“Disney” and “Bud Light” were ubiquitous words on cable news and social media when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) entered the presidential race in the spring of 2023.
COVID lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates were also DeSantis themes that spring. An early fight DeSantis picked with former President Donald Trump was on this very matter — Trump praised Anthony Fauci while DeSantis quickly reopened Florida.
DeSantis was going to run for president on matters that seriously affected regular families, in contrast to Trump, who was running on his own grievances.
There was a logic to this. Parental anger at unaccountable schools looked like a major cultural force. Conservative Glenn Youngkin won the governorship in Virginia in 2021 largely on parental anger.
School closures and other COVID protocols were surely part of that anger. Parents with any semblance of social conservatism were perturbed that their school system was trying to preach brand-new, radical theories about gender and sexuality to children. Trendy schools of thought about race and systemic racism were also peddled as basic facts.
Even left-leaning parents in wealthy, achievement-focused suburbs were upset that these ideologies were interfering with the ability to teach and enrich their children.
At the same time, battling “woke” corporations nicely fit in with this worry about indoctrination, as well as the conservative populism that Trump had mainstreamed.
Running against lockdowns and “wokeism” seemed like a winning platform. President Joe Biden’s clear and utter failures on immigration made it a no-brainer for DeSantis to throw in some good border-toughness red meat.
Things didn’t turn out the way DeSantis and many conservatives expected.
Lockdowns and school closures retreated into the back of most people’s minds, even as the evidence poured in about the disastrous harms of these policies — crime waves, chronic absenteeism, and learning loss. Maybe most people, when they think back on the fear and idleness of those days, are filled more with embarrassment or regret than with anger. They just want to forget the lockdowns, social distancing, and masking ever happened.
And being the anti-“woke” warrior isn’t as winning an issue as online conservatives might think. It’s not that the average parent is fine with his or her daughter being taught she’s incurably racist or that she might really be a he. But a Republican presidential primary probably isn’t the battleground for this fight.
Particularly, DeSantis wasn’t running against anyone who was defending “woke” indoctrination. Yes, Trump, at first, stupidly tried to attack DeSantis’s engagement in the culture wars, but pretty quickly, Trump realized his mistake. This left DeSantis battling nameless, faceless education-school bureaucrats in states very far from Florida or Iowa.
Here’s a general rule about culture-war politics: Most people are moderates, and the candidate who looks like more of a culture warrior generally suffers. Were DeSantis battling a liberal Democrat who defended transing children without parental consent, he would win. When he’s the only one talking about high school girls’ bathrooms, he loses.
Immigration was the matter DeSantis stuck to the longest. And it’s no wonder. I interviewed dozens of Iowa Republicans — at DeSantis rallies, bars, and diners — and nearly all of them named immigration or the border crisis as the top issue.
Why? It’s not as if Council Bluffs is anywhere close to the Rio Grande.
Immigration is a matter that touches on all aspects of politics: jobs, law and order, culture, and electoral politics.
On the jobs front, again, it seems odd that Western Iowans would worry — Council Bluffs and Sioux City are at full employment, with unemployment rates of 3%. Sioux City relies on a large Hispanic immigrant population to man its meat-packing industry.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no cultural problem. Laura, a DeSantis supporter in Iowa, taught at Sioux City East High School and found immense challenges in the large immigrant population. “The thing that bothered me was they can come into our country and speak absolutely no English,” Laura told me before a DeSantis rally. “How are you going to teach algebra to somebody who can’t speak English?”
The lack of a common language corrodes community bonds.
And then, there’s the infuriating abandonment of law and order. The overwhelming majority of purported asylum-seekers arriving at the border are nothing of the sort. They are Central and South Americans who know that life in America is better and who know that gaming our immigration system is much quicker than actually playing by the rules.
Iowa farmers and schoolteachers play by the rules and know that if they don’t pay their taxes or get all the right licenses, the government will ruin them — and they are infuriated that outsiders don’t have to play by the rules.
And here, there is a more visible enemy. The border crisis is a crisis of Biden’s making. So, unlike the “woke” wars, the immigration wars had traction.
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DeSantis had strong immigration messaging, but he couldn’t differentiate himself from Trump on that matter. The matters for which he did stand out, COVID and “wokeness,” proved not as powerful.
That is, DeSantis was forced to fight the nomination battle on Trump’s battlefield — and he lost.
