DeSantis Under Pressure At Home: A Hurricane and a White Supremacist Shooting

A racist just murdered three black people. A hurricane was on the way.

And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stands at the political intersection.

In a state known for chaos, these twin crises stand out as a unique challenge for DeSantis, a top presidential candidate who was knocked off the campaign trail in Iowa and thrust back into the national spotlight.

Together, the juxtaposition of the two disasters present a real-time commander-in-chief test of DeSantis’s style of governing and communication, exposing his relative weaknesses and strengths.

At a Sunday afternoon press conference on Hurricane Idalia’s approach, DeSantis showcased his strengths, sounding at ease with reporters in the state’s Emergency Operations Center, a sign of his experience and political success in managing last year’s Hurricane Ian, which reinforced his get-things-done style.

But on Sunday evening, DeSantis was in a position of weakness.

The governor was heckled by some at a vigil for the three Black people killed the day before by a white supremacist. DeSantis, a conservative who opposes gun control and is not known for an empathetic personal style, pledged at the vigil to provide more state support and security for nearby Edward Waters University, a historically black institution the gunman initially planned to target before he was chased off by guards.

“We are not going to allow these institutions to be targeted by people…” DeSantis started to say as some in the crowd grew louder.

Jacksonville City Councilwoman Ju'coby Pittman, a Democrat who represents the district where the shootings happened, interrupted and tried to silence the critics.

"We [are going to] put parties aside because it ain't about parties today,” she said. “A bullet don't know a party.”

The antipathy displayed toward DeSantis at the vigil and on social media is longstanding and deep among many Black voters and political leaders who are Democrats. It stems back to his 2018 gubernatorial campaign when his opponent, Democrat Andrew Gillum, said at a debate that “racists believe he’s a racist.”

DeSantis narrowly won that contest.

DeSantis has appointed a Black Florida Supreme Court Justice and a Black officer who replaced Broward County’s sheriff who the governor suspended in 2019 over Florida’s last high profile school shooting in Parkland.

But in the years since, he has earned widespread condemnation from Black leaders for pushing laws to ban Diversity Equity & Inclusion programs and Critical Race Theory. He fought an AP African-American history course, defended state education standards that discussed some “benefit” derived by some slaves, and he pushed for the elimination of a specially created congressional district designed to empower Black voters that once stretched from Jacksonville to Tallahassee.

In May, the NAACP issued a travel advisory to Florida that warned Black people not to go to Florida. DeSantis's office called it a political "stunt." Five months later, on Saturday, a white supremacist armed with an AR-15 tactical rifle and Glock handgun murdered three Black people in a Dollar General store and then committed suicide, authorities said.

Last month, a DeSantis campaign staffer was fired for creating a controversial video, posted on X, that used a Nazi black sun symbol called a sonnenrad.

The dismissal was a rare act of DeSantis backing down amid a controversy that outrages the left and provides fodder for pundit condemnation on cable channels – a type of criticism the governor has used to his advantage because it generates more media coverage and tends to delight or earn the respect of Republicans.

“The national media and the Democrats just can’t help but racialize everything and get it wrong, and our base knows what’s up,” said a DeSantis confidante, not authorized to speak publicly by the governor, describing his thinking. “You can call this a tactic or a strategy or whatever. But the press and the pundits are playing their game and he’s just fighting back while he’s doing his job.”

Last year, for instance DeSantis was slow to condemn neo-Nazis who waved signs for him during his reelection campaign, saying “these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that, we’re not playing their game.”

After the shooting on Saturday evening, DeSantis’s office refused to discuss his whereabouts with reporters. That prompted a CNN reporter to say on air that she asked a DeSantis spokesman “specifically if [DeSantis] plans to deviate away from his campaigning … he said we will let you know.”

Spokesman Jeremy Redfern then posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, his text message exchange with the reporter to dispute her exact characterization of the conversation.

What Redfern didn’t say: when he told her “will let you know” about the governor’s whereabouts on Saturday, DeSantis was already en route to Tallahassee and had plans to attend Sunday’s vigil in Jacksonville.

Conservative social media influencer Stephen L. Miller lauded Redfern’s post and then issued a second post that juxtaposed national media coverage of DeSantis’s Saturday travel with President Biden’s response to the Hawaii wildfires.

DeSantis’s social media activity tells the story of what he wants to talk about: three posts over two days on the storm’s approach; one late-afternoon post Sunday about the mass shooting – after critics noted he had posted nothing about it.

“For hurricane response, he has done it before and earned good marks. And if he can get back to being governor, a leader in a time of crisis, he would do better in the polls than now,” said Steve Vancore, a Democratic pollster and consultant in Florida.

“A race-based murder involving guns, involving racism where he has some issues and involving him demonstrating compassion – that’s not his strong suit.”

On Saturday evening, in Iowa, DeSantis made a video message, sent to reporters but not posted by his office or campaign, that condemned the shooting and offered condolences.

“This shooting, based on the manifesto that they discovered from the scumbag that did this, was racially motivated. He was targeting people based on their race. That is totally unacceptable,” DeSantis said. “This guy killed himself rather than face the music and accept responsibility for his actions. And so he took the coward’s way out. But we condemn what happened in the strongest possible terms.”

Fred Guttenberg, a gun-control advocate whose daughter Jaime was murdered at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Highschool massacre in 2018, faulted DeSantis for opposing the first-ever gun control legislation passed by a Republican Legislature and signed into law by-then Gov. Rick Scott that allowed police to seize guns from dangerous suspects and banned long gun purchases by non-military people under the age of 21. DeSantis this year signed a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons without a permit.

“The fake tough guy response from DeSantis, who helped fuel racist anger in our state via words and action, simply makes this worse,” he said.

Guttenberg, a Democrat, also disputed the notion that DeSantis was being unfairly singled out when compared to his New York Democratic counterpart, Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose state was the victim of a similar hate crime last year when a white supremacist murdered Black people at a grocery store and left behind a racist manifesto.

“Hochul took strong and immediate action to try and prevent another one in NY,” Guttenberg said via text message. “I am sadly certain that DeSantis, who has ignored hate and racism in Florida and who has fueled it through his words and his actions, will do nothing.”

But Ryan Petty, another Parkland parent who also lost his daughter Alaina in the 2018 school shooting, said most gun laws just don’t work.

Petty said the Jacksonville shooter “slipped through the cracks” in light of reports about him demonstrating psychiatric problems that required him to be hospitalized at one point under the state’s Baker Act.

“The reality is there are tens of millions of these rifles in circulation. The gun is not the issue,” he said. “The issue is there were warning signs here. And I think we’re going to find out about law enforcement’s interaction with this individual. And time and again, we hear about missed opportunities.”

For Republicans like Petty, DeSantis’s refusal to countenance more gun control and instead focus on security makes him an attractive political figure.

But some polling indicates Republican women are less inclined to support gun rights as Republican men, and Millennial and Gen Z voters are also turned off, according to other research, which could be a general election problem for Republicans.

Democrats also note that Jacksonville, long a Republican-run city, has had a higher murder rate than New York City, which DeSantis has been known to single out on the campaign trail. The issue came up briefly during the presidential debate on Wednesday, but DeSantis shifted the conversation to Florida’s falling overall crime rate and his decision to suspend from office two elected county progressive county prosecutors.

One of those prosecutors, Orlando-area’s Monique Worrell, is Black and her suspension earlier this month became another flashpoint in the anger of Black leaders toward DeSantis.

State Rep. Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville Democrat who opposed DeSantis coming to the vigil Sunday, protested the governor’s decision to strongarm the Legislature last year into eliminating the congressional seat to give more Black representation in Washington. She also blasted Republicans for the educational policies as well as their decision to name a road in Florida after deceased radio host Rush Limbaugh, who promoted racist songs like “Barack The Magic Negro.”

“DeSantis and Republicans in Tallahassee are fanning the flames of racism,” said Nixon. “They’re erasing Black history. That causes people to devalue our lives.”

But her Republican counterpart from Jacksonville, Republican Rep. Kiyan Michael, said DeSantis has been an ally since 2019.

“He is the first one who has insisted on African-America studies being taught in our schools, and he insists on it being taught correctly,” she said, faulting the AP African-American history class for seeking to teach “queer theory” and other leftist indoctrination. “He’s taking back our culture. And that’s what we’re in: a cultural war.”

As for his other policies, she Michael said, “There is no DEI [Diversity Equity and Inclusion] program that would have stopped that. The only thing that would have stopped that would be to get him help before he did this … What happened in Jacksonville is happening in other places. We need to heal and not stoke fires of racial hatred and racial division.”