Ron DeSantis is the Republican party’s great “what if…?” If Donald Trump had opted not to run for a third time in 2024, DeSantis might very well have been that year’s Republican nominee.
And if this were the second year of president DeSantis’s first term, how would Republicans have fared in this month’s midterm elections?
As it was, Governor DeSantis’s Florida was an almost solitary bright spot in the GOP’s otherwise dismal fortunes this cycle. As DeSantis concluded his final term in the role, Florida achieved what Texas could not: it kept the governorship and a US Senate seat in Republican hands. Imagine if president DeSantis had delivered results like that for Republicans nationwide.
Yet a little less than four years ago I wrote in these pages that DeSantis would be unwise to seek the 2024 GOP nomination. He sought it anyway, and lost. What’s worse, so far as his political fortunes are concerned, he alienated Trump by running against him. It’s hard to imagine the President
giving his blessing to DeSantis in 2028, which puts DeSantis in roughly the same position going into the next battle for the Republican nomination as he was in the last time around. He’s a candidate with right-wing appeal, but challenging Trump or his handpicked successor from the right is a nigh hopeless proposition.
He’s not yet 50 – he’s younger than Rubio and has a long political career ahead of him. He can afford to wait
There are right-wing ideologues of all sorts who find plenty to complain about in Trump’s record. The younger, more anti-interventionist right feels betrayed by the President’s decision to wage war against Iran. Free-market conservatives object to Trump’s tariffs, as well as other policies such as having the government acquire partial ownership of private companies. The pro-life movement is dissatisfied with the administration’s rhetorical support for in-vitro fertilization treatments and its failure to curb the availability of abortion drugs delivered through the mail. Even immigration hawks find some of the President’s recent remarks alarming, suggesting as they do that he might want to seek a compromise with the new Democratic Congress. Ronald Reagan also sought such a compromise 40 years ago: the result was a disastrous immigration amnesty. If DeSantis wants to challenge the Trump administration’s ideological bona fides, he appears to have an opening. But the appearance is deceiving. Unless Republicans turn against Trump personally as a result of the midterm blowout, appeals to principle will not work.
They didn’t work in 2016, when Trump’s rivals frequently pointed to their own unimpeachable orthodoxy and well-established policy records as proof of their superior suitability for the GOP nomination. And such arguments had even less traction in
2024, as DeSantis’s own forlorn campaign demonstrated.
Although officeholders may be inclined to blame Republican voters for not being sufficiently ideologically consistent, the fact is that Trump won the trust and affection of conservatives who believed he would fight harder than anyone else overall, even if he might deviate from the correct philosophical course on particular issues.
There may be a point beyond which President Trump forfeits that faith – if he were to accommodate himself too much to the agenda of Democrats in Congress, for example – but until then there is little room to Trump’s right. The GOP’s right-wing base still feels connected to him. His endorsement for the 2028 nomination will almost certainly decide the race.
Vice President J.D. Vance is the man most likely to get Trump’s nod, and if he doesn’t receive it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the most likely alternative. Neither man would take kindly to a primary challenge from DeSantis, which would force them to spend money they would rather save for the general election.
And with DeSantis and Trump’s heir apparent both competing for votes on the right, there would be a risk that a centrist or old-guard Republican – a Nikki Haley type – might benefit from a split among conservatives. DeSantis would not be well-positioned to get the nomination, but he could cause the primaries to become much messier: more protracted, expensive and divisive.
Yet he is arguably the country’s most successful Republican governor, and in the wake of the midterm wipeout, the GOP urgently needs leaders like him. The logic of making a run for the White House seems irresistible – just as it was irresistible two years ago, when DeSantis gained nothing from challenging Trump and generally fared worse than Haley, too. He squandered the political capital he’d won with his smashing 2022 gubernatorial reelection victory.
Now he’s won back that capital with Florida’s performance in the 2026 midterms. Should he gamble it again on 2028? He’s not yet 50 – he’s younger than Rubio and has a long political career ahead of him, if that’s what he wants. He wants to be President, of course. And if he’s patient, there’s a very good chance that one day he will be. He can afford to look beyond 2028.
And what he can do in the meantime is what Richard Nixon did in his “wilderness” years: helping to rebuild the party after an electoral disaster (in Nixon’s context, after the drubbing Republicans received in 1964) and, in the process, winning the loyalty of candidates, officeholders and indeed voters across the country, laying the groundwork for a successful White House campaign – once the moment is right.
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