Today, Explained - He's Ronning

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

NBC’s Matt Dixon explains how Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to Make America Florida. Vox’s Andrew Prokop spells out how the governor’s brain works. Please clap. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The former president of the United States seemingly kicked off his 2024 campaign with an unending stream of legal woes. His biggest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, kicked off his campaign last night with something called Twitter spaces. I think we've got just a massive number of people online, so it's a service of training somewhat. But Elon and Ron eventually got the boat back on the tracks. We will never surrender to the woke mob, and we will leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history. Coming up on Today Explained, he's running. His overarching pitch, like, essentially the one-line elevator pitch has been, make America

Florida, which sends, you know, joy up the spines of some people and fear for others. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs.

And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Explained. 2024 Explained. Matt Dixon is a reporter at NBC covering Florida politics. And when he told us Ron DeSantis wants to make America Florida, we were like... But also also like, what exactly do you mean, sir?

So we broke out the governor's conservative checklist. Abortion. We are here today to defend those who can't defend themselves. Well, he signed two bills. One was a 15 week ban, which was last year, and that's still in the courts. This year, he signed a six-week abortion ban. That'll only become law if the courts sign off and say the 15-week ban was constitutional. So moving very fast with abortion restrictions, for sure. This will represent the most significant protections for life that have been enacted in this state in a generation. Education?

He's essentially rewired the institution. He has put his considerable political muscle into normally kind of sleepy school board races. He elected, gosh, I think it was more than 20 school board members during the 2022 primaries. And those are very, very sort of far right school board members who want to sort of, you know, rework the institution of public education. They're going after sort of diversity programs, what can be taught in classrooms, you know, what books are in libraries. So he has gotten more than I think any governor in the country and certainly any governor in Florida

history, very, very involved in school board races and sort of micromanaging what happens at the classroom level. He's essentially taken the institution of education at both the K-12 level and higher education and remade it in his own image. As many of you know, I think the last couple years have really revealed to parents that they are being ignored increasingly across our country when it comes to their kids' education. We have seen curriculum embedded for very, very young children, classroom materials about sexuality and woke gender ideology. We've seen libraries. Don't say gay? The Don't Say Gay legislation, which got a ton of attention last year, and it's sort of a part of what supporters of that movement call parental empowerment.

Essentially, the idea that parents should have a bigger say than sort of school districts, teachers, administrators. And generally, those fall along the lines of, to some degree, you know, the partisan spectrum. So, you know, the idea of parental empowerment usually involves them advocating for ideas that are supported by conservatives and not liberals. And DeSantis has been on the forefront of a lot of that stuff. In Florida, we not only know that parents have a right to be involved, we insist that parents have a right to be involved. He also seems to have some opinions on trans rights. Yeah, he actually just signed four or five bills all at once just last week, you know, banning gender-affirming care for minors.

Teachers can no longer ask students about their preferred pronouns. There's a bathroom bill, which we've seen in a lot of other states, where students in schools and other sort of taxpayer-funded public facilities can only use the bathroom for the gender they were assigned at birth. What we've said in Florida is we are going to remain a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy. And kids should have an upbringing that reflects that. Also vaguely related, perhaps, Disney? The fight between DeSantis and the mouse has really sort of defined Florida politics from a 10,000-foot perspective for the past year.

Disney announcing that it is canceling plans to build a new campus in Central Florida. This was estimated to cost nearly $1 billion. Disney is also no longer asking about 2,000 employees in its Parks, Experiences, and Products division, which it had previously asked them to relocate to Florida to do so. It's gotten national attention, and I don't think we've seen an example of a governor, you know, picking a fight with one of its state's biggest employers before. It's usually sort of, especially a Republican governor, it's part of another tenet that he talks about a lot. He started to refer to companies that disagree

with him politically as so-called woke corporations. And he's taken a much harder line approach against, you know, the business community than you would traditionally see from Republican governors. And without question, you know, Disney is the biggest bullet point in that presentation. I feel like I'd be remiss to not mention immigration. Yeah, no, no. He has every year passed sort of an immigration crackdown. We have leaned in on illegal immigration in the state of Florida. This year, the biggest flashpoint with that was that companies with more than 25 employees

have to use the E-Verify system, the federal database that checks a worker's employment eligibility. This makes Florida the largest state in the country to do full E-Verify for employment. And that's important because the people are going to come if they get benefits. And so what you want to do is say there's not benefits for coming illegally. The hospitality and agriculture and the business community really opposed that. And so that has sort of sparked, been a shock to the system a little bit and was one of the biggest elements of an immigration bill that we have seen here in quite some time. Guns?

Just this legislative session, which ended in May, so it's relatively recent. They passed and DeSantis signed legislation that no longer requires concealed carry permits. But, you know, you no longer need a permit to carry a gun in Florida. With all due respect to these leftists, they just want to come after your Second Amendment rights. And then lastly, somehow, election laws. He has passed, gosh, I think three years in a row, some version of an election, a bill that Democrats certainly argue limits the ability of people to vote, mostly, you know, democratically in the organizations. There's been a lot of focus on college campuses. This year's version, it was a really sweeping bill, but among many things, it increased penalties by quite a bit for third-party voter registration groups. So if you go out and you want to register people to vote and you make a mistake, you violate

a state law, even if it's unintentional, there are rules in place. The fines that you have to pay, the threshold went up huge. And me signing this bill here says, Florida, your vote counts. Your vote is going to be cast with integrity and transparency. And this is a great place for democracy. Real quick question, Governor, real quick question. So it sounds like a veritable breakfast buffet of conservative policy. How is it playing out in Florida, which in recent memory was a purple state? I mean, this is a state that was a one or two point state for a long time. DeSantis won in November by 20 points. So there's been two things kind of happening. I think Republicans here in Florida absolutely love these policies. And there's sort of been a cratering of the Democratic

Party here. It's Democrats nationally don't fund things the way they used to. There's Democrats for most of political history here in Florida had the way they used to. There's Democrats for most of political history here in Florida had a huge voter registration advantage. There was more registered Democrats than Republicans for the first time in history. That is now reversed. Republicans have a significant registration lead. So there's been sort of, you know, Florida has been an experiment and when one political party is well-funded and the other political party gives up and we saw how sort of quickly it can remake a state. And Florida's a sort of really good laboratory to study that dynamic. pushing could alienate people on the right because evidently he just chased away thousands of jobs

and billions of dollars in investment in Orlando. How is the Republican establishment responding to Ron DeSantis? I mean, I think Disney is probably the best one to look at because I do think there are Republicans who are turned off by that one. But by and large, I mean, the culture war political persona that has been around DeSantis isn't new. It's existed for a couple, you know, since, you know, 2020. And he's gotten a lot of really endorsements. He's raising a ton of money. He's expected to have the most money of any Republican in the field. So if those traditional campaign, are of any indication, the culture war stuff isn't really turning off the people who make presidential campaigns work. We've seen a couple individual donors come out and say, well, we're a little leery of this stuff. But I think those are the exception and not the rule

at this point based on how much money he raised during his reelection as governor, which was a huge amount of money, over $200 million, which is crazy for a state-level race. And then the fact that he is anticipated to really sort of, you know, lead the pack as far as fundraising in this Republican primary. Those are classic metrics for, you know, sort of measuring support among the, you know, the establishment class. And I think DeSantis is going to be doing quite well there. How is the former president responding to his governor becoming America's governor? As you can imagine, very even keeled. He's handling it great. He's attacking him near daily. He's using truth social and pretty much any time a camera's put in his face to come after

Ron DeSanctimonious as he calls him. Team Trump dropping a new ad, hitting DeSantis for his tax plan, calling him a new nickname, Ron DeSales Tax. Ron DeSales Tax had a plan to make you pay more. With the sales tax here and the sales tax there. There are taxes everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere.

There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. There are sales tax everywhere. It should be reminded that the Trump endorsement really played a huge role in DeSantis winning his first race in 2018. That's something that Donald Trump likes to bring up time and time again. I got him the nomination. By the way, couldn't have never gotten the nomination.

He would be working in either a pizza parlor place or a law office right now. OK, and he wouldn't be very happy. It's about loyalty. It's about loyalty. It is to me. OK, let me just. Trump is, I think, sees DeSantis as his only potential threat because he's actually he's welcomed other Republican candidates into the race, which is not normal for a primary. Usually you don't welcome direct competition. But I think he sees a bigger field and a field of lots of candidates is advantageous to him. And there has been just a barrage of attacks each week, you know, since he got in the race as a result. Matt Dixon, NBC News.

When we're back, Vox's Andrew Prokop is going to try and get inside the head of Ron DeSantis. From Aura, Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame

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Today explained Sean Ramos for him. A question we've been trying to answer on this show for some time now is what does Ron DeSantis believe? And the person we've most recently posed this question to is Vox's Andrew Prokop. And Andrew, like those before him, essentially said DeSantis believes in opportunity. Yes, I think that's probably the best description of him because he has been very malleable on the issues and on what he purports to care about at the time, what he spends his time focusing on. You know, all politicians do this to some extent. They follow where the winds are blowing. But DeSantis really, really does. He throws himself into each new reinvention. And in a relatively short career in politics, just about a little over a decade, he has embraced many of these new personas,

I think at least five. It starts with when he's first running for office for an open house district in Florida in 2012. Unless the economy starts growing more than 1.3%, you're not going to be able to reduce unemployment and you're not going to be able to deal with the budget deficit. This was the time of the Tea Party. What was all the rage that year was big cuts to government spending.

That's what all these Tea Party groups were demanding. So that's what he focused on, too. groups and national conservative figures to get their endorsements to help distinguish him from the other more locally focused Republicans in the race. And it worked. He won the primary and he got into Congress as a leading Tea Partier. But if we go forward a few years, he tried to run for Senate. It didn't work out. He needed to reinvent himself, maybe. Oh, yes, exactly. And because this was when the entire Republican Party was going through this reinvention because of Donald Trump. And DeSantis was looking for his next move. And eventually, he decided pretty early, actually, to become the most lavish, over-the-top Trump defender in Congress.

Well, the strongest evidence of collusion, Trish, is between the Clintons and the Russians, not Trump and the Russians. He was pretty early in, let's say, debasing himself so thoroughly and really tried to cultivate Trump's endorsement for the next office he had his eye on, the Florida governorship. Again, he is facing a more established Republican in the primary. But DeSantis' strategy was basically Trump, Trump, Trump. He ran this absolutely ridiculous ad where he's reading the art of the deal to his young child. Then Mr. Trump said, you're fired. I love that part. He plays with blocks with his daughter and builds the wall with his blocks.

Build the wall. Pretty insulting stuff, but Republicans in Florida ate it up and he won the primary big. And then he gets to be governor and then he reinvents himself again. He gets to be governor, but only barely. He wins the general election over Democrat Andrew Gillum by a very small amount in the Democratic wave year of 2018. It seems that after that, he cast about and he decided, wait a minute, maybe I wasn't focusing enough on the median voter. So his first year as governor of Florida, 2019,

we see a very different DeSantis from what we're currently seeing now. This has been an almost totally forgotten period in his history because of what came after. If we overcome the tribalism that has dominated our politics, if we set aside, if we set the interests of hardworking taxpayers as our true north, then I have no doubt that the state of Florida will cruise to bright new horizons.

He governed as, you know, saying from the center would be too strong, but he governed as a pragmatist, avoiding the big national culture war battles and really focusing on areas where he could find consensus with Democrats in the state. He focused on clean water. He pushed to raise teacher salaries. He appointed some Democrats to his administration. He posthumously pardoned four black men who had been falsely accused of rape in 1949. This was a real kinder, gentler DeSantis. And his approval rating soared. And then things took a turn after that again. There's been a lot that's been done

to try to promote fear, to promote worst case scenarios, to drive hysteria. And I think people should know that that worst case scenario thinking, that has not proven to be true. So COVID hits. And after that, DeSantis seems to have again looked for which way the wind was blowing on the right, but also among typical voters. kept up too long, that it would be in his political interest to rebrand himself as an opponent of these COVID restrictions and a critic of the Democratic and public health establishment. Everyone in the media was saying Florida was going to be like New York or Italy, and that has not happened. Cases surged in the summer.

Critics called him Death Santus, but he kept onward with it. And politically, it worked out because he won re-election overwhelmingly in 2022. That would not have been possible if we had followed Fauci. Instead, we followed freedom. And that's the reason why Florida's doing better. By my count, Andrew, that's four reinventions. The fifth has to be the one we've covered several times on this show now.

What do you call it? Well, this is DeSantis, the culture warrior. You know, after he was a fighter on COVID, he decided to be a fighter for the Republican right on a series of other very hot button issues, trying to really cause controversy on them and what the causes that the national Republican right were most crazy about in these years. What they were most focused on and what tended to get him attention nationally and importantly, attention on Fox News was constantly pursuing all of these issues. And they loved having DeSantis on in the 2021, 2022 period. And they really helped build him up and help make him one possible alternative to Trump. If you're being attacked by NBC and CNN, I know you are doing a hell of a job. Is there any chance that Ron and Don could, you know,

team up and get the best of both worlds here? Or is that sort of ship sailed with all the snide remarks about each other? Isn't that politics, though? For all intents and purposes, that ship has already sailed because of the United States Constitution. Oh!

Because it has a provision that makes it really problematic for a presidential and vice presidential candidate on the same ticket to be from the same state. Specifically, the issue here is that when a state's electors are casting their votes for president and vice president, they're not allowed to vote for two people from their own state. So Florida electors cannot vote for two Florida men for president and vice president. And Florida is really, really important to Republicans' electoral math these days. So it's basically a non-starter for Republicans to run two Florida men because they have to forfeit Florida's electoral votes for at least the vice presidency.

Now, one workaround might be that either of them could move and change their residence to another state. That's a little hard for the governor of Florida to do. Trump, of course, has split his time from New York and Florida, but he's currently having some trouble with the law in New York and might want to minimize his time in that state for fear of being charged with further crimes. You know, Prokop, there was a time last year where DeSantis felt like a real threat to DeDonald. But now between an extremely extreme abortion ban and a big fight with the mouse and just generally not being very likable or charming, it feels like maybe he's in a bit of a rut on the national stage, at least.

Do you think this is just a slump and run transitional stage before he figures out his sixth iteration? I think the question is whether, you know, he could run his calculations through the old optimizer and figure out the new persona, the new thing that's missing, whether he'll be able to adopt a more forward-looking persona. I've always thought his strongest critique of Trump is to argue that Trump is a loser, that he lost in 2020, his candidates lost in 2022,

and if Republicans want to beat Biden, they should nominate DeSantis, a winner. And so he's hinted at that argument, but we're going to need to see him actually take on Trump more directly and make that case more aggressively, I think, for that message to hit home. engineered by Michael Raphael. The program is today explained. And tomorrow, we are back to not talking about this election that is 530 days away. Thank you.