Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has based his national reputation on extremist policies like “Don’t Say Gay” and book banning, along with stunts like grabbing migrants from Texas and dropping them on Martha’s Vineyard. As he launches his presidential campaign, though, he’s going for a different public image. While DeSantis is not letting up on the far-right positions—in Iowa this week he promised to finish a border wall to “reestablish the sovereignty of this nation”—he or his handlers have apparently decided that playing up the relatable middle-class dad angle is the best way to appeal to voters.
DeSantis and wife Casey, the parents of children aged 3, 5, and 6, have been laying it on thick in Iowa campaign appearances, telling stories and cracking jokes about parenting young children. At one Wednesday event, DeSantis told an extended story about taking his kids to the drive-through of a newly opened fast food restaurant, only to have the youngest need to go to the restroom. This isn’t an incidental part of how DeSantis is campaigning. Politico reports:
After DeSantis’ stump speech Wednesday, for exactly 10 minutes of the couple’s half-hour “fireside chat” in front of 150 people in a welding shop, the pair regaled the audience with talk of shuffling out of leotards and into T-ball uniforms, coloring on the walls, keeping track of the children’s birthday party social calendar and working out naptime.
When a candidate and his wife are spending one-third of his faux-informal time—time spent, incongruously, on a pair of armchairs stationed inside that welding shop— talking about being parents, he’s telling us something important about his candidacy and how he wants voters to see him. In the same way, Casey DeSantis is consistently opening her remarks by framing herself as a slightly beleaguered mother.
But in trying to make a connection with voters, at each of the governor’s first three stops in Iowa on Tuesday and Wednesday, Casey DeSantis opened her remarks with an apology for her slightly hoarse voice: She had been “negotiating with a 3-year-old” about not coloring with permanent marker on the dining room table.
Sometimes she switches it up:
I dunno, Casey, when you’re doing multiple campaign events for days, the hoarse voice might not be because of a conversation with your kid, and when you’re surrounded by campaign staff, the speeches you’re giving to crowds of adults are not your only break from children.
But the characterization of this as “extraordinary discipline” by Steve Peoples, chief political reporter for the Associated Press, shows again how the media is inclined to give DeSantis an easy time of it, at least as long as he’s Donald Trump’s major competition. Is it discipline, or is it one more sign of the authenticity question hovering around DeSantis as he tries on yet another persona? He was a Trump sycophant, then he wasn’t. In his 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign, he went for a tough guy image with a “Top Gun”-themed video that will be included on lists of most embarrassing campaign videos for years to come. Now he’s the dad telling his 3-year-old, “They don’t have little potty in Slim Chickens!”
DeSantis has had trouble deciding who he wants voters to think he is, and the question is whether his discipline about any given persona is enough to overcome the shifts. He’s even had trouble committing to a single pronunciation of his last name. Axios reports that DeSantis is going back and forth between pronouncing his name as “Dee-Santis” and “Deh-Santis.” It seems that as his career has progressed he’s gone from a strong preference for “Dee-Santis” to adopting “Deh-Santis.” His campaign and wife both use “Deh-Santis” while he goes back and forth. It isn’t a question of anglicizing an authentic Italian pronunciation, either.
“’Day-Sahn-tees’ would be proper Italian, but sloughing it off as ‘Deh-Santis’ is common,” an Italian studies professor told Axios. “But ‘Dee-Santis’ is unusual because that would be spelled ‘DiSantis’ in Italian.” This is the kind of stuff that, over time, feeds the sense that a politician doesn’t have a genuine core identity, and the kind of stuff that Trump can absolutely work into an attack. “Ron DeSantis is a phony who can’t decide how to pronounce his name,” a Trump campaign spokesperson told Axios.
Some of DeSantis’ other trying-too-hard efforts to look like a regular guy could end up feeding that perception that he’s a phony. In addition to all the parenting talk, he and Casey have worked hard to play up their middle-class backgrounds, with Casey identifying them as “gas station connoisseurs” and Ron describing Buc-ee’s as “about like Shangri-La, with respect to service stations.” Regional gas station and convenience store allegiances can be intense, it’s true, but “about like Shangri-La, with respect to service stations”? Spoken like a gas station connoisseur, I guess.
Perhaps to the same end of looking like relatable middle-class people, Casey DeSantis appears to be moving away from the cocktail dresses in inappropriate settings that earned her the nickname Tacky O in favor of campaigning in jeans and a zip-up jacket embroidered with “Casey DeSantis, First Lady of Florida.” There’s nothing wrong with jeans and a jacket (though I have some questions on the personalization), but it all looks very calculated, almost a sitcom take on how a politician decides to posture as a man—or in this case, woman—of the people.
And it matters because this is the veneer DeSantis is trying to slap over the same vicious, hard-right rhetoric and policies he’s pushed all along. DeSantis launched his campaign on Twitter, alongside Elon Musk, as Twitter protects hate speech by people paying the company $8 a month and Musk boosts a parody account made to look like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s real account. When a reporter at a New Hampshire event asked him why he wasn’t taking questions from audiences, DeSantis snapped, “Are you blind?” His campaign pledges are about the border wall and how “It’s time we impose our will on Washington, D.C.” He continues to try to sell himself as a more competent, more successful Trump. He’s not abandoning the attacks on LGBTQ+ kids and public school teachers, or the book banning. He’s just trying to layer it over with a veneer of dad jokes.
DeSantis may not, in the end, have the political chops to sell this version—or any version—of himself in a primary where his polling has already declined as he’s come under attack from Trump. We’ll see when polling starts to come out of Iowa and New Hampshire after his big charm offensive in those states. But his goal is the big Republican Party goal—Trump, but more successful—and it bears watching how they market it.
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Countless progressive organizations seek to engage and mobilize voters, but coordinating those efforts is a mighty task. On this week’s episode of “The Downballot,” we’re joined by Sara Schreiber, the executive director of America Votes, which works with hundreds of partners at the national and state level to deploy the most effective means of urging voters to the polls. Schreiber walks us through how coalitions of like-minded groups are formed and how the work of direct voter contact is divvied up between them. A special focus is on “blue surge” voters—those who, in the Trump era, joined the rolls for the first time—and why ensuring they continue to participate in the political process is the key to progressive victories.
