Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' trek toward the 2024 GOP presidential nomination is going to be a long one. He jumped into the race with both feet but failed to make the big splash he expected because the platform from which he launched it crashed during the announcement. You've got to have a heck of a vertical leap if you're going to vault over former President Donald Trump's formidable lead which, according to most polls is anywhere from 30 to 50 points ahead of the other Republicans now in the race. Pressing on, DeSantis was soon off to Iowa and New Hampshire and Fox News, where his message was clear: "I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history."
It's an interesting strategy, one that shows DeSantis to be full of vigor and willing to fight. That's a sharp contrast with the last man to have been governor of Florida, whose hopes to ascend to the top of the American "greasy pole" were smashed by Trump's observation he was "low energy."
Still, DeSantis must do more than define himself as tough before a pejorative Trump nickname starts to stick. He's got to convince voters that he's up to the challenge of being president because he has a winning vision of the future.
But here's the thing: Being the guy who's going to put an end to wokeism would be fine if it wins the election. Yet by all indications, it won't be.
As the highly-regarded GOP pollster Myra Miller of The Winston Group explained, an ability and willingness to fight back against wokes is a priority to the Republican base and will dominate the GOP primary—but that's where it ends. "These issues are not nearly as much of a focus beyond the Republican base to key groups like independents," says Miller.
Which means there's a mismatch between the strategy being deployed by many of the Republican candidates and the strategy that will win the nominee the presidency. Strategists working for Trump and DeSantis and the others in the GOP field seem to be advising their candidates to run a hard-edged campaign from beginning to end that stresses the importance of keeping boys out of girls' bathrooms and rails against drag queen story hours. Yet these are not the things most important to the Americans likely to vote in November 2024.
"In the 2020 presidential election, exit polls showed 26 percent of the electorate identified as conservative GOP, 17 percent as liberal Democrats, and 57 percent were everybody else," Miller points out. "That means less than half the electorate identified with either party's base."
To win in 2024, a candidate's issue set must be broader, and given the high inflation rate, an economic agenda is going to be crucial to winning.
To put it another way, it's still the economy, stupid!
Joe Biden's mismanagement of the U.S. economy has people fearful about the future. Nearly three-quarters of the U.S. adults participating in the 2022 Federal Reserve Survey of Household Economics and Decision-making felt good about their own finances, while only 18 percent believed the national economy was in good shape now—compared to nearly 50 percent in 2019 at the height of the pandemic and the lockdowns.
The perception of America on the cusp of an economic catastrophe seems to be rising faster than interest rates did last year—and that's what moved votes.
Consider 1992, when most of the country believed the nation was in a recession as it went to the polls. It wasn't, as the data later proved, but the perception that it was, reinforced by bad reporting by political media, helped hand the White House to Bill Clinton in a three-way race. Had George H.W. Bush not broken his seemingly ironclad pledge to oppose all efforts to raise taxes, the outcome might have been different.
As outraged as some people are by the attacks on traditional nostrums by those who count themselves among the woke, the idea that there are enough of them to constitute a winning majority in the next presidential election is at best specious. That's not because the issues aren't important; they are. They're just not the ones that people consider at the top of their list when picking a president—at least there's no evidence they do.
If DeSantis plans on making fighting wokeness the cornerstone of his presidential campaign, thinking it makes him the "kinder, gentler" version of Trump, he's got a surprise in store. Besides, why expect people to go for the pale carbon copy when they still have a chance to get the original?
Newsweek Contributing Editor Peter Roff has written about U.S. politics and policy for more than 20 years. He is now a fellow at several public policy organizations including the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network. Email him at RoffColumns AT gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and TruthSocial @TheRoffDraft.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
