Forget the fascism, Ron and Casey are just regular folks

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has based his national reputation on extremist policies like “Don’t Say Gay” and book banning, along with stunts like grabbing migrants from Texas and dropping them on Martha’s Vineyard. As he launches his presidential campaign, though, he’s going for a different public image. While DeSantis is not letting up on the far-right positions—in Iowa this week he promised to finish a border wall to “reestablish the sovereignty of this nation”—he or his handlers have apparently decided that playing up the relatable middle-class dad angle is the best way to appeal to voters.

DeSantis and wife Casey, the parents of children aged 3, 5, and 6, have been laying it on thick in Iowa campaign appearances, telling stories and cracking jokes about parenting young children. At one Wednesday event, DeSantis told an extended story about taking his kids to the drive-through of a newly opened fast food restaurant, only to have the youngest need to go to the restroom. This isn’t an incidental part of how DeSantis is campaigning. Politico reports:

After DeSantis’ stump speech Wednesday, for exactly 10 minutes of the couple’s half-hour “fireside chat” in front of 150 people in a welding shop, the pair regaled the audience with talk of shuffling out of leotards and into T-ball uniforms, coloring on the walls, keeping track of the children’s birthday party social calendar and working out naptime.

When a candidate and his wife are spending one-third of his faux-informal time—time spent, incongruously, on a pair of armchairs stationed inside that welding shop— talking about being parents, he’s telling us something important about his candidacy and how he wants voters to see him. In the same way, Casey DeSantis is consistently opening her remarks by framing herself as a slightly beleaguered mother.

But in trying to make a connection with voters, at each of the governor’s first three stops in Iowa on Tuesday and Wednesday, Casey DeSantis opened her remarks with an apology for her slightly hoarse voice: She had been “negotiating with a 3-year-old” about not coloring with permanent marker on the dining room table.

Sometimes she switches it up: