The NPR Politics Podcast - Touting Record In Florida, DeSantis Enters Presidential Race

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

The Florida governor made his campaign official on Wednesday night, in a Twitter Spaces event with Elon Musk beset with technical issues. Quickly attracting criticism from both Republican and Democratic challengers alike, DeSantis cited his pandemic response and battles against critical race theory as reasons why he would be an effective president.This episode: political correspondents Susan Davis and Kelsey Snell, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Sandy from Concord, New Hampshire, where I just finished up my weekly long training run. When I was in my 30s, I used to pace myself to Green Day. In my 40s, Cage the Elephant became more suitable to my cadence. Now that I'm in my 50s, it's live from NPR News in Washington. I'm Jack Spear. Today's podcast was recorded at 1043 a.m. on Thursday, May 25th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be trying to get my 5k time down to the good side of 30 minutes. Okay, here's the show.

Public radio is there for you for many different reasons. I'm with you in trying to get that run in time down. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover politics. And I'm Ron Elbing, editor correspondent. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made it official last night in an announcement on Twitter. Well, I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American combat. DeSantis is the second Republican following South Carolina Senator Tim

Scott to enter the 2024 presidential race this week. Kelsey, let's start with the choice of the platform and the people DeSantis chose for this announcement. He was joined by Twitter owner and billionaire provocateur Elon Musk, as well as tech entrepreneur David Sachs, who's become people DeSantis chose for this announcement. He was joined by Twitter owner and billionaire provocateur Elon Musk, as well as tech entrepreneur David Sachs, who's become a bit of a political guru for the right tech San Francisco set. These are weird choices for a presidential announcement. I mean, they are weird choices, but they are also choices that are pretty well in line with the way DeSantis has been kind of addressing reporters in the media so far. He is a pretty, you know, media averse person. He does not engage

very much with reporters. And this was an opportunity to go around traditional media and reach out directly to people who he sees as a friendly audience. I mean, Elon Musk is a controversial figure broadly in the country, but he is quite popular among Republicans who like this kind of shake up at Twitter, this feeling that it's getting more bombastic and more political and moving further to the right. One of the interesting things about DeSantis choosing Twitter is that, well, you know, it doesn't have a huge reach into every household in America. It is a kind of space where, you know, Republicans can curate who they're talking to. There is an ability to reach the type of people that they think will be supportive. It was also a space where they could avoid having to participate with the mainstream media, which is a group of people that, you know, DeSantis has been traditionally pretty averse to. It also gives them the opportunity to know more about the people

who are tuning in, because I don't know if you've ever used a Twitter Spaces event before, but you can see every single person who is in there participating, listening, watching. Every single person is right there out front. So that gives them a lot of information that you wouldn't necessarily get from, you know, listening on the radio or watching TV. It was a bit of a rocky start, though, a lot of tech issues at the top. Yeah, it started about 20 minutes late. At the beginning, the servers just kept crashing. Sometimes you could get onto the feed from the app, but not from the website. There was a period in time where we could just hear Elon Musk clearing his throat and shuffling papers. And they were apologizing a lot. Once they did eventually get it back up, it wasn't even on the

original feed. They had to move it over to David Sachs' feed. He was acting as the moderator, and it dropped from about 500,000 people trying to listen down to about 100,000 people trying to listen. And that's when things were actually fairly functional. Ron, there is this common thread between DeSantis, Musk, and Sachs, is that these three people really hate the mainstream media. I think hate is a strong word, but in this context, I think it's fair. DeSantis seems to be betting on this strategy of making the media a villain in his bid for the nomination. Yes, and why not? Because actually that has worked for candidates in the past, even as they have been highly mediagenic candidates. The obvious example is Donald Trump.

He would regularly excoriate the media and at the same time bask in the attention of, say, CNN, for example, showing hour-long speeches by Donald Trump, which they did not do for any of the other Republican presidential candidates in 2016. And I might say really starting in 2015, that's really when Trump broke out with some of that coverage. So it can work in the right hands. It can work both ways, that you can be the enemy of the mainstream media. And of course,

Donald Trump famously called the mainstream media enemies of the people. Nice little throwback there to the Soviet Union. And he got away with that because he still got fantastic coverage and the sense of attention. And that's what really mattered to him, particularly from cable television. So, Kelsey, let's talk about the message. Earlier this week, Tim Scott announced and he made his life story and his faith sort of central to his kickoff message. What was the thrust of DeSantis' message last night? He basically said that he is a winner. He won by a big margin when he was re been pushing in Florida, which is very much a culture wars, kind of us versus them mentality, is working for Florida. He talked about big tourism numbers. And his pitch was

essentially, if you like what I'm doing in Florida, I'm the only one who can replicate it across the country. Now, that may be a successful message for some in a Republican primary campaign. But part of the kind of name ID that Ron DeSantis has right now in the country more broadly is there's a lot of people who are really opposed to the things he's doing in Florida. There are some very active campaigns against him, and he does not come into this moment, particularly fresh and clean, like a new candidate sometimes does. You know, all the other candidates that have gotten in the race so far, Donald Trump has been like, Oh, Tim, welcome. Oh, Nikki Haley, great lady. That is not true with Ron DeSantis. Yeah, former President Trump was already paying for and running ads against him before DeSantis even jumped into the race. On his social platform last night, Donald Trump called him Rob, which we don't know

if it was intentional, but Trump often will mispronounce someone's name to sort of make an insult of it. President Biden on the official Twitter account was tweeting out links that worked sort of a nudge at the tech disaster of his launch. But that also tells you something else about Ron DeSantis is that both Trump and Biden see this candidate as a threat. Yes. And the polls show that DeSantis runs rather well against Biden. For someone who is just beginning to be considered a presidential candidate, Joe Biden, of course, first ran for president in 1987 and 1988.

He's been in the he's been in the lists a long time. We should say, though, that DeSantis is running about 30 points behind Trump in many primary polls. You know, that really speaks to the uniqueness of his current status as a candidate, because he is both the biggest threat to Trump and Trump is still the big kahuna. He is almost an incumbent in the minds of a lot of partisan Republicans. They don't think he lost in 2020. So they're still in his camp. But at the same time that he's challenging a virtual incumbent in his own party, he's also a kind of frontrunner for all those reasons that we've already said. So that puts him in a vulnerable spot because frontrunners draw fire from all directions.

Kelsey, it's pretty clear to me how DeSantis can campaign among Republican primary voters. He has a record in Florida that is really popular among conservatives. He loves fighting these sort of culture war fights that really get the base fired up. But we were talking just yesterday about sort of the art of the pivot, right? How winning the primary and winning the general are different things. DeSantis also seems like maybe a candidate that might have both in terms of personal style and in substance having a hard time to pivot into a general election mentality should he win the nomination. He has really, really firmly embraced some very controversial things like the six week abortion ban, bans on drag performances, book bans, his fight with Disney. These are not things that are very easy to walk back from. And he not only has a record of supporting these things, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of hours of, you know, tape of him talking about how great his decisions were.

So I don't really see how there's a clean pivot for him, though, you know, politicians find lots of ways. All right, let's take a quick break. And we'll talk more about Ron DeSantis when we get back. Without support, you can access bonus episodes of the podcast. In those episodes, you can hear the NPR Politics podcast team talk about things like traveling on Air Force One, preparing for big interviews, and life on the campaign trail. You are the only people there. You are the only people doing that job. And you manage to somehow have this very strange, unique relationship of being each other's competition and also being this very close pack of friends. That's in our latest bonus episode. New ones come out every other Saturday. For info and more, visit plus.npr.org. That's plus as in P-L-U-S dot N-P-R dot org. And we're back. And Ron, governors have a long history of running for president, but they don't necessarily have the greatest history of winning the decision that the executive experience of being a governor was really what you needed to run for president. And senators were just not doing well at all for a period of decades.

Well, then we got nominations for Barack Obama and John McCain. And then Joe Biden. I mean, it's really kind of gone back and forth. There's been a somewhat pendular swing between governors and senators. It really depends on the personality. It really depends on what the voters are looking for. And it really depends on the binary choice that's put up by the two parties in any given four-year cycle. It really matters who those last two people standing are. It's really been a point of fascination to me how little appetite voters have had for governors as nominees, especially as

there has been a lot of high caliber governors that might otherwise be formidable candidates, people like Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Larry Hogan. Like it's not as if the party hasn't had a bunch of these guys at the waiting, but the voters just don't seem interested. Those personalities sold better in their home states than they did when they stepped out on the national stage. I mean, Larry Hogan may still, there's talk of him being a candidate in a third party kind of sense. But as personalities, none of those people had the sparkle or the appeal or the power

that an Obama or a Trump had. Yeah, I think Ron hits on something that's interesting about all of those people that you mentioned is that they also really pursued these kinds of policies and conversations with voters that were, as Ron said, very important to their home state, which often meant they had to make compromises. I think about Larry Hogan in particular and Bobby Jindal. These are people who had to, you know, they didn't have these very strong, one-sided records like we're seeing out of DeSantis over the past year. Kelsey, we've also seen a dynamic in politics, and I know you and I've seen this a lot on Capitol Hill, that voters seem to put a greater sense of worth on inexperience in politics, that the idea

that someone comes from outside politics, that they're not part of the establishment, that they're not sort of part of the swamp, actually has great appeal. Expertise isn't necessarily a selling point in politics right now. That's true. It's interesting, because this is something that you and I have talked about a lot is that once that lack of expertise comes into office, though, people do not like the level of dysfunction that they're seeing, say, in this debt limit fight. There are, you know, appeals in the sense that people think Washington is broken, but then it kind of continues this cycle of proving the idea that Washington is broken when there's not a lot of experience in actually coming to an agreement that makes Washington function. You know, yesterday, Ron, we did the podcast on the latest NPR poll and how so many voters

question Biden's mental fitness for the office because of his age. And that when I think about Ron DeSantis, one of the assets he has in this race is his age. You know, if he were the nominee, that would put that criticism of Biden in even more of a stark contrast than if he was running against, say, Donald Trump, who's more of a contemporary. Yes, it's almost a 30-year gap. And the only other time we've seen something anywhere approximating that was between H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And that did not work out so well for the incumbent president. Anybody who knows anybody in their 80s knows that they're not quite the same person they were 20 years earlier or 30 years earlier. I don't think there's anything

unusual about that or abnormal about that or unfair to say about that. So we all have and we must have questions about whether or not Joe Biden is exactly the same person he was or as capable as he was some years ago. So that's going to pop up in polls. And I suspect that those numbers will go higher. And that's even without him doing anything or saying anything to suggest that people need to be asking questions. All right. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow with the Weekly Roundup.

I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover politics. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. And'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover politics. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.