Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is overtaking former President Donald Trump in early polls of likely 2024 Republican primary voters. What he’s offering is Trumpism without Trump. But will it work?
Trump’s base has always been white voters without a college degree. That was true the first time he ran for president in 2016, when he said after winning the Nevada caucuses, “I love the poorly educated.” It was true in the 2016 general election, when Trump carried 64 percent of the vote (over Democrat Hillary Clinton) among white voters without a college degree — but only 38 percent among college-educated whites; 30 percent of the voters, nationwide, were white college graduates; a substantially larger number (44 percent) were non-college whites.
In the 2020 election, Trump carried 67 percent of non-college whites over Democrat Joe Biden. White college graduates were split (48 percent for Trump, 51 percent for Biden).
Educational levels in the country are slowly increasing. In 2020, white college graduates had grown to 32 percent of voters. But they were still outnumbered by non-college white voters (35 percent).
Non-college voters were Trump’s base in the 2016 Republican primaries (which are almost entirely white). He led more than ten other contenders with 42 percent of the vote in the 2016 New Hampshire Republican primary. Among Republican college graduates his support was lower (30 percent).
And now? A December poll by Suffolk University and USA Today shows DeSantis leading Trump among likely Republican primary voters nationwide by 56 to 33 percent. DeSantis has a big lead among Republican college graduates. The vote between DeSantis and Trump is split among Republicans who never went to college. In other words, Trump no longer owns them.
Republicans used to be called “the stupid party” because of their anti-intellectualism. Today, radical right conservatives express resentment of being governed by an “educated elite” with liberal or “woke” values. Florida, DeSantis claims, is “the state where woke goes to die.”
That may help explain DeSantis’s surprising call for a grand jury investigation of “wrongdoing” by medical authorities and pharmaceutical companies that promote vaccination as a way to ward off the serious effects of COVID 19. DeSantis became a hero to Republicans by refusing to authorize school closings and quarantines in Florida. Conservatives regard such “mandates” as government overreach and unwarranted restrictions on personal freedoms. Liberals and Democrats defend them as measures to protect public health.
What DeSantis is doing goes beyond attacking mandates. It’s seeking to charge medical authorities and pharmaceutical companies with criminal conspiracy. Some Republicans are calling for an investigation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s longtime chief medical authority on infectious diseases. “Stick with the science,” Fauci advises.
The problem is that when science conflicts with personal freedom, many conservatives reject science. “Untruths abound, and we almost normalize unthruths,” Fauci told the Associated Press in a recent interview. “I worry about my own field of health, but I also worry about the country.’’
By politicizing the COVID pandemic, DeSantis is attacking the authority of educated experts. It’s a strategy for out-Trumping Trump. It’s also a risky strategy because it could rally educated voters against him, something that is already happening to Republicans under Donald Trump.
The 2020 election saw a serious defection of higher income and better educated suburban voters from the GOP. The 2022 midterm saw strong opposition to Republicans among young voters, particularly in opposition to the Supreme Court’s ruling that ended abortion rights. Without Trump at the top of the ticket, Republicans had a hard time rallying the former president’s base of less educated, often rural, “forgotten” white voters in key states.
Non-college white populists tend to be concentrated in rust belt states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Those were the states that provided the “tipping point” for Trump’s 2016 electoral college victory. The message of this year’s midterm is that they may not turn out for anybody except Trump.
DeSantis? He’s not exactly uneducated. He holds degrees from Yale and Harvard. But what matters is not that you have a populist life story but that you speak a populist language and espouse populist values (as Trump does and, in an earlier era, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to).
Trump is rapidly losing support in the Republican Party because — after 2018 and 2020 and 2022 — he’s seen as a loser. The 2022 election should have conveyed a somewhat broader message — that it’s not just Donald Trump personally. Trumpism may also be a losing proposition. That will be tested if Ron DeSantis wins the Republican nomination in 2024.
Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable” (Simon & Schuster).