The
country as a whole may have been spared that kind of power, but Florida is for
now stuck with him. And nationally, too, there may be no coming back from what his campaign has
normalized. 88 percent or Republican voters now say they want a candidate who would
“ban surgeries that change a child’s gender,” according to a January CBS News/YouGov poll.
Trump, of course, picked up on this months ago, proclaiming at a rally in a June 2023, “I talk
about transgender, everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago,
you didn’t know what the hell it was.” There is some polling data to suggest that as a country,
people have been adopting more regressive views on sex and gender since 2017.
“In
order for the party to have a future after Trump, they needed to have a
candidate,” wrote Evan Urquhart at Assigned Media, performing a post-mortem on the DeSantis campaign’s
political strategy. “In order for them to have a candidate, their candidate
needed to have an issue. In order to have an issue, they needed to sell a moral
panic. Now the candidate’s balloon has burst, but the panic rages on.” DeSantis
was rejected by voters, maybe, for running predominantly on that panic. But he
stoked the panic all the same. His campaign is over. The threat DeSantis poses
to queer and trans people is not.