This is a debate I am seeing constantly in right wing circles.
To summarize a long and ongoing conversation, DeSantis has (in theory) broader appeal and is more adept in using the law to serve his ends. Bringing Disney to heel and cementing Florida as a deep red state is not nothing.
But just about everyone who was brought into the conservative fold by Trump distrusts him. Myself included tbh. You have to remember what the Republican line-up looked like in 2016. The presumed nominee pre-Trump was Jeb freakin' Bush. The guy who said we need to be "more loving towards Mexico". Well, Trump's infamous comments on Mexico (mostly accurate except for the rapists part tbh) showed how the average Republican voter felt about that. They want to be proud of their own country rather than pandering endlessly to outsiders. The second runner up was Marco Rubio, the most insistent war hawk I have ever seen in my life. He was begging for like 6 months straight, every day, for armed conflict in Venezuela not even that long ago.
Well, Trump kept us out of all new wars. And *of course* Russian conflict starts *immediately* after he is gone. The Republican voter base made it clear they reject the military worship foisted on them by GOP Inc.
The principles Trump ran on were a complete and utter rejection of Washington DC consensus and are endorsed by a supermajority of the population that never gets what it wants because the game is always rigged on both sides. Nobody can truly say that any single politician in the huge line-up of 2016 were even attempting to represent the views of the average conservative or swing voter and that election proved it.
Now, with all that being said, the major fear among Trump loyalists is that Ron DeSantis is just another Jeb Bush. Someone who has adopted the language of veneer of Trump politics to better hide his DC consensus values and who ultimately won't pursue the same strategies of protectionism, heavy immigration restriction, non-intervention in global affairs, bringing corporations to heel, etc. People forget that Trump would pick public fights with corporations who outsourced labor. "I will never eat another Oreo again" etc. This rhetoric matters!
You can bash "woke" all day long for Twitter points like DeSantis does but that means very little about very little. In fact it feels very inauthentic, doesn't speak to the actual decline this country is facing, and very clearly looks like meaningless pandering to Trump voters.
The long and the short of it is if you were a prominent Republican pre-Trump, you are probably a DeSantis guy. If you became a Republican because of Trump, you are likely a Trump guy still. Although Trump still crushes DeSantis in republican polling.
