Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has staked his 2024 presidential run on going even further than Donald Trump on a host of hot-button culture war issues including abortion, race, and equality—but nothing he does seems to convince far-right groups to defect from the former president’s camp.
Jared Holt, a senior research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and an expert on fringe political movements, joins The New Abnormal this week to share his own theories for why the Florida governor just can’t seem to move the needle. He was watching closely this weekend as MAGA group Moms for Liberty descended on Philadelphia for a conference headlined by both Trump and DeSantis—a pair whose reception could not have been more different.
“Where Ron DeSantis is using all these big words and talking about the ‘woke Marxist agenda,’ Trump instead just leans into the mic and it’s like, ‘These people are perverts,’ Holt said. “In that way it was kind of illuminating.”
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Host Andy Levy also compared the DeSantis approach to “the debate team member who preps too hard” and loses the personal touch he needs to win over his audience.
Then, political researcher and fellow podcast host Anat Shenker-Osorio joins the program to discuss Democrats’ messaging dilemma as concurrent crises pile up.
“In order to break a signal through the noise, we need to learn the lessons of the Trump years—which is that when we keep bringing up new things and essentially being like cats with a laser pointer... it’s actually not landing with people,” Shenker-Osario said. “What we have to do is say fewer things and say them more often and piece them together into one coherent story.”
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
