DeSantis is blowing up the one key advantage he had over Trump: report

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' odds of beating out former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination is in full collapse — which has led to his much-derided "reset". And according to one report, the combative Florida governor did himself no favors this past week, and he likely made things worse.

As Newsweek's Andrew Stanton observed, the one thing DeSantis had going for him was a decent margin of approval among Black voters compared to Trump. He is doing damage with that potential voting bloc by doubling down on the controversial claim about the upside to slavery that even has Black GOP lawmakers taking shots at him.

At issue is the Florida governor's defense of the Florida Department of Education for approving a "new curriculum that states middle schoolers in Florida should be taught that slaves learned some skills that could be used for their 'personal benefit.'"

Pressed on the proposal that drew fire from all corners of the country, DeSantis protested, "I think it's very clear that these guys did a good job with those standards. It wasn't anything that was politically motivated. These are serious scholars. That particular provision about the skills, that was in spite of slavery, not because of it."

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That has not quieted his critics and he is likely going to feel the long-term effects with conservative Black voters who previously preferred him to the former president.

"While neither Trump nor DeSantis is expected to win a substantial percentage of the Black vote in the 2024 general election, the criticism over the curriculum threatens to erase DeSantis' slight advantage among Black voters against Trump, who outperformed his Republican predecessors among Black voters. Despite that overperformance, President Joe Biden still handily won Black voters by a wide margin against Trump in 2020," the report states before adding, "Polls conducted prior to the recent controversy suggested that Black Republicans were more open to supporting DeSantis than Trump, and the governor outperformed Black voters in Florida in 2022 versus Trump in 2020."

According to Whitely Yates, director of diversity and engagement for the Indiana Republican State Committee, "If the only way Governor DeSantis is able to garner attention from the masses is when he enrages the Black community, I don't see that as a winning strategy for his presidential campaign."

Yates continued, "There are prominent Republicans, both Black and white, that see and take issue with the wording of this section and I think that they are well within their rights. No one looks at other marginalized groups and genocides and attempts to pick out the silver lining in the genocide, the silver lining of the atrocity."

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