A crimson wave swept Florida, however elsewhere, it barely lapped the shore. Endangered Home Democrats are surviving throughout, the battle for the Senate could also be tilting towards the Democrats and at finest Republicans have gained themselves a return to stalemate, not the victory that the circumstances appeared to vow.
When you’re a Republican, that is all purpose for extreme disappointment — except, that's, you’re a Republican together with your eyes and hopes on Ron DeSantis as a possible presidential candidate for 2024. A world the place Florida delivers a Republican landslide whereas the GOP underperforms elsewhere is sort of probably your best situation, as a result of it appears to vindicate the idea that DeSantis shall be providing, ought to he change into a candidate in ’24.
That idea, principally, is that there’s a decisive right-of-center majority there for the taking in American politics, a chance magnified by the Biden administration’s unpopularity. It’s a majority that Donald Trump pushed the celebration towards, by choosing up working-class white voters in 2016 after which Hispanic voters in 2020 — proving that the GOP coalition may very well be extra blue collar and multiracial than its Romney-Ryan iteration and higher optimized for Electoral School success.
However Trump himself is simply an excessive amount of, too erratic and polarizing and plainly harmful, to finish the realignment on his personal. And his affect on the celebration as an entire, manifest within the underperforming candidates he elevated on this cycle, is stopping the brand new GOP majority from taking its pure form. States like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and perhaps even New Hampshire ought to have been straightforward Republican pickups; all they wanted was a standard set of Senate nominees. As a substitute they received the type of nominees that Trump wished, and the result's problem, defeat, disappointment and votes being counted late into the night time.
Crucially, the DeSantis idea emphasizes, “regular” doesn’t must imply “squishy.” As a substitute, his sweeping success in Florida proves which you could be an avatar of cultural conservatism, a warrior in opposition to the liberal media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, a politician prepared to choose a battle with Disney if that’s what the circumstances require. You simply additionally must be competent, calculating, conscious of public opinion as you choose your fights and succesful bipartisanship and regular management in a disaster. The essential Trump mixture, cultural pugilism and relative financial moderation, can work wonders politically; it simply needs to be reproduced in a politician who conspicuously is aware of what he’s doing, and who conspicuously isn’t Donald Trump.
Now, there are numerous ways in which this evaluation would possibly overstate the DeSantis case. There are causes other than his political expertise that Florida has trended sharply to the correct, and his message and persona may not yield the identical outcomes elsewhere. You possibly can’t base a 2024 marketing campaign simply on being the man who saved a sunny trip vacation spot open for enterprise in 2021 (and drew many right-of-center migrants within the course of). You possibly can’t assume that the Hispanic vote nationwide will observe the identical patterns as in South Florida. You possibly can’t rely on DeSantis’ peculiar type of anti-charisma enjoying nationally the best way it’s performed in his house state.
However highly effective narratives have a approach of burying caveats and doubts, and proper now it seems to be as if DeSantis will be capable to promote himself because the Republican who overperformed amid basic underperformance.
In a standard political world, a standard political celebration, you'd say that DeSantis successfully grew to become the 2024 Republican front-runner Tuesday night time. Nothing in regards to the GOP has been regular since Trump descended that escalator in 2015, so I gained’t be claiming something so particular.
However the script has been written, the stage ready: Now we’ll see whether or not the governor of Florida can play the half that’s ready for him.
Ross Douthat is a New York Instances columnist.