When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis delivered his initial speech as a declared presidential candidate in Iowa last week, his first 15 minutes succinctly previewed how Republicans might defeat President Joe Biden next year.
The next 30 minutes of DeSantis' speech then demonstrated how Biden might survive despite all the doubts about his performance and capabilities.
DeSantis spent the first part of his address in an evangelical church outside of Des Moines highlighting all the vulnerabilities on issues such as inflation and the border that have suppressed Biden's job approval ratings since late summer 2021.
But then DeSantis spent nearly the next half hour detailing an ambitious, exhaustive and aggressively conservative agenda on social issues (such as a six-week abortion ban, and the removal of books from school classrooms and libraries). Those messages thrilled his right-leaning audience, but risk alienating many of the swing voters who have recoiled from former President Donald Trump, particularly in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas across the battleground states.
After DeSantis' first section, many swing voters might have nodded in agreement with his case against Biden's America; after the second section, many of those same voters might have questioned whether they wanted to live in the America that DeSantis was promising.
In that way, DeSantis' first swing through Iowa showed why Republicans are still at risk in 2024 from a key dynamic that dashed their hopes of a sweeping "red wave" in 2022.
A central reason Republicans did not score the gains that they, or many pundits, expected in 2022 is that an unusually large number of voters disenchanted with Biden and/or dissatisfied with the economy still voted for Democrats anyway -- largely because they considered the Republican alternatives too extreme.
Many strategists in both parties believe that dynamic is most likely to recur in 2024 if the GOP nominates Trump. But DeSantis' first appearance as an announced presidential candidate showed how he could also face the same threat if he wins the nomination.
Criticism of Biden on issues such as inflation, the border and crime, "are really good for swing voters -- these are things that the average right leaning independent voter will go for," said Sarah Longwell, founder of the Republican Accountability Project, a Republican group critical of Trump. "But by trying to out-MAGA Trump, DeSantis is very much in danger that he finds himself in the same category as Trump with these swing voters who will not like a six-week abortion ban, and who will not like his unrelenting focus" on culture war fights, she said.
Republicans sympathetic to DeSantis argue that if he reaches the general election his critique of Biden (the first section of his speech) will prove much more relevant for swing voters than the second part (the social agenda he's stressing for GOP primary voters).
"DeSantis right now is speaking to a primary audience, so he's emphasizing the parts of his record that appeal to GOP voters and contrast with Trump," says Chris Wilson, a Republican pollster who supports DeSantis. "But his record and results on the economy, on education, and on just running a competent and efficient government without the runaway spending and inflation of the Biden years appeal to swing voters."
But, like Longwell, many Democrats believe that if DeSantis captures the nomination, he is providing Biden the targets he will need to repeat the unusual feat Democrats managed in 2022: to convince large numbers of voters to make their decision based not only on their view of what Biden has done with power, but also what Republicans would do with it.
"Instead of articulating a vision that would expand their electorate, he is articulating a DeSantOpian vision of a country where freedoms and rights are at risk," said long-time Democratic communications strategist Jesse Ferguson, offering a mash-up of the Florida governor's name and the science fiction concept of a dim and decayed future dystopia.
Among the most important reasons Democrats minimized the typical first midterm losses for the party holding the White House in 2022 is that an unusually large percentage of voters who said they were disenchanted with Biden or dissatisfied with the economy voted for candidates from his party anyway. Usually, voters discontented with the president break in large numbers for candidates from the party out of the White House.
The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN found that Biden's approval rating among voters in 2022 was almost exactly as weak (44%) as Trump's (45%) during the 2018 election, when the GOP suffered much bigger losses in the House.
Republican House candidates in 2022, like the Democrats in 2018, romped among the voters who said they strongly disapproved of the president's performance, or who considered the economy in "poor" shape, the worst grade available, according to the exit polls. But the GOP woefully underperformed among voters who were more modestly discontented.
In 2018, about two-thirds of voters who said they "somewhat" disapproved of the Trump's performance voted for Democrats in House races, according to the exit polls. But stunningly, in 2022 the exit polls found that Democrats beat Republicans among the voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden. Just as strikingly, the nearly two-fifths of voters who described the economy as "not so good" preferred Democrats by almost a 30 percentage point margin. Voters with that dour view of the economy, by contrast, had decisively voted against the president's party in 2018.
The same pattern persisted through the states. Democrats won races for the Senate, the governorship, or both in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin even though Biden's approval rating in the exit polls did not exceed 46% in any of them and also easily won the governorship in Michigan where he stood at 48%. At least two-thirds of voters said they did not want Biden to run again in each of those states where the exit poll asked the question. And in all of those states as well, big majorities said they considered the economy in only fair or poor shape.
Such sentiments typically spell doom for the party holding the White House. Yet for many voters these concerns were outweighed by resistance to the GOP alternative. Most tellingly, independent voters were much more likely in the exit polls to say they considered the GOP too extreme than to describe Democrats that way, according to analysis of the results provided by the CNN polling unit. Support for legalized abortion and concerns about Republicans as a threat to democracy crystallized that verdict about the GOP -- and proved a much more powerful counter to discontent over the economy and Biden's performance than most operatives in either party expected.
The verdict on Biden and the economy hasn't improved much, if at all, since then. His approval rating in most surveys remains stuck around 40%. Big majorities in surveys consistently say they doubt he has the mental and physical capacity to handle another term and do not want him to run again. In a recent national CNN poll conducted by SRSS, almost three-fourths of independents said a Biden reelection would be a "setback" or even a "disaster" for the country. And, despite the nation's booming job growth under Biden, Americans remain mostly dour about the economy, largely because of concerns about inflation.
DeSantis briskly evoked all of those doubts in the first section of his kickoff speech last week. He alleged that "our southern border has collapsed" and that "the Biden administration is doing all it can to make it harder for the average family to make ends meet." He charged that "Biden is deliberately trying to kneecap our energy production" and that "American cities have been hollowed out by spiking crime due to weak ideologically driven policies that intentionally allow criminals to roam the streets." Like generations of governors before him who have sought the presidency (from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) DeSantis framed himself as an outsider and railed against "elites in the political class who ignore the concerns of the American people."
At that point, with only a few brief detours into Fox News-speak (quick denunciations of "medical authoritarianism" and "cultural Marxism") DeSantis had delivered the critique of Biden's presidency that any Republican presidential nominee would offer.
But DeSantis didn't stop there. He touted the six week ban on abortion he signed in Florida and said he had "fortified Second Amendment rights" by approving legislation allowing anyone to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. He recounted his crusades to ban an alphabet soup of targets familiar in conservative media: DEI, ESG and CRT. Somewhat defensively he praised Florida legislation that has allowed objecting parents to more easily force the removal of books from school classrooms and libraries, insisting that such policies did not amount to book banning. He described at length his efforts to restrict classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity and pledged to prevent transgender girls from competing in women's sports. And he took a victory lap for his ongoing struggle with the Walt Disney Co.
Many Democratic strategists believe that, just as in the 2022 election, resistance to the breadth and intensity of this social agenda will outweigh concerns about Biden for a critical slice of swing voters.
"DeSantis' campaign and the entire Republican primary is now about how do they appeal to this narrow, very extreme, very on-line base of a party in order to win the nomination without regard for what it does to their brand for winning the general election," argued Ferguson.
Likewise, Longwell believes that while DeSantis would have an opportunity to temper his message in a general election and benefit from the age contrast with Biden, the Florida governor is identifying with such a polarizing agenda in the primary that he may permanently alienate voters he would need to win in November. "The problem for Republicans in general can be summed up by the fact that the gap between what base voters demand and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten very wide," she said. "It is a chasm that is almost untraversable. It's too wide."
Many Republicans don't see as much general election vulnerability in the sweeping social agenda that DeSantis -- and most of the other GOP contenders -- have embraced.
One reason, Republicans argue, is that the eventual nominee likely will talk about these issues less in a general election. David Kochel, a long-time Iowa-based GOP strategist, said in part because "you have a conservative media ecosystem that is focused" on these culture war fights, the candidates have no choice but to lean into them now.
Kochel agrees the eventual nominee can't "etch-a-sketch away" their primary comments -- a reference to the famous claim by a Mitt Romney adviser in 2012 that the candidate, after winning the 2012 GOP nomination, could just clear the slate and remake his image for the general election. But, Kochel added, "it also doesn't mean you have the same basic" message in the primary and a general election "for what are functionally two different elections focused on two different audiences." The eventual nominee, he predicts, will successfully shift the general election focus back to Biden's record, in part because the media is likely to highlight those questions.
Democrats are dubious that DeSantis, much less Trump, could shed his identity as a culture warrior in a general election and keep voters focused primarily on whether he can manage the economy or the border better than Biden. DeSantis in "his term as governor and his campaign for president has so doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on these extreme notions that he can't press undo with the public," argued Ferguson, who served as the communications director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
The other reason many Republicans say they are not as worried about DeSantis' identifying so unreservedly with a conservative social agenda for the primary is that they believe it can help, not hurt, in a general election. Polls show majority public support for some of the specific initiatives he has championed in Florida, including prohibiting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades and banning transgender girls from competing in high school sports.
But most Democrats believe the whole of DeSantis' social agenda will prove less popular than the sum of its individual parts. They believe many swing voters, particularly the college-educated suburbanites who have abandoned the GOP in the Trump years, will view what he calls "parents' rights" as intolerance and bigotry. "Generally, being on the side of banning stuff is bad," said Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch.
DeSantis' first Iowa speech offered a Rorschach test moment for this debate: his biggest applause in the hour-long appearance arguably came when he declared that Florida now will not only strip the licenses of doctors who perform gender affirming care on minors but send them to prison. That declaration lit up the room, but it's likely to horrify the vast majority of voters beyond the GOP base "who don't want to jail doctors, period," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked for Biden in 2020. "They are just going too far."
Lake predicts that swing voters will recoil not only from the substance of DeSantis' cultural offensive but the aggressive rhetorical style in which he delivers it. "It's divisive, it's bullying," she said. "It is not what women in particular want."
Many twists are certain before the GOP settles on its nominee. Some Democrats worry that even if DeSantis wins the nomination with a staunchly conservative social agenda, the very act of dethroning Trump will defend him from the Democratic case that he represents another form of Trump-ism -- much the way Biden's victory over Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 shielded the president from GOP charges that he was a "socialist."
But the basic dynamic framed by DeSantis' initial Iowa speech will loom large over the race in any scenario. Beset by all the difficult domestic conditions DeSantis highlighted, Biden will likely struggle straight through November 2024 to affirmatively convince a majority that his performance deserves another term. And yet the president might win that term anyway if a majority is nonetheless unwilling to entrust the nation to the Republican alternative.
Lake says that while it is difficult in our highly polarized era for Biden, or any president, to reach and maintain approval from at least 50% of the country, that traditional yardstick is no longer a prerequisite for reelection. Laying down an important marker, she argues Biden "doesn't need" majority approval to win in 2024: "He just has to have higher favorability than his opponent."
Which means that whoever the GOP nominates, Biden will need to make the America of abortion bans and book bans that DeSantis sketched in the second section of his Iowa speech frightening to more voters than the portrait of open borders and raging inflation that the Florida governor painted in the first.
