DeSantis is a winner. What does that mean for Trump in 2024?

Republican Ron DeSantis with his wife Casey DeSantis and children Madison, Mason and Mamie, waves to the crowd during an election night party in Tampa, Florida.

The media have vilified both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis to a degree that makes the treatment of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush look kind in comparison. Mr. Trump defied the odds and won in 2016, then lost in 2020 as voters tired of him.

In his 2018 run for governor, Mr. DeSantis beat Andrew Gillum by less than half a percentage point. The media in Florida tarred and feathered him, but the national media barely knew who he was. Florida was a swing state where Democrats held a narrow registration edge. Then came Covid. Mr. DeSantis bucked the national panic and reopened the state quickly, inspiring legions of like-minded people to flock to the free state of Florida. Republicans on the voter rolls now outnumber Democrats by nearly 300,000.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has been tipped as a possible 2024 presidential candidate.

After Mr. Trump lost, the media cast Mr. DeSantis—some called him “DeathSantis”—as the new lead villain, calling him a threat to democracy, a monster who wanted to kill grandma, a bogeyman who wanted to ban books and push gays back into the closet.

If Floridians had taken their cue from the media, he would have lost in a landslide. Instead, he scored what he called “a win for the ages,” beating Congressman Charlie Crist by nearly 20 points. He had long been favored, but as recently as September, his margin in polls was 3 to 8 points. The size of his victory isn’t a footnote. It contains a message to GOP leaders, who never liked Mr. Trump anyway, and to Republican voters who’ve been telling pollsters they want to renominate the former president in 2024.

No Florida newspaper with a significant readership endorsed Mr. DeSantis. They echoed the national media in excoriating him. The Miami Herald opined that “Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida is a place of meanness. It’s a place where dissent is muzzled, where personal rights triumph over the greater good, where winning is more important than unity—especially if that victory moves him closer to a White House run.” The Tampa Bay Times called him a bully who “divides to conquer.” The Palm Beach Post wrote that he “relies on hubris and manufactured culture war drama to govern.” Fort Lauderdale’s South Florida Sun Sentinel asserted that “DeSantis rules Florida with an iron hand. He dictates what teachers teach, creates barriers to voting, uses raw power to punish critics and marginalizes women, Blacks and LGBTQ people.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (who is running ahead by a slightly narrower margin in an overwhelmingly Democratic state) ludicrously encouraged us to move to California, “where we still believe in freedom.” Few voters took him up on it, but many of us heard the insults from out-of-state reporters and celebrities that felt like digs on us as much as they were critiques of our governor. Mr. DeSantis’s “Keep Florida Free” platform resonated, and his record of competent governance and effective hurricane relief produced a landslide that was one of the few pleasant election-night surprises anywhere in the country for Republicans.

In 2018 Mr. DeSantis got 39% of the vote in Miami-Dade County, which is 70% Latino. In 2022 he earned 55%. In Palm Beach County, he won 51% of the vote this year, compared with 41% in 2018. In Hillsborough County (Tampa), he went from 45% in 2018 to 54% in 2022. He improved his margins in counties in southwest Florida that were hard hit by Hurricane Ian, winning Charlotte, Lee and Collier counties with around 70% of the vote. In Osceola County, near Orlando, where Mr. Trump lost by 14 points, Mr. DeSantis won by 7.

When was the last time a Republican governor in Florida won in a bigger landslide than Mr. DeSantis? You have to go all the way back to 1868, when Harrison Reed captured 59% of votes to 32% for his Democratic challenger during Reconstruction, when fewer than 20,000 Floridians voted. The Sunshine State will now have no Democrats in statewide office for the first time since Reconstruction.

In a victory speech in Tampa, Mr. DeSantis proclaimed that his state is where “woke goes to die,” adding that “Florida was a refuge of sanity when the world went mad. We stood as a citadel of freedom for people from across the country and across the world.”

Supporters of Republican Ron DeSantis cheer during an election night party at the Convention Centre in Tampa, Florida.

In what must have been a first on CNN, a panel of seven commentators had nothing but positive things to say about Mr. DeSantis. All agreed that Republican leaders would urge him to run for president in 2024. His supporters in Tampa had the same idea. During his victory speech, they chanted “Two more years.”

Mr. Trump appears to understand the threat Mr. DeSantis poses. Last week at a rally he gave the governor one of his nicknames, albeit a flat one: “Ron DeSanctimonious.” On Election Day, he told reporters he had voted for the governor, but then said of 2024: “If he runs, he runs. If he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.”

Mr. DeSantis didn’t ask for Mr. Trump’s endorsement, and candidates who won primaries after receiving it—Mehmet Oz, Doug Mastriano, Tudor Dixon, Herschel Walker, Blake Masters—lost or are trailing as this is written. That’s a key reason why many Republicans may now line up behind Mr. DeSantis as the new face of the party. Florida’s maligned and ridiculed voters might have wounded Mr. Trump in a way the media never managed to do, opening the door for a new era for the GOP.

Mr. Seminara is a former diplomat and author of “Footsteps of Federer: A Fan’s Pilgrimage Across 7 Swiss Cantons in 10 Acts.”

The Wall Street Journal