There haven’t been many good days for Ron DeSantis’s flailing presidential campaign lately, and news that the Florida governor has slumped to fifth place in a poll for the New Hampshire primary will hardly have lifted his spirits.
Yet the biggest blow of the past week came from Florida’s once fiercely loyal Republican party, which appears to be souring on the idea of their man in the White House.
The state party’s scrapping last weekend of a loyalty oath for candidates in its presidential primary next year was, on its face, an innocent move, declared by its sponsors to merely ensure voters could choose from all Republicans competing for the White House. Removing Donald Trump from Florida’s ballot because he would not pledge support for the eventual nominee would be undemocratic, they said.
But there appears to be more behind the defiance than just giving the former president a leg up in a race he already leads by a substantial margin. The action, which the Republican Florida governor lobbied hard against, sends a clear signal to DeSantis that he no longer enjoys the unquestioned allegiance of the party in his own state, a potentially fatal position for a candidate seeking to convince the rest of the country he is best qualified for the presidency.
“People are paying attention, and they notice when a candidate’s home state is balking,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
“One thing that DeSantis was correctly noted for was his iron grip on the Florida Republican party. They didn’t question his directives, the legislature passed bills they didn’t even have extensive hearings on because DeSantis submitted them, and he kept his people in line.
“He had an iron grip, but the iron has rusted. This suggests, yet again, that DeSantis has lost not only prestige, but influence, which is what really matters in the pre-nomination battle.”
Rumblings have circulated for months that some Florida Republicans have become “fatigued” with their second-term governor and his extremist agenda. Several voted in the most recent legislative session against a six-week abortion ban that passed anyway, while others have criticized his feud with Disney over transgender rights.
The reversal of the loyalty oath requirement approved in May for the 19 March primary heralds a significant crystallization of that opposition.
Before the vote, behind closed doors at the Florida Republican party’s statesman’s dinner at an Orlando hotel, one senior operative told NBC News it “would be viewed as a ‘fuck you’ to DeSantis” if it passed.
After it did, another Republican source told the outlet: “DeSantis just got steamrollered in his own home.”
It came at a critical stage for his presidential run, with DeSantis’s poll numbers continuing to collapse (he trails Trump for the Republican nomination by 50 points in a Quinnipiac survey, and has slipped to third place behind Trump and Nikki Haley in New York); and while his latest campaign reset, following the dismissal of more than a third of his staff and appointment of a new manager, struggles to gain a footing.
“This is going to be a case study going forward for many years, just because you won an election in your state by a landslide, that does not mean that you are unstoppable at the national level,” Sabato said.
“In fact, it may mean relatively little, even when it’s a mega-state like Florida. Was Ron DeSantis the candidate who won in a landslide in 2022, or is he the presidential candidate who’s slipping below the radar today? Well, he’s both of those things. And they aren’t contradictory.
“Can he reverse it? Anybody can reverse anything given the right time and circumstances, but it sure doesn’t look that way. In all the polls I’ve seen he just keeps dropping, and pretty soon one of those other candidates, maybe it’s Nikki Haley, maybe somebody else, will end up going above him in the polls. Maybe it’s only a few points, but that’s all that’s needed to change the narrative.”
Notably, the measure to reverse the loyalty oath was brought by the Republican state senator Joe Gruters, the former chair of the state party who has clashed with DeSantis over the Disney wrangle. In June, Gruters accused DeSantis of vetoing spending in his district as retribution for not supporting him.
“The governor is clearly upset I endorsed Donald Trump for president, so he took it out on the people of Sarasota county,” he said in a statement at the time. “Simply because I support his political opponent, the governor chose to punish ordinary Floridians.”
Gruters did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, but told reporters after the Orlando vote that it was about fairness.
“It’s not about the pledge. It’s about creating unnecessary roadblocks late in the game that makes it perceived that it’s anti-Trump,” he said, according to Politico.
DeSantis, who skipped the Orlando humiliation for fundraising events in New York, will have the chance to try to win back the support of state Republicans at the party’s Florida Freedom Summit in Kissimmee on 4 November.
“The Florida GOP will remain neutral, but we will work to support the entire Republican team by helping give all the presidential candidates as many opportunities as possible to connect with Florida voters,” spokesperson Nathalie Medina told reporters.
Before that, however, DeSantis must plot his strategy for the next Republican primary debate on 27 September in California, seen by many as another possible make-or-break moment for his campaign.
“He’s had a lot of turnover in his management team, his campaign team, so we’ll see. A lot of us are watching whether that’s going to make a difference, particularly looking ahead to the next debate,” said Susan MacManus, distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida.
“Will he continue to focus on policy, which is what a lot of people would prefer, or is he going to have to get into the bashing of Trump and his colleagues on the stage? I don’t think the payoff for him is good in bashing, it’s in identifying problems facing the country and talking about how he will deal with them.”
