From a purely observational standpoint, the red-state-blue-state debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom was an interesting 90 minutes of television.
Neither man had to be there, they’re not running against each other. At least not yet, but there they were looking like they could be presidential candidates. The topics were more focused on state issues to avoid national political debate that would’ve been less interesting and more hypothetical since neither man has any real foreign policy experience.
After catching most of the debate, the first question that came to mind was why DeSantis, amid a heated presidential primary, agreed to this high-risk low-reward format. While he is dead right on policy, and thousands have voted in California with their feet by leaving, Gavin Newsom is one of the slickest liars ever to grace a debate lectern.
On issue after issue, the stats don’t lie. California’s cost of living is high, crime is up, and people are leaving. On the other hand. Florida has seen an influx since Covid of new residents seeking a lower tax burden, more freedom, and basic concern for public safety.
Neither state is perfect, of course, Florida has its problems with things like high homeowners insurance costs, rising property values, and relatively higher murder rates in certain areas.
On the level, though, people who have the chance to move would pick Florida over California, and they have done so.
At the end of the night, however, it seemed like DeSantis, not Newsom, was standing on the losing end. There was something about the tone that almost assured DeSantis would not be the GOP nominee in 2024. He’s locked in as a state politician right now and took a lot on the chin from Newsom, as Business Insider reports:
No humans died on Thursday — unlike the “Crash at Crush” — but the night was still a trainwreck for DeSantis’ presidential campaign from the very beginning.
“There’s one thing, in closing, that we have in common,” Newsom noted in his opening statement, “is neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024.”
Realistically, DeSantis had the upper hand from the start: the debate was held in Georgia (much closer to his home state than California), hosted by conservative news outlet Fox News, and moderated by one of its most tenured right-wing presenters, Sean Hannity.
Debates, truthfully, can be tricky to pick a “winner” for.
All Newsom seemed to do at the debate was highlight DeSantis’ actions and policies during his time in congressional and state leadership, but it was more than enough to send the Florida governor into a series of grimaces and uncomfortably forced smiles.
So why on Earth would DeSantis agree to a debate like this in the first place?
The likeliest reason is that despite being in second place in the GOP presidential primary polling, DeSantis is nearly 50 percentage points behind former President Donald Trump.
Here’s a three-minute recap from YouTube before we continue:
The fact that Newsom led off humiliating DeSantis by pointing out that he won’t be the 2024 GOP nominee set the tone for the rest of the night. In that regard, it was like watching the junior varsity team debate since the real match will be Donald Trump versus whoever surfaces on the Democratic side.
The debate for DeSantis was a sort of Hail Mary pass at the end of the game. It was a chance to show GOP primary and caucus voters how he would perform on the presidential stage. From that standpoint, it was Newsom who had nothing to lose and everything to gain. DeSantis gambled heavily on this debate and will wind up losing merely because, unlike debating his GOP opponents, Newsom is free to attack him on a wider variety of topics.
For example, this is the first time DeSantis has stood on stage being forced to defend his record on Covid. Never mind that Florida performed just as well or better than California with a fraction of the dictatorial mandates, that didn’t matter.
On Thursday night, Newsom did Trump a favor by pushing back on the conventional wisdom that DeSantis was always the freedom-loving governor who never gave in to the Fauci mafia, reported by the Washington Post:
The subject was first broached by Newsom, which says something by itself. DeSantis’s appearance in the national spotlight centers on his response to the pandemic, that he reversed efforts to limit the spread of the virus before other states and then made an awful lot of noise about having done so. But, except for one debate during his reelection campaign last year, he has rarely had to defend his approach. Newsom intended to make him do so.
“You passed an emergency declaration before the state of California did,” Newsom said. He noted that DeSantis, joining other state leaders, had called for school and restaurant closures. “You were promoting vaccines,” Newsom said. “You even wore a mask.”
“You followed science,” he continued. “You followed Fauci” — referring to Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious-disease expert during the Donald Trump administration who called for such actions. DeSantis interrupted to disagree: “That’s not true.”
“He did all of that until he decided to fall prey to the fringe of his party,” Newsom charged. “And as a consequence of that, Ron, tens of thousands of people lost their lives.”
DeSantis objected, claiming that a “Lancet study” showed that “Florida had a lower standardized covid death rate than California did.” (Lancet publishes but does not conduct scientific research.)
DeSantis never quite fully rebutted all of that even though California was more draconian in endless lockdowns, kept kids out of school longer, and was much more forceful with vaccine mandates than anyone else, save New York.
In short, California was in a perpetual state of Covid emergency for three years following the March 2020 declaration. DeSantis’ best line of this topic was pointing out that Newsom’s own father-in-law fled to Florida as a way to escape the California lockdowns.
DeSantis became a household name during Covid because he did effectively fight back against Fauci, and even Trump, at times, in pushing to re-open his state.
However, something that Karl Rove said a long time ago during the Bush-Kerry campaign of 2004 has stuck with me for years. Take your opponent’s perceived greatest strength and turn it around into their greatest weakness. That is what Newsom somehow managed to do last night and there wasn’t much DeSantis could do to stop it.
Newsom: You followed science. You followed facts.
DeSantis: That's not true.
Newsom: You even wore a mask in September. pic.twitter.com/M44moG5X6o
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) December 1, 2023
DeSantis is right on all the facts, and Newsom lies through his fake smile, but the damage is done. Newsom was able to paint DeSantis as not all that different in terms of closing down his state, issuing a mask order, and recommending Covid vaccinations when they became available.
The truth is much more nuanced and Florida was open much earlier than California, but people have short memories even though Covid wasn’t that long ago.
Nothing much will change from Thursday night in terms of the GOP primary polls. If anything, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, DeSantis’ closest rivals, had to be fairly pleased with the outcome.
