How the GOP's 'magic formula' for a bright future ended in a 'shambles': analyst

It was seen as the “magic formula,” a movement expected to transform the Republican Party and take it into a bright future.

But, just one year after it began, the GOP's Ron DeSantis-led Florida experiment has crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote Tuesday.

And the thing that caused its collapse is exactly that which the Republicans had celebrated.

“This time last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the rest of Florida’s Republican Party were being heralded as the post-Donald Trump future for the GOP,” Marcotte wrote.

Florida bucked the losing trend in the 2022 midterms, with DeSantis winning re-election with a massive 20 points.

“Desperate for some sign that there was hope for their party after Trump, Republican elites decided DeSantis had discovered a magic formula with his aggressive culture war politics that involved book-banning, dropping the word "woke" every few seconds, and waging war on Disney,” Marcotte wrote.

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"Then DeSantis officially announced his presidential run, while Trump got arrested and charged with 91 felonies in four separate jurisdictions,” she added. “Since then, there's been a stampede of GOP support back to the glowering orange criminal who first captured their hearts with his blunt racism.”

While DeSantis' fall from glory gets blamed on lack of charisma and poor performance on the political stump, Marcotte argued that his culture war politics were too much for the mainstream — and not enough for MAGA.

“The draconian war on reading was central to the argument that the Florida GOP would lead the national party into its post-Trump era,” she wrote.

“Instead, the 2023 election demonstrated that book banning backfired politically, causing a surge of angry pro-education parents to turn out and elect Democrats to run school boards. Other post-election anaylses show that 'don't say gay' laws and attacks on trans kids are also political losers.

Marcotte concluded that “ultimately, that may be why the Florida strategy isn't the godsend Republican elites wanted it to be. The DeSantis/Moms for Liberty methods both managed to be so fascist they scared normal people, but fell short of what the MAGA base longs for."