Florida was supposed to be the future of the GOP — now the state party is in shambles

It may seem hard to believe right now, but this time last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the rest of Florida's Republican Party were being heralded as the post-Donald Trump future for the GOP. Republicans had underperformed in the 2022 midterms in most parts of the country — except in Florida. DeSantis won re-election that November by a whopping 20 points, which was especially impressive considering his 2018 margin of victory was less than half a percentage point. Desperate for some sign that there was hope for their party after Trump, Republican elites decided DeSantis had discovered a magic formula with his aggressive culture war politics that involved book-banning, dropping the word "woke" every few seconds, and waging war on Disney. 

"Ron DeSantis shows he’s future of the GOP," declared a New York Post headline on November 9, 2022. 

"Murdoch’s media empire celebrates DeSantis as future of GOP after midterms," read a CNN headline from the same day. 

"Post-midterms, Ron DeSantis positioned as GOP's 2024 'front-runner,'" announced an Axios headline the next day. 

For months, there were glowing reports that DeSantis's "miracle" win in Florida would render Trump a "non person." Polls showed DeSantis leading Trump in the GOP primary, often by robust margins. Then DeSantis officially announced his presidential run, while Trump got arrested and charged with 91 felonies in four separate jurisdictions. Since then, there's been a stampede of GOP support back to the glowering orange criminal who first captured their hearts with his blunt racism. 

Most of this gets blamed on DeSantis for lacking charisma and on Trump for leveraging his criminality into a campaign asset with the GOP base. But it's worth taking another look at the Florida GOP and asking if the culture war-heavy politics practiced there have actually been such a political winner. The Florida Republican Party that was deemed so mighty a year ago is looking less than robust these days. 

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On Sunday, the Florida GOP did everything in their power to push their party chair, Christian Ziegler, out the door. Ziegler has been under investigation for rape, after a woman who alleges she had previously had a three-way sexual encounter with Ziegler and his wife contacted the police. Ziegler has refused to resign, even though there is apparently video showing him having sex with the accuser. So the party reduced his salary to $1 and stripped him of legislative power. 

As I wrote earlier this month, what we can say with confidence is the haste to boot Ziegler cannot be attributed to anything resembling morality, decency, or even consistency with the GOP. This is a party that has eagerly backed Trump, who is both an adulterer and a sexual predator. His defenestration suggests he and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, have lost the support of the party for political reasons. 

Besides DeSantis himself, no one has had more sway over the direction of Florida Republican politics than the Zieglers. When not allegedly engaging in three ways, the two pushed the party into embrace an anti-education, pro-censorship campaign. They helped draft Florida's "don't say gay" law and have been deeply involved in the legal harassment of the Disney corporation for publicly speaking out in defense of LGBTQ rights. With Moms for Liberty, Bridget Ziegler spearheaded the book-banning mania on the right. She played an instrumental role in passing laws that terrorize Florida teachers and librarians with threats of being dragged into court if a student is caught reading a book some right-wing parent doesn't like. 

This draconian war on reading was central to the argument that the Florida GOP would lead the national party into its post-Trump era. Instead, the 2023 election demonstrated that book banning backfired politically, causing a surge of angry pro-education parents to turn out and elect Democrats to run school boards. Other post-election anaylses show that "don't say gay" laws and attacks on trans kids are also political losers. The Zieglers and their "brilliant" strategy turned out to be an egg. 

Meanwhile, DeSantis continues to fall in the GOP primary polls, despite his aggressive efforts to win over MAGA voters with showy stunts. Indeed, he's getting so desperate that he's decided to involve himself in a silly GOP tantrum over a Satanic display in the Iowa statehouse. 

Long story short: The Satanic Temple, as they are wont to do, applied for the right to include their holiday display in the capitol building. The state allowed it because, under the First Amendment, if they let Christians erect a display, they have to let everyone do it. So some MAGA nut made the trek from Mississippi to Des Moines to destroy the Satanic altar. He's been charged with vandalism, and Republicans are rallying to his side, because they are fine with desecrating other people's religious displays, even if they would cry bloody murder if someone did this to a Christian decoration. 

DeSantis, in his try-hard way, is now getting involved. 

DeSantis, it is worth remembering, got his law degree at Harvard. He knows full well that the U.S. cannot legally ban or discriminate against any religion, no matter how much the MAGA base may want them to do it. But having fully committed to a failed political strategy of opposition to religious freedom, he apparently feels he has no other path forward but to simply reject the First Amendment's clear language on this matter. 

DeSantis's cynical posturing does make some sense. Polling shows the majority of Republicans buy into Christian nationalism, which necessarily requires opposing religious freedom. But it's not working for him the way it does Trump, who is basically channeling Hitler these days with his speeches full of genocidal rhetoric. I suspect the main reason is there's a two-bit quality to DeSantis's tactics. The MAGA crowd is so bloodthirsty they don't want to hear about how he will give a little money to defend a guy who attacked a Satanic altar. They want to hear about how he'll round up all the Satanists and send them straight to prison. 

Ultimately, that may be why the Florida strategy isn't the godsend Republican elites wanted it to be. The DeSantis/Moms for Liberty methods both managed to be so fascist they scared normal people, but fell short of what the MAGA base longs for. They angered regular people by banning books for minors, but by leaving the books legal for everyone else, they frustrated the larger ambitions of the Christian right. They banned acknowledgment of LGBTQ identities in school, but have done little to turn back the clock to the time when it was simply illegal to be gay at all. The Florida GOP promise was a path to authoritarianism that would somehow not offend the majority of non-authoritarian Americans. But it was an empty promise, and the party's current shambles shows it.