Ron DeSantis and Arsenal Football Club have a shared affliction: they are almost certainly not going to win anything this season. The Florida governor’s nascent presidential bid has been hit by his own declining poll ratings against Donald Trump, and a flurry of endorsements for the former president from legislators from DeSantis’s own state. Arsenal’s title challenge, meanwhile, has been derailed by a series of score draws against teams you might have expected them to win against and a humbling defeat by title rivals Manchester City.
We like to use narratives to make sense of the world: this is why good storytelling can sell everything from cars to workplace etiquette. Narratives also give us the illusion of control: if we, or someone else, had made this choice and not that one, things might have turned out differently. An election or a football match might have been won, instead of lost. But a good narrative can obscure as much as it clarifies and lead to us trying to fix the wrong things.
The go-to story about DeSantis’s difficulties is that he is, to put it charitably, not a people person. Greg Steube, one of the Florida Republicans to choose Trump over DeSantis, told Politico that the Florida governor had spurned “multiple opportunities” to speak to him over the years, unlike the supposedly gregarious Trump, while Anna Paulina Luna, another Florida legislator, said that Trump’s operation is “more personal” than that of the standoffish DeSantis.
There is no question that DeSantis is not the kind of charismatic politician who works a room well. But equally, Ted Cruz endorsed and supported Trump in 2016 after Trump had called Cruz a liar and threatened to personally attack his wife. Personal courtesy towards your colleagues has not, in recent years, been a precondition for winning endorsements in the Republican primaries. DeSantis’s big problem isn’t the narrative that he is cold (though he is) or that he lacks charisma (though he does), but that the most popular Republican politician remains Donald Trump. DeSantis has never had a plausible strategy to dent that popularity without damaging his own as well.
In that respect, DeSantis and Arsenal are in similar positions. Arsenal’s big problems aren’t about the easy stories of grit, desire, or mentality: they are about a thin squad and fine margins. There are broader lessons here than the fate of one football team or one Republican politician: our love of a good tale tends to make us more attracted to explanations based on what we say rather than what we do. DeSantis could have taken more time to appear personable: but what he really needed to do was work out a way of eroding Trump’s standing among voters who neither of them will ever meet face-to-face.
This is far from the first time that a good narrative has distracted attention from what needs to be done. In 2016, Alan Abramowitz’s ‘time for change’ model, which took two variables — US economic performance and the incumbent president’s approval rating — forecast that Hillary Clinton would lose to Donald Trump. Many — myself included — thought that, when push came to shove, the many things that Trump had said would outweigh the stuff that the US economy was actually doing.
In the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer was widely written off in 2021, when the Conservatives enjoyed major victories in the local elections. That the Tory success might have been down to what the government was actually doing at the time — ending Covid restrictions and rapidly rolling out the vaccine — rather than anything the opposition had said was largely ignored.
That’s not to say that narratives don’t matter at all. Opposition politicians should care a lot about what they say because it’s largely all they can do — but in office, governments should remember that they are ultimately better off spending time sweating the details of policy than engaging in trivial rows.
What should we learn from the difficulties of DeSantis and Arsenal? In the UK, we should assume that a Labour lead based largely on economic difficulties and various crises in the public realm may not survive improvements on either front, but is unlikely to be eroded simply because Rishi Sunak is a pleasant and competent man. Any time spent by Conservatives talking up the shortcomings of Keir Starmer is better spent trying to get to grips with the ailing health service and sluggish economy. And the condition of the US economy will continue to matter much more than anything that Donald Trump says between now and the next election. As for Arsenal, no amount of grit or bottle will compensate for the absence of superstar William Saliba at centre-back.