In the ten months since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crushing defeat in the presidential primary, his biggest critics on the left were clinging to shreds of hope that his relevance and culture-war-focused leadership style was waning. Then came Tuesday’s red wave.
By Wednesday, the formerly Trump-scorned governor was feeling so good about his standing in Republican politics he was publicly pitching a cabinet pick: Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general — an anti-masker who advised high-risk populations against getting COVID-19 booster shots — for secretary of health and human services.
But while Tuesday was undeniably a good night for DeSantis, it remains unclear whether DeSantis will have a place in Donald Trump’s orbit.
An early sign of doubt came Thursday night, when Trump named longtime Florida political operative Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. Wiles has a tumultuous history with DeSantis. After helping Trump win Florida in 2016, she helped DeSantis win the governor’s office in 2018. But a power struggle led to a falling out so bitter that DeSantis successfully lobbied Trump to fire Wiles from his 2020 campaign, Politico reported at the time. And this year, as she spearheaded Trump’s campaign, she helped Trump bring down DeSantis’ primary bid.
DeSantis’ treatment of Wiles was “awful,” one longtime Florida Republican operative told NOTUS after Trump announced her for his White House. Wiles has “withstood the onslaught,” and now has a “small army of loyal friends, colleagues, and allies while no one who’s ever worked for Ron will work with him again.”
As Florida solidified its place as the “center of the Republican Party of this country” — as Sen. Rick Scott described it on election night — few prominent Republicans publicly credited DeSantis for the shift, some pointing to the GOP infrastructure in the works long before him.
The Florida operative told NOTUS: “Rick Scott thanks the people that do the work, and DeSantis takes credit for the work.”
Even DeSantis’ biggest supporters attribute the DeSantis’ rise to power to Trump, not the other way around. “Trump basically gave us the blueprint, Trump showed us how to win races, he showed us the map. In my opinion, Gov. DeSantis was the first governor to really put that blueprint in effect,” state Rep. Joel Rudman, who campaigned for DeSantis at the Iowa caucuses, told NOTUS.
“As great as our leadership has been here with Gov. DeSantis at the helm, I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m pushing that same envelope that President Trump is pushing,” he said, pointing to Trump’s success among young voters, but adding that there’s “plenty of credit to go around.”
Trump’s campaign, — while publicly eye-rolling DeSantis, — used the culture war issues DeSantis spearheaded in Florida to great effect throughout the election. Florida Republicans have steadily increased their political power, including from right-leaning migration moving into the state during the pandemic, giving the GOP such a red hue the state was called for Trump by 8 p.m.
“Project 2025 is Florida 2024,” was one of Democratic Rep. Congressman Maxwell Frost’s oft repeated lines on the campaign trail. “The things they want to do in this country, they’re doing to us right here, right now,” he told a crowd in Jacksonville, Florida, the week before Election Day. Turns out, that was what voters wanted.
Leading into Tuesday, Democrats were pointing to a few reasons why there might be a rejection of DeSantis in the cards: A number of candidates DeSantis endorsed lost their races in the August primaries; the state legislature had been more vocal pushing back against his agenda; and he had a very public rejection of his presidential dreams when he challenged Trump.
Florida state House Democratic leader, Rep. Fentrice Driskell, told NOTUS ahead of the election that Democrats winning back seats would show the state is “pushing back on the legislature that has been DeSantis’ rubber stamp”
But on Tuesday, Trump and Rick Scott both won Florida by about 13-point margins. Republicans kept their supermajorities in both chambers of the state government. And the two ballot amendments that DeSantis had made himself the face of the opposition to and had poured millions in state resources to interfere with failed to reach the 60% threshold to pass.
The result did lead at least one group to passionately pile praise on DeSantis. Anti-abortion leader Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America —- who has previously said she was “deeply disappointed” in Trump’s position on a national abortion ban — said, “When GOP leaders engage extreme abortion ballot measures fail,” in a statement Wednesday. “Republicans must be as devoted as DeSantis.”
The Trump campaign also spent more than $30 million on anti-trans ads in the past two months of the campaign, according to public reports, using a DeSantis playbook targeting a small population the governor began relentlessly demonizing and legislating about in 2022.
Critics on the left have pointed to the majority that was out of step with DeSantis however, on both the abortion and marijuana amendments, even if they didn’t pass. “57% of Floridians still want that abortion ban gone,” Florida progressive organizer Thomas Kennedy told NOTUS. “DeSantis’ position was unpopular.”
The election reflected “a deeply entrenched pattern of voter suppression and exclusion, a legacy driven by Republican-led efforts to silence the voices of Floridians,” Florida House Rep. Angie Nixon wrote. “For decades, our state has faced hurdles from restrictive voting laws, increased ballot thresholds to 60%, and the removal of every Floridian from vote-by-mail rolls — all designed to narrow the pathways to participation.”
But if the DeSantis playbook she points to does proliferate in Trump’s America, few are rushing to call it that. Even if the vision Trump is pitching looks a lot like DeSantis’ Florida, sources said, it was always Trumpism as the origin point.
“It may irk DeSantis to no end, but the reason for DeSantis is Donald Trump. If there’s no Trump, there is no DeSantis,” Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi told NOTUS. “Having said that, I do think DeSantis had a very good Election Day here in Florida.”
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.