Floridians facing divided loyalty in Republican nomination race

MIAMI — Henry Suarez is watching closely as the clock counts down to the 2024 American presidential election.

His watch repair shop is a shrine to former president Donald Trump. It’s decorated with posters, campaign emails, the famous red Make America Great Again hat and even a rubber Donald Trump mask that watches over all who enter his downtown Miami store.

But there are hints of the divided loyalties many Republicans are now facing: two postcards pinned above a Trump-for-president shirt featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is challenging Trump for the Republican nomination.

“DeSantis — I love him. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a great governor. I love what he did in Florida,” said Suarez, a Cuban-American who came to the U.S. in 1961. “But Trump is already proven.”

It’s early days in the volatile contest to determine who Republicans believe is best suited to take on President Joe Biden 18 months from now. Several others have also stepped forward as candidates, including former governor Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, both of South Carolina.

Trump’s pitch to party members is rooted in revenge. He clings to the unsubstantiated claim that his 2020 defeat to Biden was riddled with fraud and stolen from him and that he’s the only one to set the country back on the right path.

“We need MAGA — Make America Great Again,” Trump said in a video message following DeSantis’ campaign launch last week. “We have no choice. This is the last shot we’ve got at it. If we don’t win this time, our country’s in very big trouble.”

DeSantis, whose re-election as governor last November was the one clear victory in an otherwise disappointing Republican midterm showing, argues that the party needs to rally behind a proven winner.

“There is no substitute for victory,” he said during his campaign launch on Twitter, a much-anticipated event that was beset by technical glitches.

“We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years.”

It’s an anxious political moment that has the two leading conservative candidates fighting over which of them hews most closely to the extreme right flank of the party.

DeSantis accuses Trump of attacking him from the left, after the former president said that a bill DeSantis signed banning abortion six weeks after conception was “too harsh.”

Trump has mocked DeSantis as being only marginally better than a Democrat when compared to Republican governors in other states, and for picking an ideology-fuelled fight after facing criticism from Disney chief executive officer Bob Iger and putting thousands of jobs and tourism dollars at risk.

The infighting between the two politicians is a Democrat’s dream, but unnerving for those who must ultimately choose between the two Florida residents.

“I’m stuck in the middle, waiting to see how it plays out,” Willy Guardiola, a Palm Beach resident known for years as Trump’s biggest local supporter, told the Palm Beach Post recently.

He would have preferred DeSantis wait out this election cycle, but as the head of Christian on a Mission, a faith-based non-profit group, he said it was important that the most pro-life candidate prevail.

“Bottom line is that I’m not a happy camper right now with these two phenomenal candidates right now running against each other,” he told the newspaper.

The longer-term challenge facing Republicans is picking a presidential candidate who stands a chance of appealing to more moderate or independent voters in a general election.

The Republicans have a clear opportunity here. Even some Democrats are underwhelmed that Biden is seeking a second term — one that would have him leaving the White House at the age of 86.

But a Trump candidacy comes with all the baggage collected during his first four years in office, from 2016 to 2020.

On top of the various criminal investigations that could result in prosecutions — and eventual convictions — and the lasting stain of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol building in 2021 in an attempt to overturn Biden’s election victory, Trump is quite simply a hugely divisive figure.

“I don’t like Trump at all. I think he’s kind of a douchebag,” said Jim Fehrenbach, a boat captain from Cape Canaveral, Fla., who grew up in the same Dunedin neighbourhood as the Florida governor.

“I think people will listen to DeSantis a little more than they’ll listen to Trump, because with everything that Trump says — even if he’s right — they’re so mad at him that they shoot down everything he does just to shoot it down.”

U.S. polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight shows Trump with a clear lead among registered Republican voters and DeSantis in second place. Trump’s lead has been slowly and steadily growing since March, with the former president currently at 54 per cent and the governor at 20.7 per cent.

But in an analysis of DeSantis’s prospects, it was noted that while both men hold similar net favourability ratings among Republicans, fewer people have formed definite opinions about DeSantis, meaning that he has an opportunity to make a good impression.

But scratching below his carefully scrubbed surface could also result in DeSantis losing support.

On the sidewalk outside the Miami Four Seasons last week, where DeSantis’ political donors met ahead of his presidential campaign launch, Bob Kunst set himself up with a lawn chair and a homemade “Gays Against DeSantis” sign.

He initially supported the governor. He liked his refusal to shut down the Florida economy in the face of the pandemic, his decision to ban transgender women from competing in female sports and to prohibit the use of gender-inclusive pronoun use or permit primary-school sex-education lessons in school.

Where some saw controversy, Kunst saw “common sense.”

But then, DeSantis signed a bill prohibiting drag queen performances in the presence of minors.

“That is a symbol that goes way beyond this other stuff. Now he’s going after the gay community,” Kunst said. “It’s the foot in the door to come after anybody.”

On the wall in Suarez’s watch repair store are family photos, including a black-and-white image of his now-deceased father, who brought the family to America from Cuba in 1961 following Fidel Castro’s communist revolution.

“My father had to close up his business and we were able to get out in ’61 because we had friends in the embassy,” he said.

Yet Suarez has little sympathy for migrants entering the U.S. through the southern border — a major political issue in the U.S., which both Trump and DeSantis have vowed to bring to a halt as part of their pitch to voters.

“I’m for people coming into this country. But do it the right way. Do it the legal way, not just open the border and let them in,” he said.

Suarez believes that Trump is the one best suited to bring order to what he sees as chaos, though he acknowledges that Trump’s blunt style often brings has brought about its own kind of bedlam.

“I support him. I’m still going to vote for him. But I wish he would be a little bit more of a politician,” Suarez said.

“But that’s the way he is. Trump is a straight-up guy. He’ll tell you in your face whatever it is and you either like him or you hate him. It’s one of the two.”

Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan

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