LGBTQ+ Republicans to DeSantis: The ‘old playbook’ doesn’t work anymore

LGBTQ+ conservatives say a video shared by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign is homophobic and represents a return to an old Republican strategy that no longer works.

The video, shared by DeSantis War Room, the Twitter account that does rapid response for the DeSantis campaign, portrayed fellow candidate Donald Trump as too pro-LGBTQ+ for the Republican Party. The video contrasted DeSantis’ policies in Florida with Trump’s embrace of LGBTQ+ supporters and promises to protect members of those groups from extremism.

The minute-long video drew the ire of Log Cabin Republicans, a prominent group representing LGBTQ+ conservatives, who called the video “divisive and desperate.” The video appears to have been deleted by its original creator, a conservative Twitter user called Proud Elephant.

“Ron DeSantis’ extreme rhetoric has just ventured into homophobic territory,” the statement from the Log Cabin Republicans read. “DeSantis’ rhetoric will lose hard-fought gains in critical races across the nation. This old playbook has been tried in the past and has failed — repeatedly.”

The “old playbook” refers to Republican Party platforms, especially in the early 2000s, that stood firmly against gay rights and those fighting for same-sex marriage.

Republican nominees who were clear and uncompromising in their opposition often found their way to the White House. “I’m not for gay marriage. Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman,” George W. Bush said during a presidential debate in 2000. In 2004, while serving his first term as president, Bush said he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

But in 2021, for the first time, a majority of Republicans approved of same-sex marriage, according to a Gallup poll. The same year, the Republican National Committee launched a Pride coalition to mobilize LGBTQ+ communities ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“There are elements of the conservative movements who want to see gay people stay in the shadows … and not have any kind of visibility whatsoever,” said Charles Moran, president of Log Cabin Republicans. “That’s just not happening in society. And that’s not happening in the conservative movement.”

This year, however, Republicans’ support for same-sex marriage dropped. In 2022, 56% of polled Republicans agreed that same-sex relationships were morally acceptable. A June 2023 Gallup poll found that just 41% of Republicans said the same.

The decrease came as state legislatures across the U.S. filed more than 500 bills targeting LGBTQ+ people in 2023, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

The latest DeSantis campaign video is likely trying to appeal to hardline social conservatives who didn’t like Trump’s permissiveness around issues like LGBTQ+ equality, Moran said.

The Florida chapter of Log Cabin Republicans endorsed DeSantis for governor in 2022. The club’s chairperson, Joe LaFauci, said in a tweet that he was “totally disappointed in our governor” because of the video.

Cameron Gambini, the Republican National Committee’s first gay outreach director, said the video “did absolutely nothing but hurt the LGBT movement in the Republican Party.”

“It’s pivoting himself and the Republican Party as an anti-gay community. It’s disgusting,” Gambini said.

The video is in line with the DeSantis campaign’s attempts to outflank Trump on the right. DeSantis has tried portraying himself as more conservative than Trump on abortion, immigration, COVID-19 policy and culture war issues.

In an interview with conservative political commentator Tomi Lahren on Wednesday, DeSantis doubled down on the video, calling it “fair game.”

“I think identifying Donald Trump as really being a pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream, where he was having men compete against women in his beauty pageants, I think that’s totally fair game, because he’s now campaigning, saying the opposite, that he doesn’t think that you should have men competing in women’s things, like athletics,” DeSantis said.

Meanwhile, a mailer thanking Trump for supporting gay rights is going around Iowa, an early state in the Republican primary battle. It was paid for by a recently registered nonprofit, the progressive website Bleeding Heartland reported.

Moran said the video features LGBTQ+ Republicans who are on the same page with DeSantis about social issues and have supported some of the governor’s policies. Media personality and trans woman Caitlyn Jenner, for example, has been outspoken against trans athletes competing in women’s sports. DeSantis signed bills in 2021 banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.

The video, shared by the campaign on June 30, opens with a clip of Trump speaking to a crowd of supporters a few weeks after the Pulse nightclub shooting, a gay nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed. “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” then-President Trump says in the clip.

More headlines, pictures and audio clips meant to depict Trump as embracing the LGBTQ+ community appear. (Despite Trump’s statements, his policy record on LGBTQ+ issues is mixed. While president, he banned transgender people from serving in the military, for example.)

The video then cuts to another section meant to contrast Trump’s support of LGBTQ+ rights with DeSantis’ policies in Florida.

André Béliveau, a public policy analyst based in Washington, D.C., said the video shows that the campaign is too “terminally online.”

The second half of the video contains elements of niche, online meme culture meant to depict DeSantis as more masculine. Clips of DeSantis are interspersed with videos of male bodybuilders and clips from movies and TV shows, including actors portraying “Wolf of Wall Street” stock trader Jordan Belfort, the mythic Greek warrior Achilles, “American Psycho” serial killer Patrick Bateman and English gangster Thomas Shelby from “Peaky Blinders.”

“It’s a s—tpost that a 21-year-old populist, recent college graduate would put on his personal Twitter account,” Béliveau said. “And that’s who he has working on his campaign.”

It remains to be seen if this kind of messaging will be effective, either in public opinion polling or in DeSantis’ fundraising efforts, said Spiro Kiousis, a political communication professor at the University of Florida.

“I don’t want to say it’s a Hail Mary, but it’s certainly a more aggressive move right now,” Kiousis said.