Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has had a rough week on the Republican presidential campaign trail.
His national poll numbers are stagnant, which isn’t the worst thing at this phase of the primaries—but zoom in on key details and things aren’t looking so good. A new Fox News poll has him slipping to third in the early primary state of South Carolina, and three national polls show DeSantis support plummeting among college-educated Republicans, the very voters who were expected to gravitate toward the supposed “Trumpism with brains” schtick.
Inside campaign HQ, it seems no better. The DeSantis team is undergoing a “reset,” a very generous label for getting rid of a third of your staff.
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And among those who got the ax is one Nate Hochman, a 25-year-old staffer previously known for his work at National Review, the Claremont Institute, and The New York Times op-ed page who’s now identified as the producer of a DeSantis campaign video which ended with a shot of soldiers marching toward a spinning Nazi symbol, a Sonnenrad.
Glaring white supremacist iconography doesn’t show up in presidential campaign materials by accident. So how did this happen?
The surface explanation is obvious: Hochman (and other campaign staff, if any, who knew what he was doing) thought this content would successfully attract desired voters, and the voters in question are too-online members of the far right who are, at the very least, anti-anti-Nazi. Or maybe it’s more than campaign strategy—maybe Hochman and his collaborators are simply white supremacists themselves.
But even that doesn’t answer why Hochman made the video he did. It wasn’t distributed in private channels, and it’s not the dog whistle you’d expect from a campaign trying to court the far right while maintaining plausible deniability. It’s blatant, and I suspect it’s significantly about Republican desperation for the youth vote.
That the GOP is in a panic about young people is not new. The party has been hyperventilating over “demographics is destiny”—the idea, less compelling than it used to be, that long-term demographic trends would produce permanent Democratic majorities by the middle of this century—for as long as I can remember.
This includes the fear that each new generation will fail to age rightward as their predecessors have done. The boomers grew out of weed and war protests, Gen X is comfortably settled in the suburbs, but will millennials and zoomers do the same?
There’s good reason to think they will, as New York Times analyst Nate Cohn documented last month, although perhaps not as decisively as generations past. But that’s not a sure thing. On buzzy issues like gun control and gay marriage, younger voters are more progressive now than they were a decade ago.
In the long run, that means even the same rightward movement would start from further left. And in the near term, it means the Republican share of the youth vote could get even smaller. The GOP’s panic is not irrational.
The problem, both morally and tactically, is their apparent strategy—or, at least, the strategy the DeSantis campaign has taken, as evidenced by its hiring of Hochman, who for several years has been a recurring character in almost every major examination of the illiberal online right.
In features at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, The Nation, Dissent, Rolling Stone, The New Statesman, and elsewhere, there he is, perpetually dubbed a “rising star in the intellectual right.” Through his own efforts and this frequent attention from the center and left, Hochman has become one of the radical new right’s best-known apostles to the normies, willing to both talk to and publish in mainstream outlets while messing around in—in his own phrasing, to the Times—”the goo of the fever swamp of young right-wing internet circles.”
The result: If you’re a forty or sixtysomething Republican campaign operative trying furiously to figure out what the kids think is lit in 2023, Hochman would be the obvious choice: He’s in touch with the youth, right? He’s very online, but so are all the kids these days. It’s a feature, not a bug. Even the left admits he’s a rising star!
But the kids Hochman knows—those fever swamp denizens—are not your average kids. The average American youth voter is not, in fact, into Sonnenrads, not even with a Kate Bush soundtrack. The average American youth voter thinks that video is some weird, racist internet crap.
Indeed it is, and unless the Republican Party rapidly realizes the yawning gap between persuadable young voters and the Hochman-style new right, the DeSantis campaign won’t be the only GOP organ to be humiliated by this kind of content and connection.
There are “a lot of young Republican staffers working in the ‘New Right’ ecosystem that will be headaches for Republicans in the next few years just like Hochman is now for DeSantis,” tweeted attorney Blake Allen on Tuesday, as the Hochman story broke. “Brains poisoned by the toxic alt-right online scene. He’s a harbinger of what’s to come.”
Less than 24 hours later, Allen had two new allegations of young GOP operatives’ online racism to add to his thread. The fever swamp will keep on leaking.
