A.G. Gancarski
Gov. Ron DeSantis may have an edgelord messaging operation online, but Republican voters see him as a normie.
That’s one conclusion to be drawn from the latest Monmouth Poll at least.
In the survey, 57% of Republican Primary voters see the Florida Governor as part of the “political establishment,” while 33% do not.
That’s the highest number of any candidate surveyed, though it’s just marginally more than former United Nations envoy Nikki Haley’s 56%. However, only 22% of the 510 people polled are confident she is not part of the establishment.
Why does this matter?
“Nearly half of the GOP electorate says it is either extremely (26%) or very (21%) important for the next president to be someone from outside the political establishment,” the pollsters argue.
“Just 22% say this is not important to them. This is a particularly high priority among strong MAGA supporters (47% extremely and 24% very important). Most Republican voters — whether a MAGA supporter or not — see Donald Trump as more of a political outsider (69%) than insider (26%). This paints the former president in a similar image as business entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has never held office (63% outsider).”
Trump has blasted the Governor as a “RINO globalist” and other such aspersions for close to a year now, and it’s clear those attacks are sticking.
Ironically for DeSantis, the polling comes after months of his attempts to position himself as a counterweight to the GOP establishment. As National Review Online noted this winter, DeSantis’ “The Courage to Be Free” presented him, and the wisdom he attained as Governor, as a counterweight to sclerotic thinking in Washington.
During a Newsmax interview in March, DeSantis distilled that message in response to a question about whether he really was just a RINO.
“I mean, all people have to do is just open their eyes. There hasn’t been a bolder Governor in the country,” DeSantis contended.
To make his case, he revisited familiar talking points and well-trafficked feuds and story arcs.
“I mean, who was taking on the establishment during COVID? Me. Everything we did in Florida from April of 2020 to the present I did against people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the corporate media, a lot of the other entrenched bureaucracies and we made sure that the state was able to thrive,” DeSantis said.
“We also last year had a bill to make sure we were protecting the rights of parents to be able to send their kids to school without having things like gender ideology shoved down their throats,” DeSantis added. “You should not be telling a kid in school that they may have been born in the wrong body.”
Even before that, DeSantis presented himself as anti-establishment. During a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference just weeks after Joe Biden’s inauguration, DeSantis derided the “failed Republican establishment of yesteryear.”
12 comments
My Take
September 26, 2023 at 12:05 pm
He’s just a bigoted redneck . . . but with a podium.
Earl Pitts American
September 26, 2023 at 12:07 pm
Relax your Sphincters America,
I, Earl Pitts American, am clocking out now for lunch. But when I return to work I will drop some “Golden Nuggetts of pure “D” Earl Wisdom” on your dessert plates in regards to the above article.
Thank you America, EPA
*Save Room For Dessert*
WhatNow
September 26, 2023 at 4:19 pm
– No thanks, we’re good…
Tom
September 26, 2023 at 12:34 pm
Rhino Rhonda. Has a nice ring to it. I like the edgelord reference as well. Nice touch.
Earl Pitts American
September 26, 2023 at 1:26 pm
Good afternoon America,
My, Earl Pitts American’s, confidential sources within Monmouth have advised me that the polling company secured triple the usual payment from The DNC to put out this egregious hit piece of polling skulldrugery against Desantis this late in the campaigne process.
The payment basically puts Monmouth at their 2023 revenue expectations and they are banking on the notion that Desantis will be too busy with his POTUS duties of fixing everything Biden messed up to even call Monmouth out on the chicanary. There will be a few other polling business’s that will follow suit and get that Big DNC money but overall they are starting the rise in public approval true polling for Desantis to maintain some modicum of credibility for their polling business’s.
EPA
My Take
September 26, 2023 at 1:45 pm
Tramp, DeSSgustus, and Ramenswampy — the þop the GOP has to offer.
As Hiaasen once said of a group of Florida politicians, “You could throw a mullet net over any bus bench on Biscayne Boulevard and recruit better.”
(Exact or close wording. We need quotation marks that mean close, by memory, ~)
My Take
September 26, 2023 at 2:51 pm
Maybe just ~”. . . . “
My Take
September 26, 2023 at 3:20 pm
I wonder what DeSScumtis’s stooges are up to now with FAU?
My Take
September 26, 2023 at 3:26 pm
You just know that wretched Feingold woman is ratting every word in the ‘secret” selection committee discussions to DeSSgustus.
My Take
September 26, 2023 at 11:27 pm
I read that the FAU board of trustees are playing preemptive “chess” with DeSSantis to prevent Feingold from becoming chairman.
WhatNow
September 26, 2023 at 4:22 pm
“57% of Republican Primary voters see the Florida Governor as part of the ‘political establishment’ “ – I’m sorry, but BOY are they dumb. Not that I really care.
George Navarini
September 27, 2023 at 2:38 pm
By the latter stages of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, most of the early leaders of the revolution, most notably Maximilien Robespierre, were accused of betraying the increasingly nebulous ideals of the Revolution of not being “enough.”
The thing was that “enough” was never clearly defined, but it mattered not. In the end, Robespierre, and most of these now-discredited leaders followed their hated king to the guillotine, fulfilling the warning noted by Mallet du Pan that “revolutions devour their children.”
Driven by an unobtainable “purity test” this once noble Revolution killed off its leaders. In so doing, it killed itself, allowing a despot to hijack the movement and the nation itself, plunging France into a series of wars requiring the rest of Europe to contain, but in the end, cost millions of French lives and the bulk of the nation’s treasury,
We know, however, when we read that pundits are now claiming that Ronald Reagan was a RINO, even as we celebrate his leadership by having tonight’s debate at the Reagan Library, that all this is going a bit too far in an attempt to discredit opponents using a purity test so stringent, that when applied universally, we find that no Republican can pass muster.
If we take off our hyper-partisan blinders, we will see that all this infighting only serves to bolster our Democrat opponents by taking the nation’s attention off the doddering old fool they foisted on our Republic and the blithering idiot of his running mate, selected solely for her “ability” to keep him in office, based on her patently clear inability to speak, let alone assume the office.
Short answer: focus on the real enemy here, and he does NOT have an R behind their name.
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