--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The former president of the United States seemingly kicked off his 2024 campaign with an unending stream of legal woes. His biggest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, kicked off his campaign last night with something called Twitter spaces.
--:-- Matt Dixon: I think we've got just a massive number of people online, so it's somewhat restraining. But Elon and Ron eventually got the boat back on the tracks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We will never surrender to the woke mob, and we will leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history. Coming up on Today Explained, he's Ronning.
--:-- Matt Dixon: His overarching pitch, like essentially the one-line elevator pitch, has been make America Florida, which sends joy up the spines of some people and fear for others.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup, of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture.
--:-- Matt Dixon: You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package, closer to the action, the best seats, the best suites, closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment, closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now. We work 24-7 to resolve customer inquiries. No hold music, no canned answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Explained. 2024 Explained. Matt Dixon is a reporter at NBC covering Florida politics. And when he told us Ron DeSantis wants to make America Florida, we were like. But also like, what exactly do you mean, sir?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we broke out the governor's conservative checklist. Abortion. We are here today to defend those who can't defend themselves.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Well, he signed two bills. One was a 15-week ban, which was last year, and that's still in the court. This year he signed a six-week abortion ban. That'll only become law if the courts sign off and say the 15-week ban was constitutional.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So moving very fast with abortion restrictions, for sure. This will represent the most significant protections for life that have been enacted in this state in a generation.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Education? He's essentially rewired the institution. He has put his considerable political muscle into normally kind of sleepy school board races.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He elected, gosh, I think it was more than 20 school board members during the 2022 primaries. And those are very, very sort of far right school board members who want to sort of rework the institution of public education.
--:-- Matt Dixon: They're going after sort of diversity programs, what can be taught in classrooms, what books are in libraries. So he has gotten more than I think any governor in the country and certainly any governor in Florida history, very, very involved in school board races and sort of micromanaging what happens at the classroom level.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's essentially taken the institution of education at both the K-12 level and higher education and remade it in his own image.
--:-- Matt Dixon: As many of you know, I think the last couple of years have really revealed to parents that they are being ignored increasingly across our country when it comes to their kids' education.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have seen curriculum embedded for very, very young children, classroom materials about sexuality and woke gender ideology.
--:-- Matt Dixon: We've seen libraries that have clearly... Don't Say Gay? The Don't Say Gay legislation, which got a ton of attention last year, and it's sort of a part of what supporters of that movement call parental empowerment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Essentially, the idea that parents should have a bigger say than sort of school districts, teachers, administrators.
--:-- Matt Dixon: And generally, those fall along the lines of, to some degree, the partisan spectrum. So the idea of parental empowerment usually involves them advocating for ideas that are supported by conservatives and not liberals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And DeSantis has been on the forefront of a lot of that stuff.
--:-- Matt Dixon: In Florida, we not only know that parents have a right to be involved, we insist that parents have a right to be involved.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He also seems to have some opinions on trans rights. Yeah, he actually just signed four or five bills all at once just last week, you know, banning gender affirming care for minors.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Teachers can no longer ask students about their preferred pronouns. There's a bathroom bill, which we've seen in a lot of other states where students in schools and other sort of taxpayer funded public facilities can only use the bathroom for the gender they were assigned at birth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What we've said in Florida is we are going to remain a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy. And kids should have an upbringing that reflects that.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Also vaguely related, perhaps, Disney? The fight between DeSantis and the mouse has really sort of defined Florida politics from a 10,000 foot perspective for the past year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Disney announcing that it is canceling plans to build a new campus in central Florida. This was estimated to cost nearly $1 billion.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Disney is also no longer asking about 2,000 employees in its Parks, Experiences, and Products division, which it had previously asked them to relocate to Florida to do so.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's gotten national attention, and I don't think we've seen an example of a governor, you know, picking a fight with one of its state's biggest employers before.
--:-- Matt Dixon: It's usually sort of, especially a Republican governor, it's part of another tenet that he talks about a lot. He started to refer to companies that disagree with him politically as so-called woke corporations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's taken a much harder line approach against, you know, the business community than you would traditionally see from Republican governors.
--:-- Matt Dixon: And without question, you know, Disney is the biggest bullet point in that presentation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I feel like I be remiss to not mention immigration Yeah no no He has every year passed sort of an immigration crackdown
--:-- Matt Dixon: We have leaned in on illegal immigration in the state of Florida This year, the biggest flashpoint with that was that companies with more than 25 employees have to use the E-Verify system, the federal database that checks a worker's employment eligibility.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This makes Florida the largest state in the country to do full E-Verify for employment.
--:-- Matt Dixon: And that's important because the people are going to come if they get benefits. And so what you want to do is say there's not benefits for coming illegally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The hospitality and agriculture and the business community really opposed that. And so that has sort of sparked, been a shock to the system a little bit and was one of the biggest elements of an immigration bill that we have seen here in quite some time.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Guns? Just this legislative session, which ended in May, so it's relatively recent, they passed and DeSantis signed legislation that no longer requires concealed carry permits.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But, you know, you no longer need a permit to carry a gun in Florida.
--:-- Matt Dixon: With all due respect to these leftists, they just want to come after your Second Amendment rights.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then lastly, somehow, election laws. He has passed, gosh, I think three years in a row, some version of an election bill.
--:-- Matt Dixon: That Democrats certainly argue limits the ability of people to vote, mostly, you know, democratically in the organizations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's been a lot of focus on college campuses. This year's version, it was a really sweeping bill.
--:-- Matt Dixon: But among many things, it increased penalties by quite a bit for third party voter registration groups.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you go out and you want to register people to vote and you make a mistake, you violate a state law, you know, even if it's unintentional, you know, there are rules in place.
--:-- Matt Dixon: The fines that you have to pay, the threshold went up huge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And me signing this bill here says, Florida, your vote counts. Your vote is going to be cast with integrity and transparency. And this is a great place for a democracy.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Real quick question. Governor, real quick question. So it sounds like a veritable breakfast buffet of conservative policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How is it playing out in Florida, which in recent memory was a purple state? I mean, this is a state that was a one or two point state for a long time.
--:-- Matt Dixon: DeSantis won in November by 20 points. So there's been two things kind of happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think Republicans here in Florida absolutely love these policies. And there's sort of been a cratering of the Democratic Party here.
--:-- Matt Dixon: It's Democrats nationally don't fund things the way they used to. There's Democrats for most of political history here in Florida had a huge voter registration advantage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was more registered Democrats than Republicans. For the first time in history, that is now reversed.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Republicans have a significant registration lead. So there's been sort of, you know, Florida has been an experiment in when one political party is well-funded and the other political party gives up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we saw how sort of quickly it can remake a state.
--:-- Matt Dixon: And Florida is a sort of really good laboratory to study that dynamic. Especially when it comes to like the Disney situation, it feels like some of these policies that Ron DeSantis is pushing could alienate people on the right because evidently he just chased away thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investment in Orlando.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How is the Republican establishment responding to Ron DeSantis? I mean, I think Disney is probably the best one to look at because I do think there are Republicans who are turned off by that one.
--:-- Matt Dixon: But by and large, I mean, the culture war political persona that has been around DeSantis isn't new. It's existed for a couple, you know, since, you know, 2020.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's gotten a lot of early endorsements. He's raising a ton of money. He's expected to have the most money of any Republican in the field.
--:-- Matt Dixon: So if those traditional campaign metrics are of any indication, the culture war stuff isn't really turning off the people who make presidential campaigns work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've seen a couple individual donors come out and say, well, we're a little leery of this stuff. But I think those are the exception and not the rule at this point based on how much money he raised during his reelection as governor, which was a huge amount of money, over $200 million, which is crazy for a state-level race.
--:-- Matt Dixon: And then the fact that he is anticipated to really sort of lead the pack as far as fundraising in this Republican primary. Those are classic metrics for sort of measuring support among the establishment class.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think DeSantis is going to be doing quite well there.
--:-- Matt Dixon: How is the former president responding to his governor becoming America's governor? As you can imagine, very even keeled.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's handling it great. No, he's attacking him near daily. He's using truth social and pretty much any time a camera's put in his face to come after Ron DeSanctimonious, as he calls him.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Team Trump dropping a new ad, hitting DeSantis for his tax plan, calling him a new nickname, Ron DeSales Tax.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ron DeSales Tax had a plan to make you pay more. With the sales tax here. And the sales tax there. Your tax. There are tax everywhere. Sales tax.
--:-- Matt Dixon: It should be reminded that the Trump endorsement really played a huge role in DeSantis winning his first race in 2018.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's something that Donald Trump likes to bring up time and time again. I got him the nomination. By the way, could have never gotten the nomination. He would be working in either a pizza parlor place or a law office right now.
--:-- Matt Dixon: OK, and he wouldn't be very happy. So it's about loyalty. It's about loyalty. It is to me. OK, let me just.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump is, I think, sees DeSantis as his only potential threat because he's actually, he's welcomed other Republican candidates into the race, which is not normal for a primary.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Usually you don't welcome direct competition, but I think he sees a bigger field and a field with lots of candidates as advantageous to him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there has been just a barrage of attacks each week, you know, since he got in the race as a result.
--:-- Matt Dixon: Matt Dixon, NBC News.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When we're back, Vox's Andrew Prokop is going to try and get inside the head of Ron DeSantis.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards These days it seems like everybody has a rewards program You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head. Not anymore, says Built Rewards.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community, and Built wants you to go out and do things in the community.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points. You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members every month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you're ready to travel, they say Built points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining built.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash explained.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique, fierce independence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Florida is where woke goes to die. Today Explained, Sean Ramos for him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A question we've been trying to answer on this show for some time now is what does Ron DeSantis believe? And the person we've most recently posed this question to is Vox's Andrew Prokop.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Andrew, like those before him, essentially said DeSantis believes an opportunity. Yes, I think that's probably the best description of him because he has been very malleable on the issues and on what he purports to care about at the time, what he spends his time focusing on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, all politicians do this to some extent. They follow where the winds are blowing. But DeSantis really, really does.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He throws himself into each new reinvention. And in a relatively short career in politics, just about a little over a decade, he has embraced many of these new personas, I think at least five.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It starts with when he's first running for office for an open house district in Florida in 2012.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Unless the economy starts growing more than 1.3 percent, you're not going to be able to reduce unemployment and you're not going to be able to deal with the budget deficit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was the time of the Tea Party. What was all the rage that year was big cuts to government spending.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's what all these Tea Party groups were demanding. So that's what he focused on, too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He tried to cultivate these national conservative groups and national conservative figures to get their endorsements to help distinguish him from the other more locally focused Republicans in the race.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it worked. He won the primary and he got into Congress as a leading Tea Partier.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if we go forward a few years, he tried to run for Senate. It didn't work out. He needed to reinvent himself, maybe.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Oh, yes, exactly. And because this was when the entire Republican Party was going through this reinvention because of Donald Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And DeSantis was looking for his next move. And eventually he decided pretty early, actually, to become the most lavish, over-the-top Trump defender in Congress.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, the strongest evidence of collusion, Trish, is between the Clintons and the Russians, not Trump and the Russians.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was pretty early in, let's say, debasing himself so thoroughly and really tried to cultivate Trump's endorsement for the next office he had his eye on, the Florida governorship.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Again, he is facing a more established Republican in the primary. But DeSantis' strategy was basically Trump, Trump, Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He ran this absolutely ridiculous ad where he's reading the art of the deal to his young child. Then Mr. Trump said, you're fired.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I love that part. He plays with blocks with his daughter and builds the wall with his blocks. Build the wall.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Pretty insulting stuff, but Republicans in Florida ate it up and he won the primary big.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then he gets to be governor and then he reinvents himself again? He gets to be governor, but only barely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He wins the general election over Democrat Andrew Gillum by a very small amount in the Democratic wave year of 2018.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It seems that after that, he cast about and he decided, wait a minute, maybe I wasn't focusing enough on the median voter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So his first year as governor of Florida, 2019, we see a very different DeSantis from what we're currently seeing now.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This has been an almost totally forgotten period in his history because of what came after.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If we overcome the tribalism that has dominated our politics, if we set aside, if we set the interests of hardworking taxpayers as our true north, then I have no doubt that the state of Florida will cruise to bright new horizons.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He governed as – saying from the center would be too strong, but he governed as a pragmatist, avoiding the big national culture war battles and really focusing on areas where he could find consensus with Democrats in the state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He focused on clean water. He pushed to raise teacher salaries. He appointed some Democrats to his administration.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He posthumously pardoned four black men who had been falsely accused of rape in 1949
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was this was a real kinder gentler DeSantis And his approval rating soared
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then things took a turn after that again There's been a lot that's been done to try to promote fear, to promote worst case scenarios, to drive hysteria.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think people should know that that worst case scenario thinking, that has not proven to be true.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So COVID hits. And after that, DeSantis seems to have, again, looked for which way the wind was blowing on the right, but also among typical voters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He placed a bet very early that people weren't going to like it if COVID restrictions kept up too long.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That it would be in his political interest to rebrand himself as an opponent of these COVID restrictions and a critic of the Democratic and public health establishment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everyone in the media was saying Florida was going to be like New York or Italy.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that has not happened. And cases surged in the summer. Critics called him Death Santus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he kept onward with it. And politically it worked out because he won re-election overwhelmingly in 2022.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That would not have been possible if we had followed Fauci. Instead, we followed freedom. And that's the reason why Florida is doing better.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By my count, Andrew, that's four reinventions. The fifth has to be the one we've covered several times on this show now.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, this is DeSantis, the culture warrior. You know, after he was a fighter on COVID, he decided to be a fighter for the Republican right on a series of other very hot button issues, trying to really cause controversy on them and push the state as far to the right as he could.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he was really just glomming on again to what the causes that the national Republican right were most crazy about in these years, what they were most focused on and what tended to get him attention nationally and importantly, attention on Fox News.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: because Fox News was constantly pursuing all of these issues, and they loved having DeSantis on in the 2021-2022 period, and they really helped build him up and helped make him one possible alternative to Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you're being attacked by NBC and CNN, I know you are doing a hell of a job. Is there any chance that Ron and Don could, you know, team up and get the best of both worlds here? Or is that sort of ship sailed with all the snide remarks about each other?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Isn't that politics, though? For all intents and purposes, that ship has already sailed because of the United States Constitution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No. Because it has a provision that makes it really problematic for a presidential and vice presidential candidate on the same ticket to be from the same state.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Aha. Specifically, the issue here is that when a state's electors are casting their votes for president and vice president, they're not allowed to vote for two people from their own state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Florida electors cannot vote for two Florida men for president and vice president. And Florida is really, really important to Republicans' electoral math these days.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So it's basically a nonstarter for Republicans to run to Florida men because they have to forfeit Florida's electoral votes for at least the vice presidency.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, one workaround might be that either of them could move and change their residence to another state.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's a little hard for the governor of Florida to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump, of course, has split his time from New York and Florida, but he's currently having some trouble with the law in New York and might want to minimize his time in that state for fear of being charged with further crimes.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You know, Prokop, there was a time last year where DeSantis felt like a real threat to Donald. But now between an extremely extreme abortion ban and a big fight with the mouse and just generally not being very likable or charming, it feels like maybe he's in a bit of a rut on the national stage, at least.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think this is just a slump and Ron transitional stage before he figures out his sixth iteration?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think the question is whether, you know, he could run his calculations through the old optimizer and figure out the new persona, the new thing that's missing, whether he'll be able to adopt a more forward-looking persona.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've always thought his strongest critique of Trump is to argue that Trump is a loser, that he lost in 2020, his candidates lost in 2022.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And if Republicans want to beat Biden, they should nominate DeSantis, a winner. And so he's like he's hinted at that argument.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we're going to need to see him actually take on Trump more directly and make that case more aggressively, I think, for that message to hit home.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Andrew Prokop, Vox.com is where you can read his work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were produced today by Amanda Luellen, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Michael Raphael.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The program is today explained and tomorrow we are back to not talking about this election that is 530 days away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
