Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has a mountain to climb if he wants to become president. He won’t just have to defeat former President Donald Trump to earn his party’s nomination in an ultraconservative GOP. After that, he’d need to pivot to the center with hopes of winning some independent or even liberal-leaning voters in a general election.
According to a recording of a Miami meeting of donors that was obtained by Florida Politics, DeSantis backers expressed concerns that the governor’s signing of a draconian six-week abortion ban in Florida could hurt his election chances.
“My Republican friends who have daughters and wives are upset,” one DeSantis supporter said. He added: “We need talking points.”
The reply from Team DeSantis revealed two things: They don’t think the abortion issue will hurt them majorly, and they think DeSantis’ age relative to President Joe Biden works in their favor.
The man who answered, identified by Florida Politics as pollster Ryan Tyson, was rather revealing when he claimed that DeSantis had given the “best position” a Republican could take in a Fox News interview last Thursday. As Florida Politics wrote in its coverage of that interview, DeSantis waffled on whether there should be a national ban on abortion.
The exchange highlights how serious a problem abortion could be for DeSantis as a candidate. Ever since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion last year, Republicans have faced fierce blowback from voters — including in states as conservative as Kansas. In Florida, DeSantis has a Republican-led legislature that essentially does whatever he wants it to do. That has made it easy for him to sign revanchist laws, such as the six-week abortion ban — laws likely to be unpopular in states that aren’t as rigged to help Republicans.
The leaked conversation doesn’t offer much consolation to any DeSantis supporters who might be worried on this front.
“I totally understand how…
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