The Florida governor pitched himself as a defender of traditional values to students at Liberty University, an important stage for Republican presidential hopefuls.
The morning after signing one of the nation’s most stringent abortion bills into law, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida pitched himself to thousands of evangelical college students as a defender of truth, common sense and morality in the public square.
“Yes, the truth will set you free,” Mr. DeSantis said, invoking the words of Christ. “Because woke represents a war on truth, we must wage a war on woke.”
Mr. DeSantis spoke to about 10,000 students at Liberty University’s twice-weekly convocation service, which the school bills as “the world’s largest gathering of Christian students.”
He was introduced by pastor Jonathan Falwell, recently named the school’s chancellor, who drew sustained applause when he mentioned Mr. DeSantis’s signing of the abortion law on Thursday night. The law prohibits the procedure past six weeks.
Mr. DeSantis did not explicitly mention the abortion law. He opened his speech on a personal note, thanking the audience for their prayers after his wife’s cancer diagnosis in 2021.
“The prayers have been answered,” he said. He went on to tout his record in Florida on an array of issues including new restrictions on gender-affirming medical treatments.
“We chose facts over fear, we chose education over indoctrination, we chose law and order over rioting and disorder,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We did not back down.”
The visit was part of Mr. DeSantis’s national tour of centers of conservative influence as he builds momentum for his widely anticipated entry into the 2024 presidential campaign. More than that, it was a crucial opportunity to gauge, and perhaps advance, his relationship status with evangelical Christians — a voting bloc that helped vault Donald J. Trump to the presidency and appears to be open to new presidential suitors.
Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., has long been an important stop for Republican politicians and conservative celebrities eager to reach the campus’s undergraduates.
It is the stage where Senator Ted Cruz of Texas announced his candidacy in 2015. It is also where Mr. Trump introduced himself to a wider evangelical audience, pitching himself as the defender of a Christianity under attack — and famously referred to “Two Corinthians” in a fumbled attempt to speak the same language as his listeners.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump did not need to “speak evangelical” to win them over. He won an even higher share of the white evangelical vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Though some evangelical leaders have signaled they would consider supporting another Republican candidate, many remain loyal to Mr. Trump and have so far shown few signs of abandoning him en masse over his recent indictment.
For Mr. DeSantis, the question is whether he can loosen that extraordinary bond.
Jesse Hughes, a junior at Liberty, had been hoping to hear Mr. DeSantis offer a more intimate account of how his faith influenced his approach to governing and helped him navigate challenges like his wife’s cancer diagnosis. Instead, he said he mostly heard material he recognized from Mr. DeSantis’s other speeches.
Still, he is impressed with Mr. DeSantis’s record in Florida, including his approach to abortion legislation, education, and “how he’s willing to take bold stances and not cave to media pressure.” Under Mr. DeSantis, the state has banned discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades.
Mr. Hughes read Mr. DeSantis’s recent memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” but said he found little to help him understand the governor’s personal spiritual life. “There are references to his faith, but he doesn’t go into much detail on anything,” he said.
Mr. Hughes brushed off the indictment against Mr. Trump as “political persecution.” But he also said that many of his fellow students are ready to move past Mr. Trump.
Mr. Hughes, 21, is the president of the campus’s College Republicans club, which is conducting a small informal poll of student preferences in the primary. Hours before the poll closed on Friday, Mr. DeSantis had 53 percent of the vote to Mr. Trump’s 31 percent, with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley at 13 percent.
“What I’m seeing is definite interest in DeSantis, but not a rejection of Trump” among white evangelicals, said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian at evangelical Calvin University in Michigan and the author of “Jesus and John Wayne.”
Ms. Du Mez sees Mr. DeSantis making a similar appeal to conservative evangelicals as Mr. Trump did, positioning himself as a combative culture warrior who is “protecting the vulnerable Christians.” He may appeal to voters who are drawn to Mr. Trump but exhausted by the chaos that follows him, or doubtful of his chances to win in a general election, she said.
But there is a trade-off. “What you gain in terms of stability in turning to DeSantis,” Ms. Du Mez said, “you lose in terms of charisma.”
She said that most conservative evangelicals at this early stage seem genuinely open to either of the leading candidates. Among voters, at least, “it’s a friendly competition.”
Mr. DeSantis was raised in a Catholic family in Florida. “Growing up as a kid, it was nonnegotiable that I would have my rear end in church every Sunday morning,” he wrote in his memoir. He has an aunt who is a nun and an uncle who is a priest, both in Ohio. (Both declined to comment on their nephew’s religious upbringing.)
Until now, he has deployed mentions of his personal faith fairly cautiously, while positioning himself as a defender of “God-fearing” people. In speeches, he often refers to putting on “the full armor of God” — a biblical reference and an evangelical touchstone — telling audiences to “stand firm against the left’s schemes.”
He closed his speech at Liberty with another scripture reference, telling the crowd that “I will fight the good fight, I will finish the race, and I will keep the faith,” paraphrasing the apostle Paul in the book of 2 Timothy.
Daniel Hostetter, the student body president, said his initial impression of Mr. DeSantis’s address was that it felt less personal than what he had heard from other politicians on Liberty’s stage, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia.
“I feel like I just don’t know as much about DeSantis as I’d like,” he said. In a candidate, he is looking for someone “who looks like Christ” — someone who is kind and “full of mercy” but will stand by his convictions.
He noted that one of the biggest applause lines of the morning did not even come from Mr. DeSantis, but from Mr. Falwell, when he mentioned Florida’s new six-week abortion ban. He speculated that Mr. DeSantis may be waiting to see how the ban is received nationally.
Abortion has become a thorny issue for Republicans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. A portion of its base will settle for nothing less than the strongest restrictions, putting them out of step with the electorate as a whole and raising concerns about how any candidate who could win the Republican primary on the issue could then go on to win the general election. Sixty-four percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most cases, according to a poll this year from the Public Religion Research Institute.
Daniel Griffith, a graduate student who leads a youth ministry at Liberty, said he was disappointed by some of Mr. DeSantis’s more aggressive rhetoric. He noted that the governor’s lines about “wokeness” got more applause than his recitation of his economic achievements in Florida. “I have friends who he would probably consider woke,” he said. “It gets the cheers, it gets the noise, which kind of stinks.”
Mr. Griffith said he is leaning toward supporting Mr. DeSantis over Mr. Trump.
“People are sick of the controversies and sick of the scandal,” he said. “Even at Liberty, we’ve had our own mess and we’re sick of that,” he added, comparing Mr. Trump’s outbursts and legal entanglements with the problems of a former president of the school, Jerry Falwell Jr.
Mr. Falwell, a former president of Liberty, was one of Mr. Trump’s first prominent evangelical supporters. He endorsed Mr. Trump in January of 2016, about a week after the candidate spoke at Liberty’s convocation, and became one of his most vocal allies.
Mr. Falwell resigned as president in 2020 in a haze of tawdry controversies and is currently suing the school over his retirement payments. The school named a new president in March, Dondi Costin, a former Air Force chaplain who was most recently the president of Charleston Southern University.
Out of power and without a platform, Mr. Falwell is an observer in this election cycle, not an influencer. Reached at home on Wednesday, he said he no longer has Mr. Trump’s phone number.
But his political instincts have not changed.
“I’ve got nothing against DeSantis at all, I just don’t think he’s ready for prime time yet,” Mr. Falwell said, remarking that the governor “looks like a little boy.”
He added, “I’m still 100 percent a Trump man.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
