Ron DeSantis has seemingly won the culture war in his home state but it is instructive to note that Florida’s legislature is controlled by Republicans. There is more and more news, some breaking as recently as yesterday that Donald Trump may not be the Republican candidate for president. Consider the lead story in HUFFPOST:
Less significant, but worth noting is this news:
Take a look just at the titles of the top three articles in RAWSTORY at this writing:
All of this recent news about Trump’s troubles add up to the conclusion that his star, as in TV star, may be fading, or put another way, that his star as in astronomy, may be going supernova. If Trump was the later kind of star to extend the analogy perhaps we can see that he’s shrunk to being a white dwarf with the next stage being his exploding into irrelevance. If this does happen and he’s been relegated to being cosmic dust he’d hardly be a shoo-in for the GOP nomination. In this case there will be a mad scramble to assume his front-runner status.
While there are a few credible other wannabe GOP presidential candidates by the accounts of most knowledgable pundits DeSantis is poised to be the front runner.
This is some of what Sophia A. Nelson, a contributing editor for theGrio, had to say about him in her Feb. 2022 article What in the hell is wrong with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis?
OPINION: Florida’s governor, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, has been on a proverbial warpath against everything—from banning mask and vaccine mandates and the teaching of critical race theory to suppressing voting rights.
I know I am asking a rather loaded question. But it is one for which I have been desperately searching for answers. Florida is off the chain: neo-Nazi rallies, anti-CRT sentiments, debates on banning books, bans on vaccines and mask mandates and attacks on voting rights and fair elections. But worse than the state itself is its young Yale and Harvard Law-educated governor, Ron DeSantis.
Florida’s governor has been on the proverbial warpath against, well, everything.
By “everything” I think it is fair to say the author means that DeSantis is bent on fighting the culture war on every possible front.
Like others have noted she opines that DeSantis is a more palatable, a less offensive version, of Donald Trump. She writes:
Let’s just call it what it is: Gov. DeSantis is Trump lite. He is maybe even worse. Why? Because, unlike Trump, he doesn’t really engage in the hyperbolic insults, offensive racial talk and animus that Trump does. He is smarter. Smoother. Slicker. He makes jokes. He positions himself as a champion of freedom and individual liberties, while all the while he’s suppressing them.
Consider that polls that show that most Americans are pro-choice, a recent poll indicates that a new high of 71% of the country supports same sex marriage, a poll from January showed that a slight percentage favored voting reform, another January poll found over half of Americans believe white people in the U.S. have advantages based on skin color, 75% believe public schools should teach about racial inequality.
All of this assumes that not only will DeSantis run as the GOP candidate but that he will win in his upcoming race for governor against Democrat Charlie Crist. Recent news suggests that this is not a this is not a sure thing.
If DeSantis loses in Florida it will be a major blow to his chances in a Republican primary but not necessarily be the death knell for him.
The question I have is whether Florida is representative of enough of the other states to enable a candidate running on the culture war, whether DeSantis or someone else, can put together enough electoral votes to win the general election even with all the Republican efforts at voter suppression in states where they can pull this off.
Addendum
We all have a sense of what the culture war being fought in the United States is but here’s more on an explanation of what the term itself means from Wikipedia:
A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.[1] It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values. The term is commonly used to describe "hot button" issues of contemporary politics in the United States.[2] These include wedge issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, racism and other cultural conflicts based on values, morality, and lifestyle which are described as the major political cleavage.
This is their section on the culture war in the United States from 2014 to the present.