As I noted in a previous post, Ted Cruz ran as a pious evangelical in 2016, presumably because he thought people like him made up at least a plurality of the GOP electorate. That wasn’t an unreasonable assumption–I believed it back then, as well–but it was incorrect. Trump was running alone in a white nationalist lane, and it turned out he had the plurality. That plurality, if anything, has increased in size since the Trump presidency.
For the most part, DeSantis, unlike Cruz, has been running in the Trump lane; he has portrayed himself as a more competent and electable version of Trump, not something fundamentally different. In recent days, however, he has started to focus a bit on abortion in an effort to distinguish himself from the man on golf cart. If this continues, the Cruz analogy will make more sense.
There are two glaring problems with running in Cruz country. First, Cruz lost. Second, if you’re a GOP voter and you are motivated mostly by your feelings on abortion, why would you pick DeSantis over Mike Pence? The Cruz lane is already occupied.