Inside the Great Governor Debate

Arguably America’s two most noteworthy governors went head to head Thursday night in a testy debate showcasing the pair’s opposing political ideologies.

Ron Desantis of Florida and Gavin Newsom of California are culture warrior-type governors with prominent national profiles; both are seen as bellwethers in their respective parties, and both govern states with Disney parks. But the similarities between the two men end there. Beyond that, they could not be more disparate.

After feuding publicly over the past year, DeSantis and Newsom agreed to meet in Georgia for a 90-minute debate hosted by Sean Hannity, where their many disagreements spilled out into the open. In his opening monologue, the longtime Fox News anchor noted that the differences between the two governors’ “approach to governance” “are clear and deep and profound.”

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Front and center on the debate stage Thursday were the issues of parental rights, LGBTQ+ materials in schools, crime, Covid, and Florida’s influx of former Golden State residents. DeSantis largely focused on his successes advancing conservative social policy, vindicated, he frequently argues, by Florida’s ballooning population. Newsom, a Biden surrogate, instead defended the president’s record, asserting, among other things, that “Bidenomics” has been a success and that the president is cognitively fit for the position.

Perhaps most significant to the two leaders’ differences, both men represent states with wildly divergent stances on minor sexual orientation and gender identity, with Gov. DeSantis tending to align with parents and Gov. Newsom with LGBTQ+ youth and activists.

“If you’re a parent in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina,” DeSantis pointed out, “your minor child can go to California without your knowledge or without your consent and get hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and a sex change operation.

“That is extreme,” he added. “That is an assault on parents’ rights.”

The Sunshine State’s governor also bashed the radical left-wing push for pornographic books in schools. In one particularly memorable instance, he displayed blacked-out images from a sexually graphic book that appears in California school libraries. Those who argue that explicit content, frequently under the guise of “LGBTQ+ education,” should not be accessible to minors are often smeared as “book banners,” a talking point Newsom parroted in the debate, accusing DeSantis of a “cultural purge.”

For his part, the left-wing governor primarily aligned with Joe Biden (“he’s doing fantastically,” he said), dismissing rumors that he’s competing against the sitting president.

“I’m here to tell the truth about the Biden/Harris record,” he opened.

DeSantis, on the other hand, told a very different story, alerting audiences that the president and other Washington elites want to “take the California model and do that nationally.”

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Response to the debate, for the most part, was split down party lines. However, Ron DeSantis’s warning about the dangers of federal, top-down policy enforcement is worth heeding on both sides of the aisle. 

The vast political divide between Florida and California simply highlights the vast divide in Americans’ political values. For as long as we expect to force any one partisan model on the entire nation, we will continue to bifurcate at alarming rates.

“There’s no question about it — America is going through a national divorce,” said Mark Meckler in response to Florida voting trends. “We are separating and regrouping at historic rates, and that is not a bad thing.”

“This does not mean that we give up on America,” he continued, “rather we quit trying to force the outdated idea that we must all think alike and be governed alike. The federal government’s top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions are tearing us apart because they effectively reverse what Americans are trying to do via the great decoupling — that is, to get away from government policy and governance they disagree with.”