I continue to be very bullish on this guy and think the below article speaks to a lot of the reasons why.
Basically, there isn’t going to be any fragmentation among non-Trump candidates this time. They’re all in for Desantis and the big money donors and just as importantly conservative media are on board.
In the year after the Presidential election, Fox News producers asked DeSantis to appear at least a hundred and ten times, and he agreed at least thirty-four times. They posted some three hundred and forty stories about him online. The coverage drew attention from across the country. This March, DeSantis’s campaign and his political-action committee, Friends of Ron DeSantis, reported raising a hundred and ten million dollars. Nearly forty per cent of it came from out-of-state contributors, including the billionaires Peter Thiel and Ken Griffin.
He’s going to win over the frothers with this stuff, too:
As DeSantis prepared to run for reëlection, he introduced a series of legislative measures that seemed calculated to spark similar fights, and to inspire fevered discussion outside of Florida. Many rested on flimsy legal grounds. One bill banned “sanctuary cities,” in which local governments refuse to coöperate with federal officials to deport undocumented immigrants; Florida has no such cities. Another bill created a police force dedicated to preventing election fraud; almost no fraud has been proved in recent Florida elections. DeSantis also dispatched a battalion of state law-enforcement officers to Texas to help stop illegal immigration, even though the nearest portion of the Mexican border is nearly nine hundred miles away. (As DeSantis saw off the troops, Fox covered the moment live.)
Also, he occasionally governs:
For DeSantis, it was a rare moment of publicity for his policy agenda rather than for his fight with the liberal establishment. “Compared to the culture-war measures, the mainstream stuff he has enacted is almost invisible,” Jon Mills, a former House speaker and a co-director of the University of Florida’s Center of Governmental Responsibility, told me. “But there’s a lot of it.” Many of these measures have enjoyed broad support. DeSantis persuaded the legislature to create one of the country’s first wildlife corridors and steered more than a billion dollars to Everglades restoration (even if much of the money came from Biden’s infrastructure plan). He signed a measure to temporarily suspend the state gasoline tax, and raised salaries for public-school teachers.
