Governor Ron pulled Florida firmly towards the Republican camp in the US midterms – as Donald Trump’s grip on the party slipped
The answer is finally in. For months Washington’s political class obsessed about this week’s midterm elections, wondering whether grim predictions for Democrats would translate into a thumping at the ballot box. They didn’t, and one man is getting the blame: Donald Trump. Now, in the election’s wake, all eyes are on a different set of surveys – among Republican voters about who they want to be their party’s next presidential candidate. A new name is on the rise: Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old governor of Florida who owes his start to Trump, but now may come to usurp him.
On a bad night for his party, DeSantis vastly outperformed, crushing his Democratic rival by 20 points, up from the three-point margin of victory Trump secured over Biden in the vital swing state two years ago. Swing-state no more. Wrenching hispanic support from Democrats, DeSantis has pulled Florida – a vital prize on the path to the White House at presidential elections – firmly and definitively into the Republican camp. Few in that camp, bruised by last night’s small margin of victory elsewhere, will have failed to notice.
All the more so because Trump’s performance, even though he wasn’t on the ticket, was miserable. After a host of Trump-endorsed candidates flopped with voters, The Donald’s grip on the party he once seemed to hold in the palm of his hand could finally be slipping. Two years ahead of an election which may be the Republicans’ to lose against an enfeebled Joe Biden or an underwhelming Kamala Harris, the likely picture of America’s next first couple is changing. For Donald and Melania, read Ron and Casey.
Yet if DeSantis owes Trump, 76, his career, has pinched a policy or two, and assumed his mantle as a hammer of the “woke”, the two men could, in many ways, hardly be more different.