My new TIME cover story is an in-depth profile of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who’s expected to become Trump’s chief competition for the GOP presidential nomination when he gets in the race in the coming weeks. To understand his rise and popularity on the right, I argue, you have to look at how he’s transformed the Sunshine State.
If critics see DeSantis as a would-be authoritarian, allies see a conservative who gets things done. Many predicted that his hard-charging first term in office would provoke a backlash. Instead the opposite occurred. While Republicans across the country struggled last November, DeSantis romped to a 19-point re-election victory, the biggest win for a Florida governor in decades. What was once America’s paradigmatic swing state now pulsates bright red. For the first time in modern history, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats. The people of Florida seem to like the steady hand—even if it’s an iron fist.
To fans, DeSantis’ success proves that a pugilistic, big-government conservatism that promises ruthless competence instead of Trumpian chaos can win broad support, including a growing share of working-class and minority voters. “We’ve shown that you don’t have to do it the liberal way, and we’re the envy of the nation when you look at our results,” says state representative Randy Fine, a Republican who has sponsored some of DeSantis’ most controversial legislation and may soon be rewarded with an appointment as a university president despite no background in academia. “DeSantis says what he’s going to do and he does it. People like that, even if they don’t agree with him.”
There’s lots of fun stuff in the piece, including this juicy, previously unreported story from DeSantis’s first run for office:
In 2010, DeSantis left active duty and settled near Jacksonville, where he worked as a lawyer and married a local TV anchor, Casey Black, whom he met at a driving range. As the Tea Party fervor crested, he self-published a book of conservative ideas, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, and traveled to local activist meetings to give talks and sell it. DeSantis was looking for a way into elected office but unsure where to start until he met two Florida consultants, Tim Baker and Brian Hughes, who had made a specialty of electing conservative insurgent veterans. DeSantis thought he might run for state legislature or some other low-level office. The consultants persuaded him he had a shot at a Jacksonville-area congressional district that had just been redrawn to favor the GOP.
The 2012 primary was crowded, and DeSantis had little money or name recognition. The consultants devised a guerrilla strategy designed to tap into the new conservative zeitgeist. Casey, a local celebrity, began using her married name on television. The couple went door to door, using his advisers’ data to target households with the strongest record of voting in Republican primaries. Meanwhile, his consultants, who had agreed to backload their fees, gambled by spending nearly all of the campaign’s meager budget on an ad on Fox News.
DeSantis began to close the gap on his more experienced rivals. He impressed national right-wing groups and won the endorsement of the influential Club for Growth, which brought a flood of cash from donors. He won the seven-way GOP primary by a wide margin, drawing nearly 40% of the vote.
Buoyed by this success, the consultants drew up a plan to raise DeSantis’ profile as he headed to Washington. But the candidate dismissed them: he didn’t want to spend more money with his election to Congress all but assured. It was only when Baker and Hughes expressed concern that the dispute might become public that DeSantis relented, according to two people familiar with the episode. Their role in his early career is not mentioned in DeSantis’ new memoir, The Courage to Be Free, which describes the door-knocking strategy as if it were DeSantis’ own idea. “He has a habit of rewriting history,” one of the people familiar with the episode told me. “There’s Richard Petty, there’s Tom Petty, and then there’s Ron DeSantis petty.”
Another telling anecdote that didn’t make it into the piece: When DeSantis’s 2022 opponent, Charlie Crist, called to congratulate him on Election Night, DeSantis refused to take his call. Read the whole thing in TIME.