‘Rain Man Ron’ DeSantis is Overrated and Not Ready for Prime Time

A Personality Deficit and Scrutiny will Derail his Ambitions

The national media is in a swoon over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who defeated his Democratic opponent Charlie Crist by nearly 20 points. Republicans who are exhausted by Donald Trump and blaming him for defeat are also pushing the DeSantis narrative. A senior Republican strategist anonymously told The Washington Post, “Republicans saw their path forward last night in a double-digit landslide victory in Florida. By definition, Trump is a loser. Trump, loser; DeSantis winner.”

Unfortunately for DeSantis, he’s not presidential material and is reminiscent of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another rockstar presidential frontrunner who hit rock bottom. Florida’s dark cloud in the Sunshine State is likely to wilt under the intense spotlight, where his fatal flaws will undermine his future.

For starters, DeSantis’ massive victory came against Crist, a former Republican career politician who inspired no one. Republican strategist Ana Navarro blamed Democrats for nominating Crist, who she called “a political corpse – and that’s an insult to corpses.”

Navarro also correctly points out that DeSantis leveraged his power to enact voter suppression measures, creating a climate of fear that seemed to keep many Democrats from heading to the polls.       

“He gamed the system and turned Florida into an unlevel playing field,” Navarro said on CNN.  “They changed the election laws, making it harder to vote by mail. They paraded a bunch of…black people that they arrested for voting fraud in front of national media. He created an election police…turnout was 10 points lower than it was in 2018. What you had was a depressed, deflated vote.”

DeSantis may have engaged in additional shenanigans that have yet to come to light. His decision to block Department of Justice election monitors from gaining access to polling places in South Florida looks suspicious, to put it mildly. This appears to be a redux of the 1960’s, when southern governors engaged in civil rights violations and voter suppression, while obstructing the federal government from acting against their illegal activity. What exactly is Ron DeSantis hiding that he didn’t want the rest of the nation to see?

The Biden Administration should launch an investigation. I’m not saying DeSantis lost the election (he didn’t), however, there is a clear conflict of interest when a sitting governor, up for reelection, unilaterally decides that only his handpicked state election monitors can keep watch over Democratic-leaning counties.

It does seem a bit fishy that DeSantis was reelected in a landslide, but only won his first gubernatorial contest in 2018, against Andrew Gillum, by 0.4-percent. For reference, in 2020 Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden in Florida by only 3.3 percentage points. Suddenly, DeSantis is winning with Vladimir Putin-like numbers?   

DeSantis was also aided in victory by the Democrats shifting resources to states where they believed they had a better chance of winning. This allowed the GOP to register 300,000 more voters than Democrats. The New York Times reports:

Democrats, in the meantime, failed to adequately invest in the offices, staffing and other resources necessary to reach voters in a large and expensive state. They continued to outsource basic party functions such as voter registration to outside groups whose effectiveness some Democrats have increasingly called into question.

After Tuesday’s results, there will not be a single Democrat in statewide office for the first time since Reconstruction. 

The ability to exploit his power, abuse his office and outspend Democrats are advantages that Florida’s governor won’t have if he runs for president. However, DeSantis’ largest obstacle to becoming President is his defective personality. David Jolly, a congressman from Florida who served with DeSantis, describes DeSantis as, “a little reclusive, a bit of an odd duck. He always had his earbuds in, to keep people away.”

Dexter Filkins further elaborated on DeSantis’ personality deficit in a sprawling New Yorker profile. In basic human interactions, DeSantis comes across as “Rain Man Ron.”

Nearly everyone I talked to who knew DeSantis commented on his affect: his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids. 

By all appearances, DeSantis lacks the political acumen to conceal his inner jerk. This was evident when he bullied students into dispensing of their masks at a press conference during the epidemic. The New Yorker spoke to various people in the governor’s past and a theme emerges. DeSantis is driven, intelligent, yet has an awkwardness and mean streak that won’t wear well in a long presidential run.

Some recalled that DeSantis was so intensely focused that he wasn’t much of a Yale baseball teammate. “Ron is the most selfish person I have ever interacted with,” another teammate told me. “He has always loved embarrassing and humiliating people. I’m speaking for others—he was the biggest dick we knew.” But the same teammate praised DeSantis’s intellect. “This is the frustrating part. He’s so fucking smart and so creative.”    

A smart, creative Ivy League graduate might get far in state politics, but it also describes virtually every person potentially running against him for president, whether Democrat or Republican.

While many low-information Floridians celebrated DeSantis’ lax Covid policies, more than 82,000 Florida residents have died from the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic. The Tampa Tribune reports that, “there are studies that suggest the state could have prevented thousands of those deaths.” The newspaper opined:

It’s easy to dismiss the numbers..but they represent deaths, real people who really died from COVID, perhaps unnecessarily.

Gov. DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo rarely mention vaccines or the pandemic anymore even as it kills scores of Floridians every day. They want to put COVID in the rearview mirror, but it keeps showing up in the backseat. 

While Florida Republicans might be fine with hordes of unnecessary deaths, this could be a liability in a presidential race. Many Floridians don’t call him Gov. Death Sentence for nothing.

The media’s anointing DeSantis as Trump’s heir apparent puts a target on his back. In the governor’s first term, he was able to traffic in Culture Wars with relatively little pushback. DeSantis spearheaded his infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law and stopped schools from teaching “critical race theory” (which they weren’t teaching anyway).

In DeSantis’ victory speech he arrogantly declared, “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

Unfortunately for the governor, “the woke” [aka experts, creatives, LGBTQ people and professionals] tend to have disposable income and love to travel. Now that DeSantis is a national figure, the woke are likely to wake up to the alarming political transformation of Florida into Alabama. The fact that DeSantis has had great difficultly condemning actual Nazi rallies in Florida won’t help him either when he tries to dismiss peoples’ concerns about Florida’s new direction.   

Stampp Corbin, a former board member of the Human Rights Campaign, is urging conventions and tourists to choose other destinations. Expect “anywhere but Florida” campaigns to potentially materialize, especially as an emboldened DeSantis expands his bullying crusade against minorities.

DeSantis’ pandering to the Religious Right will also play better in Florida, a state awash in evangelical fervor, than on the national stage. In a chilling and narcissistic vanity ad that will come back to haunt him if he runs for president, DeSantis revealed a “God complex”. The ad proclaimed that he was created because God needed a fighter. Anyone who would produce such a tone-deaf ad has delusions of grandeur. It raises massive red flags that suggest DeSantis is uniquely unfit to oversee America’s nuclear codes.

While DeSantis is a darling of the Religious Right today, they will try to pressure him this year into enacting a draconian abortion ban. If DeSantis agrees, that will harm Florida’s tourism and marry him to a deeply unpopular issue that wounded Republicans in the midterms. If he defies the Religious Right and tries to keep an abortion ban at 15-weeks, he will be skewered by his base. This is a no-win issue that could be DeSantis’ albatross in 2024.      

Finally, DeSantis has raised the ire of Donald Trump, a one-man wrecking ball who has perfected the politics of personal destruction. In 2015, Trump dispensed of one GOP rival after another – reducing them to “Little Marco”, “Lyin’ Ted”, “Low Energy Jeb” and so forth. He’s already slimed the Florida Governor as Ron DeSanctimonious.

Trump has also threatened to release dirt on DeSantis. “I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife,” the former president reportedly said. Given Trump’s hoarding of Top-Secret documents, it might be true. DeSantis’ strength is that he can “out-nasty” his rivals. But Trump is his equal in gutter politics, and the former president has infinitely more charisma. This is a brawl that DeSantis will likely lose.

Ron DeSantis is a right-wing bubble politician who isn’t ready for the Big Stage of presidential politics. Most of his mystique was created by FOX News producers, who wanted to groom a new TV personality to replace Trump. If DeSantis wants to see the inside of the White House, I suggest that next time he’s in Washington he order tickets for the fabulous tour. That’s the only way he’s getting close to the Oval Office.