Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) says he is more likely to win than former President Donald Trump, and he is obviously right. Trump was a drag on the ticket in both 2016 and 2020. He single-handedly lost the Senate by making the Georgia runoffs all about himself. He repeated that trick in the 2022 midterm elections when candidates he had endorsed crashed in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and pretty much everywhere else.
DeSantis suggests that, unlike Trump, he gets stuff done. Again, he is right. He held out against overwhelming pressure and kept Florida open while Trump was musing aloud about whether to inject people with bleach.
THE TRUMP INDICTMENT: IRRESPONSIBILITY SQUARED
DeSantis presents himself as an orthodox conservative, which he plainly is when compared to the man who sucked up to Vladimir Putin, attacked free trade, and presided over a trillion-dollar deficit.
Yet, bizarrely, it is DeSantis, not Trump, who is portrayed as some kind of corporatist, milk-and-water RINO. Why? For an answer, glance across the Atlantic, where a similar paradox is unfolding.
Last week, Britain’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson, declared war on the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak. Nothing very unusual there: Former heads of government almost always make life difficult for their successors. What is interesting is the way in which the row has divided the Conservative Party. By and large, Johnson is backed by the Right, who feel he has been forced out of public life by an establishment plot in which Sunak is somehow involved.
The fascinating thing is that, on almost any metric, Sunak is to the right of Johnson. Where Johnson is unequivocally pro-immigration, Sunak is more doubtful. Where Johnson waited until the last minute before deciding which way to jump on Brexit, Sunak is a lifelong Euroskeptic who was writing criticisms of the European Union while in high school. Where Johnson took pride in having more ambitious green targets than other countries, Sunak balked at their cost. Indeed, Sunak eventually resigned as Johnson’s chancellor of the exchequer because he could not sign off on unfunded spending commitments.
Why, then, is the Thatcherite Sunak portrayed as some sort of wet? The answer has to do with what the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh calls “vibes and tribes.” Seeking to explain why Sunak had lost the leadership election to Liz Truss (whose 42 days in office were sandwiched between the Johnson and Sunak premierships), Ganesh observed that their policies mattered less than how they came across. Truss, who had voted Remain, said blunt things in a regional accent; Sunak, who had voted Leave, dressed and spoke like the CEO of a multinational. People picked their candidate on the basis of signifiers, not doctrine.
The same is true of Johnson versus Sunak and of Trump versus DeSantis. As Ganesh puts it: “Most people’s ideological commitments are extraordinarily soft. What they think of as a belief is often a post-hoc rationalization of a group loyalty. Crucially, this is more true, not less, of degree-holding, ‘high-information’ voters.”
DeSantis is barking up the wrong tree when he tells Republican voters that he is likelier to win and to deliver than the president who never even built his wretched wall, for he presupposes that they want a winner.
But what if Republican voters don’t care? What if voting for Trump is performative rather than functional, a way of getting something off their chest? What if they have had enough of condescending libs and want to hit back at them? What if they believe that elections don’t change anything, so it doesn’t really matter whether Trump can win? Indeed, their sense of group identity might be stronger if he is kept out of office claiming fraud.
If these are their preoccupations, they will not be moved by the polls showing that 60% of the public don’t want Trump. They won’t care that the former president paid off a porn star and then lied about it. It won’t bother them that he mocked American servicemen while DeSantis was serving his country in uniform. Indeed, they may take a certain pride in sticking to their guy despite the scandals and indictments, for nothing strengthens tribal loyalty such as a shared sense of persecution.
Almost any other Republican could beat the now palpably frail and doddery President Joe Biden. Almost any other Republican would govern in a more conservative way. Almost any other Republican would hold himself to a higher moral standard (I don’t think that raises the bar unreasonably high). But it is becoming horribly clear that, for a chunk of the base, none of these considerations make the slightest difference.
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Dan Hannan, a former conservative member of the European Parliament, is a prolific writer and a member of the United Kingdom's House of Lords.