, tends to be more right of center or, you know, in some cases, further right than right of center. So when you look at Ron DeSantis and you look at the way in which he's become governor and the way he's governed, it has been an evolution, and you've also seen him grow into the use of power. One of the more interesting aspects of him exercising this is there was an elected Tampa area, Hillsborough County, state attorney, a prosecutor who had signed on to a letter, you know, produced by one of these, as they like to say, these Soros backed groups where he said, hey, look, I'm not going to, I'm not going to enforce the abortion law that you guys are going to pass. Now, there were no cases pending before. this prosecutor, Andrew Warren, and DeSantis suspended him. And it was really kind of a reach and exercise of power we haven't seen before. Usually there's a little more grounds to suspend an office holder in the state by the governor. But DeSantis sort of went out on a limb. And when you looked at the lawsuit, which DeSantis won. Turned out he had the right to do it. Even DeSantis had

doubts about whether he should do it or not. But he kind of plowed ahead in kind of a risk. And despite all of the bad press he got and all of the criticism in a once swing state that DeSantis won by less than half a percentage point, he won by nearly 20 points just last year. So it gives you an idea that he's kind of discovered not only how to get elected and how to use power, but how to do it in such a way that it furthers his political ends, and that's why he is where he is. I think that, I think that question alone, how did he do so well in Florida in 2022 is, is working our exploring. And I'm going to segue there for a moment because you raised it. We have watched Florida over the years, and certainly if you came of age politically in the past

25 years or so. You remember Florida hanging by a Chad in the year 2,537 votes or whatever it was, and we're in a very divided country. We saw George W. Bush win Florida a second time. We saw Obama win it twice. We saw Donald Trump win it twice, but the first time rather narrowly, a little bit, did a little bit better the second time. Then we see, while Republicans are struggling all over the country, we see, Ron DeSantis win a 20-point re-election. And I think a lot of us are trying to figure out. Is this because now Democrat Charlie Christ was such an incumbent retread that he could not inspire any support? Was it because all of the in migration from out of state by people who wanted the cultural

lifestyle of Florida in the middle of COVID when so many other states were locked down or you couldn't go outside or you couldn't go to restaurants, you couldn't operate your business. So they all moved there, and that changed the electorate. Or was it because Ron DeSantis knew how to appeal to all of these different groups, many who at least sometimes vote for Democrats and just turn the state red for one election? What are we dealing with here? There has been just a long and steady grind of Republicans taking over the state. You know, it's still Florida.

It's still a place for retirees. And in the past, the retirees who came here were more, or there was a higher proportion of them who were, you know, FDR Democrats. Now we're getting, you know, Reagan Republicans in far higher proportions. And the state is just changing demographically. And now, this is kind of received wisdom. I'd love to see a study on this, just FYI. So, you know, I do reserve the right to be disproven by data.

But the general belief here is that Florida's acting like a magnet and has for years attracting more and more people who are just kind of conservative voters by nature. I mean, who comes to Florida? By and large, it's still known as a retiree state. One of the attractive things, we don't have an income tax. We don't have a stocks and bonds tax. So you don't want to pay tax. You got the money to move and you're older. Well, you're going to score out as a Republican super voter. So we're just kind of naturally bringing them in. And Trump kind of really kind of kickstarted the state. Like people did not think he was going to win in 2016.

And he also won in 2020 in Florida. And prior to that, the idea was, look, in a general election and a presidential election of Florida, this is kind of Democrat state demographically. But in those midterms, when Democrats, with their base, had a tendency to stay home more disproportionately, well, it would swing right. So swing left and right. Well, that stopped happening with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Now, in 2018, there was a midterm. Trump's midterm. He's vastly unpopular, but Republicans still won.

There was a blue wave in other places, wasn't in Florida. And by the time you get... Let me interrupt you there just because it's the question I wanted to get to. So I'm going to take a chance here and interrupt you. We look at 2018, which was a Democratic year, but Republicans win. But Ron DeSantis wins with 32,000 votes out of 8 million cast. Rick Scott wins the Senate race, House of Democratic incumbent,

but by an even smaller margin, right, super razor. Less than a quarter, yeah, less than a quarter percentage point for him. And it was less than half a percentage point for DeSantis. I mean, they were razor-thin margins. Correct. And notwithstanding Trump's three-point victory in 2020, which by Florida standards is pretty significant. If we just look from 18 to 22, we go.

from razor-thin margins to 20-point margins and like a suite. I mean, it doesn't even operate like with a hint of swing state performance. Mark, we've covered lots of mid-term elections where the out-party wins at all, but the thing is they win all the races by like a hair. Well, the Stanton doesn't win by a hair. He wins by a whole head of hair. So what the heck happened? Was it the in-migration supercharged with all of these people that are like you say,

Republican super voters, or did something else change? I think it's that. Democrats stopped doing the spade work of trying to win Florida after 2020, when Bloomberg might have plugged in as much as $100 million to defeat Trump, and Trump still won. The Biden crew had said, you know what, let's stop focusing on Florida so much. Let's look a little more at Texas, actually. And let's focus more on North Carolina. So by the time 2020 comes along, there's no national money coming into the state. The states, the Florida Democratic Party's chair and chairwoman prior to that, they really didn't do the kind of heavy lifting that needed to be done, the party building. There wasn't a lot of leadership. There wasn't a lot of voter registration, which was a key to Barack

Obama's wins in Florida in 2008 and 2012. They just didn't do any of that work. And Republicans did a load of it. And DeSantis is just in a kind of perfect wave. Not only did he inherit an attenuated Democratic Party, a national Democratic Party that didn't want to play in Florida, a revitalized Republican Party, which really wanted to make a point. And the fact that he really did a good job attracting a lot of swing voters that don't underestimate how well he did with that crew. I do think that a lot of it was COVID-related just time and time again when you would go to when I would go to events where, you know, political events, like there was one where DeSantis showed up was 2021. February of 2021, he's at Versailles. I live in Miami.

It's the, that's the Cuban restaurant you go to when you want a campaign. And he made some stop there. And some dude, name was Manuel, who was a construction worker just showed up and wanted to stay and meet the governor. And I said, why? And he said, he saved my job. And there are so many people, so many blue-collar workers, so many people who credited that to DeSantis. I'm not saying it's fair or right. I'm not taking a position on whether his stances and his policies on COVID, opening the state, masks, vaccines, and all of that was correct or proper or good.

But what I'm saying is a lot of voters thought that. They credited him with leading the state well and saving their jobs. And, you know, the old phrase, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. First impressions stick. And DeSantis really made one when he did that. And that, I think, was part of the secret sauce of this just massive win. And he just had a load of money. I mean, he had something like $230 million or so.

It's just like an obscene amount we've just never seen in the state. Now, part of that was a lot of Republicans just kind of hedging their bets, hoping Donald Trump would go away and wanting to prop. up DeSantis. And DeSantis wanted to run up the score, knowing that that would help propel him further into national contention and the national discussion to be potentially his party's nominee if he runs for president. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance

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Isaku, and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors, October 29th to November 2nd. Details and tickets at Festival of Authors.ca. So, Florida heading into 2024, Red State, or? Yes, I like. I mean, I've talked to some of the Biden folks. I've talked to some of the Democrats here who, you know, what's the right word, symbolically or kind of metaphorically say they can't get their cause return.

I mean, they can, but they're just, you know, they know they're an after. You're going to see Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and to a degree, Texas. I think Texas and Florida are going to kind of fall in a similar basket as far as like national investment. But if you don't plug national money here and if the party, the Democratic, party doesn't really have a come-to-Jesus moment, kind of reorganizing, you know, I just don't see it. One Democrat I was talking to today, actually, I should probably scroll through my phone to find

the text messages, is he was saying it's a top Democrat in the state that basically the state's essentially unwinnable. And there's a group text message. Another had said, well, it is winnable if they do the work. And then one person said, well, we're not doing the work. So that's the situation they're in. So fascinating. Just as an aside, I remember a couple of years ago talking to a Republican in Georgia,

who was telling me that for years he was jealous of other states like Ohio and Florida and named a few others that are swing states and competitive states. And look at all the action they get and all the money that's spent and all the drama that Republicans in those states get to be a part of. Then he said, man, I wish I could go back to those days. The halcyon days of being a guaranteed red or blue state. Correct. All right.

So listen, what Ron DeSantis is done in Florida has been pretty remarkable, I think, from a political perspective. And the way, as you mentioned, the way he is coming into his own in the way he exercises power. People may disagree with how he exercises power. He may get a lot of stuff done that people think is not any good and it shouldn't get done. But he gets a lot of stuff done. and he does exercise the executive office pretty aggressively. But you can't do anything if you don't win an election.

So let's talk about his ability to handle Donald Trump. If he, if, as we all think, and let me know if you have any doubts about this based on your reporting, he gets into his presidential race and then is filing a candidate where I would guess he's going to do candidate things a lot more often than he does now, which is not very often. Yeah, I've always. The line I've used with Donald Trump is that he's a self-immolating arsonist made out of asbestos who hugs you as he lights himself on fire. You burn and he doesn't. So, you know, good luck with that. Like, that's not easy. The other thing is like Donald Trump is a cultural figure. He's not a politician. And his DNA is replicated in the cellular structure of the Republican Party.

It's very difficult to dislodge someone like that. He essentially runs as an incumbent and as polling reflects it. Now, the question is, is like, where are Republicans? Have Republicans had enough of the Donald Trump show? We're in the seventh season here. And, you know, usually by now, you know, in the seventh season of a production, you're going to have some shark jumping that happens. Although one of the things that always rescues a good show is a courtroom drama.

And now we've got that. But perhaps not a. unironically, Donald Trump is actually consolidating more support. So the thing that you are looking at and I am looking at that we're all wondering is like, okay, to what degree is this consolidation of support in the Republican Party for Donald Trump, a sugar high? Or to what degree is this kind of real protein that's building more kind of political muscle? You know, I don't know. And the more of these sort of, you know, investigations and potential court cases stack on each other, At what point do Republican primary voters say, boy, you know, love the guy, but it's just, it's, you know, season seven is just too much drunk, right? I want a little more normalcy. And so DeSantis is positioning himself to be that kind of Maga without the crazy, right? That's what privately some of his people will say.

Taste great. Less film. Yeah, you know, I'm not, I'm not sure that that's where Republican voters are. And it's sometimes different. to make a case if you're not being forceful about it. So the other thing to look for, and I've talked to his people and they're tight-lipped about it, is when does Rhonda Santis start to really hit back? How does he do it? How does he fare on a debate stage with Donald Trump? And let's face it. I mean, Donald Trump, and I say this as a short man, okay, Donald Trump is taller. He's got a deeper voice. He presents very well. And he's so pugilistic and combative. Can Ron DeSantis, you know, sort of surpass this?

And how does he kind of walk that tie rope? I just, I don't know. I'm not forecasting he's going to lose. I'm not forecasting that it's going to win. But in a Republican primary, Donald Trump is just an incredibly challenging person to face. I mean, look, he did it in 2016 when people didn't expect him to. And I mentioned this. I posted it the other day on my Instagram account, you know, I haven't been on Twitter.

I'll be up soon. Maybe I'll post it there. I was in Key West, southernmost part of the United States, right? Two Sundays ago, it's Sunday morning, 7 o'clock in the morning. We're going to leave from Miami. And I hear as I'm filling up the Truman and White Chevron in Key West, Florida, this voice and the mutilating children. I'm like, what?

It's like a Donald Trump speech. Like, are they playing Donald Trump from the speakers of the, But pump, no, it's some dude drinking coffee sitting with his bike and his dog playing Donald Trump speeches. So I go to him and I ask me, like, what do you, like, what's going on? He's like, and he's like, I'm not a Donald Trump supporter. I'm a Donald Trump lover. Like, you don't really see that with other candidates. Now, understand, I'm only talking about the primary. I'm not talking about the general election, right? So those are the, the complications that Rhonda Sanders is just going to face. And how he pulls this off is going to be one of the more,

intriguing things we've seen in politics, almost akin to, if Ron DeSantis beats Donald Trump in a primary, in a Republican primary, it'll almost be as great a feat or as difficult a feat as Donald Trump in 2016, besting all of those other people unexpectedly. Because it is a tough, tough clotter. Yeah. Well, it would also surprise, I guess, the media as much as that did, if that were to happen. Let's ask the question this way. I think, you know, especially, you know, for you and I and people in our profession, we really want to talk to voters and look at data, and then we can tell everybody what's happening.

And there's just a lot we don't have yet because Rhonda Sanchez isn't a candidate yet. And right now we've got this indictment out of New York that is just a different sort of a scene than we're used to with a political campaign. But let's look at it in a quick. Talk about jumping the shark, you know, to just extend your analogy.

What do they do when the show has run its course? with a normal storyline, you know, then they put, where this comes from, they put Fonzie in a leather jacket on a surfboard jumping a shark, literally, which is where the term comes from or something like that. And it's like, why did you do that? Because they had run out of storylines with Fonzie and the diner snapping his fingers and, you know, start in the jukebox and they couldn't do it anymore. And either people tune in or they say, oh my God, this is just not the show that we liked and we're out, you clearly don't, are not very free. Let's ask the question this way.

Who knows if Ron DeSantis can beat Trump? Because it's going to depend a lot of Republican voters and how they feel about Trump and as you mentioned, how these investigations, which could come one after the other, between the Georgia case and the federal federal federal federal counsel case, how that impacts things. I think the question to ask,

and what I tried to get to when I was talking to Republican Insiders in Tallahasse is, does he have the chops as a policy? to appeal to voters, number one, in a way that they are going to find receptive. And by that I mean, for a guy that likes to exit, enter through the back, give his remarks, and exit immediately back out the back without shaking hands or working the room, for a guy that hates small talk and chit chat, is he going to spend time in Iowa, New Hampshire, in South Carolina, not just doing the Q&A for an hour at a town hall,

and sticking around for 90 minutes afterwards, taking selfie, shaking hands, hands and listen to everybody's personal story, which is like, this is what you do if you're not Donald Trump and you need to be successful. That's how people become endeared to you. Second of all, and I'm just curious to get your view on this, he's proven capable of fighting pretty effectively with Democrats and the media, at least in a way that Republicans respond to. Do you think he has it within him to go after Donald Trump in his own way, but in a way that can tell primary voters at the very least, he's willing to fight. Trump is the frontrunner. He wants to be the front runner in his place. He's willing to fight him for it. Maybe they don't vote for him in the end,

but at least he's not afraid and he doesn't spend his time attacking everybody else hoping somehow Trump just disappears on his own. Yeah, I don't think, I don't think Ronald Rondosanus would be here if he wasn't interested in taking a few shots of his own. Like, he knows what he's up against. So I think the answer to that is yes. Now, the question is, will it be effective? Hell if I know, right? I don't think any of us knows.

The kind of the deeper thing you're especially hearing the national press is, you know, that, you know, Ronda Santis has that, you know, the kind of the non-friendly vibe. I've been in rooms with him. I've spoken to him privately and personally. I've seen him deal with people privately and personally. He's certainly up to doing it. Now, does he want to do it? I would imagine so. I can't imagine someone would run for president and think,

hey, I'm not going to meet voters one-on-one in Iowa and in New Hampshire. The reality is, to your point earlier, about how well-studied he is, you know, he is a, you know, he's kind of a full politician. He knows how to relate to people. you don't win by 20 points, yes, Florida's a TV state, unless you got some chops. And I think some of this chatter is probably going to be to DeSantis's credit because the expectations for them are now so low. Like everyone expects him to show up at a room and spit in everyone's face and then just like leave and I don't know, pro food on the carpet, right? I just don't think that's going to

happen. Now, I don't want to predict what they're going to do in Iowa. I don't want to predict what they're going to do in New Hampshire and these other states. But I think, some of this, some of this, oh, you know, Ron DeSantis is like this hostile, vicious person who doesn't get along with people. I don't think that's necessarily accurate. It is correct that DeSantis is very pugilistic style and his interest in getting in fights and winning them and exercising power has certainly left a lot of people, especially in Tallahassee, with a deep fear of the guy, right, especially lawmakers. One of the things he did was it last year, I think it was last year. He had like the president of the Senate and the House Speaker, the Florida Senate

President, Florida House Speaker behind him as he signed the budget. And he had line on his line on the veto authority in Florida. And he just like vetoed most of their projects. Like he was like a total, you know, strongman move, right? And that's just an example of like how Desantis kind of governs and governs politically. But again, like one-on-one, he's certainly capable of doing that. Like, you know, I know, just in talking to him, like, you know, I'm a Miami hurricane, Miami hurricane fan. Like, we used to win football games. I remember him talking to me saying, like, you know, one of his, his favorite teams of all times were those old Miami defenses of the late 80s, right? Like, so he has, like, an abiding understanding of, like, kind of regular guy talk and the like.

So I think he's perfectly capable of that now. To what degree does a candidate, once they become a presidential candidate, a lot of president. pressure is on them. Like how much can they keep their genuineness? We're going to have to wait to see. By the way, now you guys win basketball games, apparently, which I say is a bitter UCL. I don't know what's going on. That's how that's the bizarre world we live in is that Miami Hurricanes are winning basketball games, not football games. Listen, I don't want to look like a, you know, an idiot reporter, but whatever. Everybody probably thinks that anyway. So let me ask you a question in the middle of Donald Trump skyrocketing in polls in the Republican primary

as we speak. I'm always a big, I live in fear of certainty when it comes to political reporting and analysis, assuming the way things have been or the way they're always going to be, assuming the way that one election went means that's the way this election's going to go. So let me ask you, I mean, we're just shooting the breeze here. You know, Trump, Trump, in retrospect in 2016, makes a lot more sense when you realize what an ultimate change agent he was. And you can mind that with his name, I mean, his television persona. But, you know, the Republican Party had grown pretty stale from an ideological perspective as far as voters were concerned. You know, most of my, I'm old enough that, you know, for most of my life, they all ran

around every two to four years saying they're the next Ronald Reagan offering new tax cuts or the same old tax cuts. And here, this guy comes along and starts talking about trade and immigration in a different way and a few other things in a different way, right? And so he's the ultimate change agent and known, but not in any way a professional politician or even politics adjacent other than he was a donor. And so it's easy to see, notwithstanding he didn't win the popular vote, why that was able to make such a splash in the Republican Party, particularly because everybody was running against was considered old guard. Here it's like something new and fresh. Now we're eight years almost since he came down, you know, the escalator, as he likes to say. And this,

as you mentioned earlier, this act has been going on now for years. And he was president. And so I sometimes wonder if he's not an incumbent retread who is still the front. runner and strong, but a diminished figure from what he was and not the ultimate change agent, leaving room for somebody to take his place if they will just go take it. Or maybe to your point about the guy in Key West who was just listening to Donald Trump's speeches on his bike, the same way, you know, I listen to country music when I'm on a road trip, that this is just an icon you can't compete with and it doesn't matter. Yeah, I think what you laid out in kind of the first part of the question there is DeSantis' theory of the case, right? Is that if you talk to the people

who are familiar with kind of the data more from the DeSantis side than the Trump side, they say, yeah, look, you know, Trump, Trump's got a lot of weaknesses that you can't quite see and that no one's hit him properly and that the guy who'd be able to do it is going to be wrong to Stannis. So, yeah, you know, the DeSantis theory of the case is, once voters see him and they hear him and they look at his record, they're going to realize that this is the guy to go with. The Trump argument is just essentially there's just no way this is, there's just no way this happens, right? Like that DeSantis's new Coke and, you know, voters are still going to want to stick with Coca-Cola classic. So I don't know. I do agree with you

as far as the dangers of certainty. And, you know, as an example of that, one of the Biden folks I was talking to about the degree to which they're kind of happy that that Trump is getting kind of boosted by this and could walk into the general election as an attenuated candidate with all these scandals and investigations on them. They don't see it that way. They're saying, look, we don't know anymore. Like we're perpetually in unchartered waters. So I'm kind of with you on this. And, you know, it's what? It's April of 2023. We got, I don't know, eight months. until Iowa votes, like that's a lot of time in politics.

Yeah, it sure is. All right, Mark, I could keep going just because I'm fascinated by this and you have so much Florida insight that I want to steal. It's politics and the media. We don't have any ethics, so I'm going to steal it and claim it as my own.

But I can't do that because you've got stuff to do. Tell me a little bit before I let you go about the messenger. You're a national political reporter for the messenger. It's a new publication. Here at the dispatch, we love new publications, although I'm going to hate competing against you once again when you're really back in action. What are you guys going to be up to? When can we start reading it?

What's going on? Well, the messengers are a new digital media company. We're going to launch in May. And the mission is delivering accurate balance and nonpartisan news and information. So, you know, the plan is to have as many as, you know, 500 editorial staff once we're completely up and running. which would be way in the future. But, you know, we're going to not just cover politics, but span readers' interests, you know,

their passion points from sports and entertainment to technology, health, purposes, and business, right? So that's the full pitch. Mark Caputo is a national political reporter for The Messenger. You can find him on Twitter at Mark A. Caputo. Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Hope to talk to you again soon. Well, thanks, David. I appreciate it. I'm going to be able to be.