Ron DeSantis isn’t dead yet. I need to stress that as I begin this piece, because we’ve seen more improbable turnarounds before in Presidential politics. But he’s going to have totally reinvent himself and anger his donors to make any “reboot” really work.

Governor DeSantis is controlled by the GOP donor class both here in Florida and nationally. He has very few political allies that aren’t somehow connected to him or his campaign financially and is nakedly transactional – unlike other pols who may maintain relationships with money men but take IOU’s or simply leave doors open, DeSantis wants campaign cash or money for a SuperPAC as quid pro quo for policy decision making. I suggest our readers check out either Jason Garcia or Judd Legum on Substack for all the details. They’ve kept the receipts.

Based on Garcia and Legum’s reporting as well as sorts of other hard and anecdotal evidence, DeSantis is 100% pay-to-play in a manner that nobody previously seen at the state level here in Florida since the 1960’s when several of our elected officials were hauled off to jail. What we used to see as “corruption” or “pay-to-play” in the Jeb Bush and Rick Scott years look quaint in comparison to the way DeSantis has governed this state.

Team DeSantis is obsessed with woke & gay issues because of who his donors are & elites he pals around with politically. For all of Donald Trump’s race-baiting, he’s not as beholden to the outcasts in Silicon Valley, the slimy Hedge Fund managers and the crooked Investment Bankers the way DeSantis is – so he doesn’t have to express their outright homophobia and racist business philosophy regarding DEI and ESG in the direct, crude and constant way DeSantis does.

I can’t stress how bad his record economically is in the state, even when compared to the previous Republicans in the same office. And also when compared to Republicans in other states in our region so it’s not really a partisan thing – This Governor is really abnormally dangerous, conflicted and incapable of leading without involving politics as we have found.

And he is clearly someone with absolutely no feelings or compassion for the working class, something he has demonstrated time and again. This is why he isn’t going to beat Trump straight up for the GOP nomination. Trump has feigned interest in economics and helping the working class over the last eight years – heck I’d argue some of his economic policies did help certain segments of the working class, though I believe from a macro perspective they were pretty damaging for the overall economy.

Many Democrats absolutely hate me pointing out Trump’s working class bonafides in terms of the electorate preferring to claim all of Trump’s voters are motivated by race or identity, but maybe those folks don’t circulate with normal (non-political) GOP voters the way I do. Yes, race is a factor with some but with most it’s about economic hope and the view (wrongly imo) that elites have hollowed out manufacturing and industrial jobs – and this partly explains why Trump got the highest percentage of the African-American vote any GOPer has gotten running for President in 60 years.

Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker hollowed out this country’s industrial base to beat inflation in the early 1980’s and the big beneficiary outside of foreign companies and tech bros was the political candidacy of Donald Trump, who seized on that three decades later to became President.

None of this applies to DeSantis, because in his donor-driven Federalist Society bubble, real people don’t matter- they’re commodities to be played around with, hurt or exploited. And honestly, Trump avoiding the LGBTQ+ issue completely (heck DeSantis allies are accusing him of being pro-LGBTQ+)and steering clearer of race issues this go-round indicates to me that grievance toward the “other” Trump so successfully exploited in 2016 has died on the alt-right except when it comes to immigrants – which still is race-based of course.

DeSantis faces a long haul and heavy lift if he’s going to turn this thing around – and he may have piss off some donors in the process. So the odds really are quite long and the deck is increasingly stacked against him.