As he headed back to the Sunshine State from a California fundraising trip this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted San Francisco as a city destroying itself with liberal governance in a new online presidential campaign video.
“We’re here in the once-great city of San Francisco,” DeSantis says in the video released on his personal Twitter account, in which he appears to be standing in a dark suit jacket and white dress shirt at the corner of Geary and Hyde streets on the edge of the city’s gritty Tenderloin neighborhood.
“We saw people defecating on the street, we saw people using heroin, we saw people smoking crack cocaine,” DeSantis says. “The city is not vibrant anymore. It’s really collapsed because of leftist policies.”
Leadership matters. Cities like San Francisco that have embraced leftist policies have destroyed the quality of life of their citizens and sparked an exodus of productive people to greener pastures. We need to restore sanity across this country. pic.twitter.com/LF86omZ1e6
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 20, 2023
DeSantis became a rising Republican star during the COVID-19 pandemic, touting Florida as a sanctuary from the controversial lockdowns and mandates pushed by Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom to help slow spread of the deadly virus.
DeSantis was easily re-elected last fall in a Republican sweep of Florida that marked one of party’s few encouraging results in a congressional midterm election in which the GOP barely retook the House of Representatives and failed to take the U.S. Senate.
Long assumed to be a potential 2024 presidential contender, DeSantis made it official last month. But he faces a steep path to the GOP nomination over former President Donald Trump, who has taken to belittling the Florida governor as Ron “DeSanctimonious.”
Despite the former president’s indictment this month on charges of mishandling secret government documents, Trump has consistently led the Republican field. A CNN poll out Tuesday found that among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters, 47% support Trump.
That’s down from 53% in May. But DeSantis held steady at 26% and support for other Republican contenders like former Vice President Mike Pence, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was in the single digits.
Will the new ad shake things up? Political analyst Dan Schnur, who worked for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson in the 1990s and for Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, said Wednesday that’s unlikely.
Schnur saw the ad as aimed chiefly at Newsom. The former San Francisco mayor, assumed to have future White House ambitions of his own, has relentlessly criticized DeSantis, calling him a “small, pathetic man” after DeSantis spent his state’s money to fly dozens of Texas migrants to Sacramento this month to make a point about California’s refusal to enforce federal immigration law.
“This is much less about taking votes from Trump than it is simply trolling Gavin Newsom,” Schnur said. “It’s hard to see many Republican voters or donors factoring this into their decisions. But DeSantis and Newson have been going at it for months now and this is just one more escalation in a rivalry that’s probably going to continue for the next five years.”
Is the ad effective? Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco lawyer and Republican National Committeewoman who hasn’t endorsed any GOP presidential candidates yet, said the “critique of San Francisco’s decline is entirely accurate.”
“I’ve witnessed it personally in the two decades I’ve lived here,” Dhillon said. “I walked a few blocks yesterday and I didn’t feel safe in the once-thriving shopping areas that are now repelling visitors and residents alike.”
Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed, also a Democrat, had no comment on the piece Wednesday.
One veteran political ad specialist, who’s doing work for another Republican governor seeking the GOP presidential nomination, would say only that the ad offered nothing new.
DeSantis isn’t the first presidential hopeful to take a whack at San Francisco’s problems, which the Florida governor’s video doesn’t actually show, despite the squalor he colorfully describes.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic seeking the Democratic primary nod over President Joe Biden, released a Tik Tok video of his own this month from a spot on Mission Street.
“This is one of hundreds of street corners in San Francisco that has been occupied now by the homeless,” Kennedy says in the video as he walks in front of tent encampments and argues homelessness can be solved with housing vouchers, which he says is “more important than funding wars.” Kennedy noted West Virginia, led by a Republican governor, “has one of the highest addiction rates in the country, but homelessness is a minor problem there.”
