Something strange is going on with Ron DeSantis in Florida
This weekend’s Florida Governor debate between Democratic nominee Andrew Gillum and Republican nominee Ron DeSantis ended up being more than a bit one-sided. Gillum sounded confident, knowledgeable, and happy to be there. DeSantis came off like a guy who had wandered into the debate by accident, and couldn’t remember if he’d left the oven on. Now, after his terrible performance, DeSantis has gone into hiding.
This afternoon Andrew Gillum appeared on-air for an MSNBC interview with Chuck Todd. At the end of it, Todd revealed that he’d also tried to book Ron DeSantis for an interview, but couldn’t get him to do it. So is DeSantis merely hiding from the liberal leaning MSNBC? As it turns out, no, he’s hiding from everyone. He’s also bailed on a scheduled sit-down interview with the conservative leaning USA Today newspaper network. So what’s going on here?
The short answer is that we don’t have any way of knowing for sure. Sometimes when candidates have a big lead heading into election day, they strategically step away from the media, in order to avoid any chance of committing a random gaffe that could reshape the playing field. But Ron DeSantis is not leading this race. The polls suggest that Andrew Gillum has anywhere from a razor thin lead to a sizable lead, and you can take that for whatever it’s worth. But the bottom line is that there’s no above-board strategic reason for DeSantis to go into hiding right now. If anything he needs as much publicity as possible to try to turn things around.
The general consensus from the debate was that Ron DeSantis seemed distracted, as if something larger was going wrong for him that had nothing to do with the debate. Now DeSantis is hiding from the media on the left and right. If he keeps this up much longer, people are going to start asking why. Candidates who are slightly behind in the polls don’t start blowing off media requests across the board just two weeks from election day. What’s happening with this guy?
