The Underpriced Risk of Ron DeSantis Losing Reelection
The media would have you think Ron DeSantis is a lock to welcome the winners of the Super Bowl LIX to the White House in a few years – but he could be a nobody by 2024 if this November goes screwy.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is an alluring political animal. In his four years of running the nation’s third-most populous state, he has attracted attention from Fox News and the New Yorker alike; even the foreign press has profiled him, as in the case of one excellent June dispatch from Der Spiegel. Yale-educated and Navy-trained, he is often memorably thought of as “Trump with a brain”.
He has adopted the former president’s public mannerisms, both body-postural and media-relational. He is most known nationally for his strident stance against restrictions to combat COVID-19, to say nothing of his thoughts about Moderna’s vaccines. He took on Disney, his state’s biggest employer, in a head-to-head brawl and beat them into submission. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that all the chatter about DeSantis today rests on his decision to enter the 2024 presidential race.
However, DeSantis has one more hurdle to clear before the path to 2024 opens fully – he must win reelection as governor in November of this year. That is thought to be a political no-brainer – PredictIt has his chances at 91%, and 538 reckons about the same, calling him “clearly favored” to win.
I think these odds are too rosy and am selling DeSantis at these prices. The governor must defeat a Democratic nominee who has tasted success in statewide Florida politics. What’s more, the national mood is tilting blue rather rapidly, and in an era of depressed ticket-splitting, a strong Democratic generic ballot showing may weaken DeSantis enough to put him out. Let’s dig in further.
As was decided tonight, DeSantis will face Charlie Crist in the race this November. Crist was previously a popular two-term governor of Florida. He won the last leave-no-doubt majority in a Florida gubernatorial race in his reelection in 2006, defeating Jim Davis by 7pts. What’s more remarkable is he did this while a Republican – Crist was a GOP star until 2010, when a rift in the Florida state Republican party led to Marco Rubio earning the GOP nomination for that cycle’s open Senate seat. In response, Crist crossed the aisle and backed Barack Obama’s presidential reelection in 2012, helping to deliver Florida for the Democrats. Since 2017, Crist has represented St. Petersburg in the House – as a Democrat.
Crist will lack no name recognition in Florida and as an extremely moderate “Democrat” has ideological footing sound enough not to be trounced. However, even if we put on an electoral veil of ignorance and consider only the likely performance of a generic candidate, there is room for doubt on DeSantis’ predicted performance.
For much of the twentieth century, Florida was essentially a one-party state ruled by southern Democrats. In 1986, however, Bob Martinez – a party-flopper himself – won the governor’s mansion as a Republican in the midst of Reagan’s boom years. He promptly lost reelection. Statewide races in Florida were hotly contested in the decade following, including the state’s first real nailbiter in 1994, when Lawton Chiles kept Jeb Bush away by a hair’s breadth – 1.5pts. That turned out to be the first of many close-run things, as we currently sit in the middle of a 20-year-run of no governor winning election in Florida by more than 10pts – the last to do it was the immortal Jeb himself, who romped his way to a 13pt victory in 2002.
That election, however, is a curious case of everything going right for the incumbent – Jeb was able to call in his brother, President George W. Bush, still riding his astronomical post-9/11 popularity, to stump for him for several weeks. Meanwhile, the presumed Democratic nominee, former US Attorney General Janet Reno,1 fumbled her way out of the primary race and allowed an unknown Tampa lawyer named Bill McBride to slip in.2 The Bushes slaughtered McBride in the course of the general campaign, and Jeb became Florida’s first two-term governor ever.
Take away Jeb 2002 and the next best performer of the past quarter-century becomes Crist, who won in 2006 with a 7pt margin as noted above. Following that, however, Floridian gubernatorial results have been razor-thin: 1.2pts in 2010, 1.0pts in 2014, and 0.4pts in DeSantis’ win over Andrew Gillum in 2018.
538 is kind enough to provide their estimate of the 2022 race’s winning margin – they have DeSantis beating Crist by 9.8pts at the time of this writing, a result far more 20th century or “Jeb and W. post-9/11” than anything seen recently.
Unless things in Florida have truly changed post-COVID to bring the Sunshine State back to one-party rule, we should expect that margin forecast to tighten, necessarily depressing DeSantis’ odds, even if they remain high. Crist also appears on the face of it to be a solid opponent. One final plank of evidence comes from the national mood, or, as the pollsters put it, the changes in the generic ballot.
The repeal of Roe v. Wade in June of this year has resulted in tremendous energy among Democratic voters. Voter registration numbers, a weak and leading but still significant signal, are trending hard-D. 538’s early read showed a clear move towards Dems nationally, with their confidence in that signal growing stronger as more special elections and primaries have transpired over the summer. Democratic-aligned groups have won in Kansas and outperformed a so-so 2020 result in a New York special election.
In 538’s toy model, one point of Dem generic ballot strength offsets one point of the state’s partisan lean – how much more Republican or Democratic it is than the rest of the nation – directly. The margin is simply the sum of generic ballot and lean – a 2021 datadump had their estimate of Florida’s lean as -7.6 Dem, which would combine with a +0.3 Dem generic ballot to give us -7.3 Dem margin of victory.
That’s not great for my purposes, but it’s admittedly better than a 91% chance of DeSantis victory or a margin like a 9.8pt Democratic defeat. If that generic ballot continues to tilt further Crist’s way, the race could become very interesting very fast. Sell Ron from Dunedin at his highs and wait to see what the fall brings.
The cool thing to remember about Janet Reno is that she was the only Clinton cabinet member to last all 8 years – she was Clinton’s Tom Vilsack, who is in fact on his way to become both Obama and Biden’s Janet Reno.
For “fumbled her way out of the primary race”, read “Elián González”.