Even by the standards of today’s political ads, the video that recently roiled the Republican presidential race is not particularly subtle. In it, a talking head accuses Florida Governor Ron DeSantis of producing “some of the harshest, most draconian laws that literally threaten trans existence.” Headlines like “DeSantis Signs ‘Most Extreme Slate of Anti-Trans Laws in Modern History’” flit across the screen. The twist: This was not an attack ad against DeSantis. The clip was shared by his own team on Twitter, and presented as an attack on Donald Trump for being too soft on LGBTQ issues.
With its slapdash presentation and internet-meme imagery, the video could easily be dismissed as the half-baked output of a floundering campaign. But in fact, DeSantis’s anti-trans rhetoric is part of a pattern—and an essential component of his plan to win the Republican primary.
This might seem like a strange claim at first glance. After all, most Americans oppose discrimination against transgender people, even as many express reservations about medical transition for minors or trans competitors in women’s athletics. But the DeSantis clip, like his other incendiary interjections on this topic, was not targeted at most Americans. It was directed at one of the most socially conservative and politically important constituencies in Republican politics: evangelical voters in Iowa.
On paper, DeSantis’s campaign is in dire straits: He’s trailing the front-runner, Trump, by a two-to-one margin in national polls. But there is no national primary, only individual state contests—and the first of these will take place in Iowa in early 2024. The outcome of that showdown has the potential to shape the entire primary to follow, and by pivoting hard to the right on social issues including abortion and gender, DeSantis has been methodically positioning himself to win it.
In February 2020, the New York Times reporter Astead Herndon went to South Carolina and interviewed Black voters in churches across the pivotal Democratic-primary state. He discovered a groundswell of support for former Vice President Joe Biden, who had been written off by many observers after falling short in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Biden went on to sweep South Carolina and capture the nomination.
This year, Herndon visited churches in Iowa, and discovered a different surge for a seemingly struggling contender, who was gaining ground on a surprisingly shaky Trump. “We believe the former president’s hurdles are so significant, that most likely, he gives the Democrats the best opportunity to win in 2024,” Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Family Leader, the state’s politically influential evangelical umbrella group, told him. “So we believe we’re doing our base a great service by trying to say who would be a good alternative to the former president.” Who might that be? At Eternity Church, one of the largest in the area, Herndon found that “a surprising number of people are turning to DeSantis,” who had visited the congregation in May. The pastor himself revealed that he’d donated to the Florida governor—and repeatedly referenced “gender” as one of his top issues.
These voters have outsize importance. Because of Vander Plaats’s well-organized political machine, conservative evangelicals and their preferences have determined the winner of the Iowa caucus for the past three Republican presidential primaries. In 2008, they chose the former pastor Mike Huckabee. In 2012, they gave the nod to the culture warrior Rick Santorum. And in 2016, they handed the first victory of the primary season not to the twice-divorced playboy Donald Trump, but to Ted Cruz.
None of this would seem to bode well for DeSantis. After all, Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz all lost the nomination. Most other states are not as dominated by the white-evangelical electorate that prevails in Iowa. So why would the Florida governor invest so much effort in courting a community that has previously failed to deliver a durable victory? Probably because taking Iowa is his only chance to take the nomination.
According to recent polls, about half of Republican voters don’t actually want to nominate Trump again. But as long as other small-time candidates such as Nikki Haley and Mike Pence are in the race, DeSantis has no hope of consolidating this constituency. To beat Trump, he needs to turn the 2024 primary into a head-to-head contest between himself and the former president. And to do that, he needs to win Iowa and demonstrate to Trump-skeptical voters that he is their only realistic option. Just as Biden’s dominant showing in South Carolina convinced establishment Democrats that he was their best chance to beat a surging Bernie Sanders, a DeSantis upset in Iowa could anoint him as the most viable alternative to Trump.
Iowa won’t determine the ultimate victor, in other words, but it could determine the contenders. “Iowa’s job isn’t to select the nominee,” Vander Plaats told Herndon. “Iowa’s job is to narrow the field.” In the past, winning Iowa failed to vault the likes of Cruz and Santorum into serious contention, because they were factional candidates without name recognition or major appeal outside the religious right. But DeSantis is a better-positioned candidate with comparable favorables to Trump, thanks to his national profile and prolific appearances on Fox News. If he can quickly narrow the primary field to a one-on-one contest, he has the underlying numbers to make it competitive. If he can’t, his campaign may be over before it really begins.
Of course, there’s a cost to running a campaign designed to appeal to your party’s most fervent partisans. By staking out unpopular positions to win the primary, a candidate puts himself at a disadvantage in the general election, where independent voters tend to punish perceived extremism. We’ve seen this quite recently. In the 2022 midterms, Trump handpicked many GOP congressional candidates who echoed his 2020 election-fraud claims. But although these individuals easily won their primaries, nearly all of them lost their races. What thrilled the Republican base alienated the broader electorate.
The same trap has also ensnared non-Trumpy politicians. Just ask another former Republican presidential hopeful. In 2012, Mitt Romney began his campaign with a reputation as a problem-solving moderate who had successfully governed the blue state of Massachusetts. But by the end of the primary, he had dubbed himself “severely conservative” on the debate stage and committed to an array of policy stances that dogged him throughout the election.
At the time, a senior Romney adviser infamously assured the media that his candidate would simply wipe the slate clean after winning the Republican nomination: “You hit a reset button for the fall campaign … It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch.” It didn’t quite work out that way. “After running for more than a year in which he called himself ‘severely conservative,’” Barack Obama cracked, “Mitt Romney’s trying to convince you that he was severely kidding.”
Such political sleight of hand might have worked when voters didn’t have immediate access to video recordings of everything a candidate said on the campaign trail. But as Romney discovered, in the age of the internet and viral social-media clips, it’s much harder to escape one’s past pronouncements. Put another way, today’s pro-DeSantis ads boasting of his anti-trans legislation are tomorrow’s anti-DeSantis ads warning voters about his radicalism.
July 09, 2023 at 06:30PM
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Why Ron DeSantis Is Running for President of Iowa - The Atlantic
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