“This was not an easy decision to make but I believe it is the right one.”
With these words, Josh D’Amaro, the head of Disney’s theme parks division, announced to staff that the company had abandoned its plans to construct a $1 billion corporate campus in Florida for 2,000 employees – the latest front in its bitter dispute with the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis.
Tensions have been rising since the Republican governor revoked Disney’s special tax status, which had been created by a 1967 law that allowed the company to self-govern the roughly 25,000-acre Orlando area where its Walt Disney World theme park complex is located.
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The stripping of its tax breaks was widely seen as retaliation for Disney’s opposition to a new “don’t say gay” law limiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in schools.
But as DeSantis prepares to officially launch his 2024 presidential bid this week, “picking a fight with Mickey Mouse has backfired”, said The Times.
“Poll watchers are sensing a miscalculation,” the paper said, as voters see DeSantis’s showdown with the company as “too much like political theatre”. The Florida public regards his interest in waging “culture wars” as being “less important to them than hard issues such as inflation, breaching the debt ceiling, border security and abortion rights”.
Picking the wrong battle isn’t just a problem for DeSantis but his entire party, said Sacha Pfeiffer, the host of the NPR’s Morning Edition. Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been “pursuing legislative crackdowns on social issues, from abortion and transgender rights to drag performances”, said Pfeiffer, but by doing so the party “risks being out of step with voters”.
The Republican focus on social issues simply isn’t winning votes, said Intelligencer. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, for example, polls show “public opinion on abortion in the US has moved sharply leftward”, the news site said.
Despite this, culture wars are undoubtedly set to be a feature of the 2024 presidential campaign, said Kamy Akhavan, from the University of Southern California.
“Creating outrage often works to win elections,” Akhavan told Newsweek. “The so-called culture wars are a symptom of the bigger problem of polarisation and tribalism that has taken our country hostage.”
In Florida, that polarisation was on display in a recent poll by Yahoo! News and YouGov, which found the state almost entirely split on DeSantis’s run-in with Disney. The poll of 1,584 voters found that 40% of people considered DeSantis’s actions against Disney inappropriate, while 38% felt they were appropriate, with 22% undecided.
Yet as hurricane season approaches, the governor’s “inaction on skyrocketing property insurance rates – one of the most pressing issues here – has drawn criticism”, said The Times, as DeSantis and the Republican-controlled legislature pursue a culture wars-heavy agenda.
Ironically, DeSantis “built his reputation in Florida on competent and smart governance… rather than culture war issues,” said Discourse magazine. “But it seems that in DeSantis’ mind, the culture war strategy is a winning one.”
But is he correct? According to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, he trails Republican frontrunner Donald Trump by more than 30 percentage points.
As Kellyanne Conway, the former senior adviser to Trump, recently told Fox Business, DeSantis “spends way too much time on the culture wars, and that begins with Disney and includes many other things.”
“Woke is important,” Conway said, “but you can’t have that as a replacement for an economic plan.”
