Ron DeSantis says he hasn't called anyone about 2028 and that the reports are fabricated. Meanwhile, people familiar with his thinking say he is keeping the door open while he "assesses the landscape." Both can be true in the way these things always are: a politician who hasn't dialed a consultant, only because consultants have been dialing him.
The denial isn't interesting. What he said about his own party is.
After midterms in which Republicans took broad losses, DeSantis called the results close to an "extinction-level event" for the GOP, then insisted Florida was the exception. That is the whole pitch for 2028 in one sentence: the party is dying, and he is the man who found the cure. It deserves scrutiny, because the cure is the disease.
DeSantis built his national brand by turning state government into a cultural battering ram. He picked a fight with a company that employs tens of thousands of Floridians, then watched it drag on. He signed a six-week abortion ban into law. He pushed book removals and classroom speech restrictions that teachers say have made them afraid to do their jobs. He put up a swamp detention site for immigrants and called it a tourist-friendly punchline. Voters in other states just looked at the national version of that politics and, by the story's own account, delivered a rout. He wants to tell Republicans the answer is more of it, with better discipline.
Meanwhile, ask Floridians what he has done about the things that actually cost them money. Homeowners' insurance premiums are among the highest in the country. The condo crisis after the Surfside collapse has left retirees staring at special assessments they can't pay. Property owners are being squeezed while the governor gives speeches about wokeness. If that's the "exception," it's an odd one.
Then there's the matter of courage. DeSantis ran in 2024 as the man who would take on Donald Trump, finished second in Iowa, quit, and endorsed him. Trump had spent months mocking him. The endorsement wasn't conviction; it was queueing. Now he is positioning himself as the grown-up who might inherit a battered movement, while never having said what he believes Trump got wrong. A party in an "extinction-level" crisis doesn't need a man who diagnoses the illness and still salutes the one who caused it.
Now the harder part, for my own side. Democrats should not take comfort from any of this. Florida's exception is real. The state moved decisively right, Democratic voter registration collapsed, and Republicans made gains with Latino voters in Miami-Dade. Voters there approved the abortion-rights amendment with a majority in 2024 and still fell short of the 60 percent threshold, which tells you the state is not as ideologically locked in as its officials claim. But it also tells you Democrats lost the organizing, the money and the message in a place they once treated as a swing prize. Pointing and laughing at DeSantis is not a strategy. Showing up in Florida, year-round, with a case about insurance, housing and rights, would be.
He leaves office in January, term-limited, with nothing to run for except the next thing. Expect the denials to continue exactly as long as they're useful. Expect the early-state trips to come after. Democrats should expect something else too: a candidate who will say the party lost because it wasn't ruthless enough, rather than because voters saw what ruthlessness looks like up close.
They did see it. They voted. The question for 2028 is whether anyone on the Right is willing to listen.
