Hurricane Idalia Gives Ron DeSantis an Opportunity To Save His Campaign

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has a chance to give his 2024 presidential bid a much needed boost if he can handle the upcoming crisis set to be brought by Hurricane Idalia.

The potential life-threatening storm made landfall in Florida Wednesday morning, bringing with it winds of up to 125 miles per hour and the potential for dangerous flooding, storm surges and heavy rainfall.

DeSantis paused his 2024 campaign to return to Florida to help deal with preparations for the hurricane, which forecasters warn could cause catastrophic damage.

For DeSantis, dealing with Hurricane Idalia is not only a chance to remind Florida residents he has not forgotten about them, even as he tours other states for his White House bid, but also an opportunity to show the rest of the country he can be a leader in a time of crisis.

"There is an opportunity here for Ron DeSantis to make an impression on Republican voters," Christopher Devine, an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton, Ohio, told Newsweek.

"Remember, one of the reasons that Donald Trump lost in 2020 is that Americans thought he'd handled the COVID-19 crisis poorly," he said. "DeSantis' response to it was, and remains, popular among Republicans. His response to this crisis could remind voters, particularly those who have soured on him in recent months, of why they liked him in the first place."

For a while, DeSantis was seen as the ideal replacement for Trump to lead the GOP in 2024, with the former president widely blamed for the party's poor 2022 midterm performance, as well as Trump's ongoing legal issues looming over his potential candidacy.

However, DeSantis' 2024 campaign has been marred by controversies and avoidable errors from the get-go. He has also failed to make any dent in Trump's overwhelming leads in GOP primary polls, despite the former president now facing four separate criminal trials.

The first televised Republican primary debate—in which Trump was absent—was seen as a way for DeSantis to give his campaign a much-needed boost. However, DeSantis was more muted than expected during the debate in Milwaukee and gave a solid, if unmemorable, performance, which analysts argued was a missed opportunity for the Florida governor.

With the arrival of Hurricane Idalia, DeSantis has another chance to show he can be a leader when called on, as well as to show a personal touch to those affected by the damage, that critics have consistently said he lacks to win over voters.

"It's an opportunity to demonstrate competence and leadership," Devine said. "DeSantis has shown that he is willing to fight the culture wars, but so has Donald Trump.

"Being able to govern effectively, especially amid a crisis, is another matter altogether. DeSantis has the opportunity to draw that contrast and help make the case that he, more so than Trump, can win the confidence of voters outside the Republican Party and, in turn, win the presidency," Devine added.

This is not the first time that DeSantis has had an opportunity to prove he can deal with a major crisis when called upon. In 2022, he was praised for his response to the devastating Hurricane Ian which hit Florida in September of that year.

This included putting aside political differences to work with President Joe Biden to help prepare for the disaster. The pair even visited some of the worst-hit areas of the hurricane together in October 2022 in a sign of bipartisan unity.

The praise DeSantis received for his Hurricane Ian response arrived while he was campaigning for reelection as Florida governor. While DeSantis was already widely predicted to beat his Democratic challenger Charlie Crist in the November 2022 midterms, the positivity around his Hurricane Ian response did his chances no harm and DeSantis went on to win by nearly 20 points.

However, Danielle Vinson, a professor of politics and international affairs at Furman University in South Carolina, suggests that DeSantis will not improve his chances in the GOP primary, even if his response to Hurricane Idalia is successful.

"It won't matter that much in the primary—unless he messes up," Vinson told Newsweek.

"Hurricane responses can show competence and in some cases empathy, but those aren't really issues in the GOP primary," she said. "And I think most Republican voters view DeSantis as competent. His response to the hurricane still does not provide a rationale for voting for him over their first choice—Trump."

DeSantis, who was due to be in South Carolina on Monday but returned to Florida over the weekend to help prepare for Hurricane Idalia, said he will stay in Florida for as long as necessary.

"I'm hoping this storm is not as catastrophic as Hurricane Ian was, but we're going to do what we need to do because it's just something that's important," DeSantis told a Tuesday press conference. "But it's no different than what we've done in past iterations of all this stuff."