ORLANDO, Fla. — In the week before Hurricane Idalia hit Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis had a debate performance that didn’t appear to boost his presidential chances and faced a chorus of boos in the wake of a racist murder of three Black people in Jacksonville.
But the arrival of the powerful Category 3 storm allowed the governor to show leadership by responding to a crisis under pressure, a role that helped him during last year’s campaign for reelection when he oversaw recovery efforts after Hurricane Ian.
He also had good things to say about the federal government, touring the affected region with the FEMA chief and working with President Joe Biden to declare disaster areas, a notable shift from his usual attacks on the president and Washington in general.
A robust response to a storm, however, might not have the same impact on the national electorate as it would on state voters.
“Certainly, there’s an opportunity for him to look presidential,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from St. Petersburg and co-founder of the Forward Party. “… I’m just not sure the opportunity meets the moment that he’s in in the current campaign, given all the other headwinds he faces.”
DeSantis continues to tread water in GOP primary polls as former President Donald Trump maintains his large lead and challengers such as businessman Vivek Ramaswamy start to gain more support.
“The governor was a solid leader during this latest crisis,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “… But I don’t think that will reboot his campaign.”
DeSantis may have stabilized his public relations image, Jewett said, which is helpful for his campaign after “a string of self-inflicted misfortunes.”
“He was able to change that up a little bit,” Jewett said. “But if he had done poorly, I think I really would have been the final nail in the political coffin.”
Jolly agreed that hurricane responses are more notable for damaging reputations if things turn bad than they’ve bolstered executives for performing the work well. Examples include presidents George H.W. Bush with Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and George W. Bush with Katrina in 2005.
“We’ll see how the reviews are,” Jolly said. “And those reviews often come in response to the aftermath less than the prep. The downside risk is probably greater than the upside opportunity, in that mismanagement becomes a glaring leadership failure that is easy to translate on the national stage.”
Jewett said that looming homeowners insurance issues could yet pose a problem, with companies continuing to leave the state as they did after Ian.
“That doesn’t mean that there still won’t be thousands of people who are needing insurance claims to be filled and to rebuild,” Jewett said.
DeSantis has long railed against the federal government since Biden took office. In February 2022, in the wake of tornadoes in Lee County, he attacked Biden personally for the administration not approving a disaster declaration.
“Since Biden’s been President, it seems like [they do] whatever they can do to thumb their nose at Florida,” DeSantis said at the time.
Even following Hurricane Ian in September 2022, after which DeSantis met with the president in Fort Myers Beach, he would give campaign speeches like the one in Oviedo that November in which he gave the state full credit for the Ian recovery while quickly pivoting to “the mess they have made” in Washington.
In the past few days, though, he’s talked about his “partners” at FEMA and said the needs of the people in harm’s way “has got to triumph over any type of short-term political calculation or any type of positioning.”
Biden said Wednesday that working with DeSantis “sounds strange,” but “I trust him to be able to suggest that this is not about politics.”
“It’s one thing to rail against the intrusion of the federal government in the abstract and another thing to refuse all assistance when your state has been devastated,” said Gregory Koger, a professor of political science at the University of Miami.
“The federal government has provided a lot of funds to the state of Florida over the last three years,” Koger said. “And that has helped the state to have a relatively flush budget.”
Jolly said overseeing a hurricane response is a role expected of governors of Florida, with former Gov. Rick Scott seemingly everywhere with his trademark Navy hat.
But so is being there to help communities grieve after tragedies, and the boos DeSantis received at a vigil in Jacksonville on Aug. 27 following the shooting deaths of three Black residents at the hands of an openly racist killer showed that he can’t easily slip into that ceremonial role.
“He returns to the state, he does the performative things, but he’s bad at performing,” Jolly said. “And I think that’s what we saw in Jacksonville. It was performative but a bad performance.”
Black leaders in Florida and across the country have criticized DeSantis’ attacks on critical race theory that supports systemic racism in America, the state’s battle with the College Board over Black history standards, and state guidelines on teaching slavery.
Koger said he expected DeSantis’ renewed praise of the federal government would not last too long.
“I guess two weeks,” he said. “And in the meantime, what I expect to see is a distinction between welcoming the support of the federal government, the bureaucracy, the agencies, the government as an institution, and personally thanking President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for his assistance.”
And while the two appeared together without incident last year following Ian, he did not expect to see anything too far in the other direction, like the controversial embrace then-New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie gave Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012 after superstorm Sandy.
“I think the Chris Christie lesson is, don’t literally give Biden a hug,” Koger said.