Ron DeSantis watched Democrats ride a socialist wave into power while young voters cheered them across the finish line.
Republican consultants keep promising that louder warnings about Marxism will win those kids back.
And DeSantis just pinned the blame on a crowd much closer to home.
DeSantis Named the Republicans Who Do the Left’s Recruiting for Free
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sat down recently with Sage Steele for her show and delivered a midterm postmortem most Republicans in Washington, DC would rather skip.
He started with the obvious. Democrats ran socialists, Republicans spent the fall hollering the word “socialism” at voters, and it flopped.
“Obviously, it didn’t work in this election, and why?” DeSantis asked. “I think the reason is, young people have a very positive view of socialism compared to capitalism.”
DeSantis doesn’t struggle with that choice himself. When a socialist shows up on his ballot, he told Steele, “it’s an easy thing for me to vote no.” But he knows plenty of voters aren’t wired like a Republican governor.
He blamed part of the problem on the universities. Then he aimed somewhere a lot less comfortable.
“What they’re comparing is not free enterprise to socialism,” DeSantis said. “What they’re comparing is how government gets involved in business and you have crony capitalism. So, the best kind of indirect supporters of socialism are some of these corporatist Republicans who propagate these crony policies.”
Indirect supporters of socialism. A Republican governor said that about Republicans.
DeSantis described young people watching lawmakers “trying to bend the government to funnel benefits” to favored companies and industries. Those voters, he said, wonder whatever happened to a competitive market.
“They’re seeing just a handful of companies that have an outsized influence on our economy and on our society, and they see government policy,” he said.
Then he pulled an example straight out of his own party’s playbook. “For example, the Republicans in Washington wanted to do a 10-year effective amnesty for big tech, where states and locals wouldn’t be able to provide any type of regulatory oversight over artificial intelligence.”
Steele knows a thing or two about corporate muscle, by the way. Disney’s ESPN pulled her off the air in the fall of 2021 after she called the company’s vaccine mandate “sick” on Jay Cutler’s podcast. She sued ESPN and Disney, settled, and walked away in August 2023, explaining that she wanted to exercise her “first amendment rights more freely.”
The Kids Booing Capitalism Mostly Met Its Crony Cousin
The survey data backs DeSantis up more than his critics will want to admit.
Researchers at North Dakota State University asked college students to define capitalism before rating it. A majority described a free market. A big chunk of the rest picked a system where corporations lean on grants, special tax breaks, political connections, and special rules to beat their competitors.
Among students who defined capitalism that second way, 61 percent viewed it negatively.
Harvard’s Institute of Politics found only 39 percent of young Americans backing capitalism in its fall 2025 youth poll. Back in 2020, the number sat at 45 percent.
Maybe that’s too tidy. Plenty of kids cheering socialism couldn’t define either word if a professor spotted them the first three letters.
But a 24-year-old who watches politicians hand goodies to the biggest players in town isn’t crazy for thinking somebody rigged the game. He’s just dead wrong about the cure.
Disney Ran Its Own Government for 55 Years Until DeSantis Pulled the Plug
DeSantis doesn’t have to argue this point in the abstract. He already picked a fight with the most famous crony arrangement in his state’s history.
In May 1967, Florida Governor Claude Kirk signed the law creating the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special government Disney sought for the land that became Walt Disney World. The district let the company handle its own emergency services, roads, and building permits. No mom-and-pop motel down the highway ever got a deal like that.
Lawmakers from both parties left it alone for more than half a century. Disney kept a busy checkbook in Tallahassee right up until 2022, when the company suspended its Florida political donations.
That year, Disney came out swinging against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law and announced it wanted the law repealed or struck down. DeSantis answered by asking lawmakers to end the special district, and he signed the dissolution bill on April 22, 2022.
When the state took control of the district in February 2023, DeSantis didn’t mince words. “Today, the corporate kingdom finally comes to an end,” he said. “This is what accountability looks like.”
Disney didn’t go quietly. Before the handover, the outgoing board approved a development deal designed to last until 21 years after the death of the last surviving descendant of King Charles III. Only a company used to writing its own rules would reach for the British royal family to stretch out a land-use agreement.
The two sides eventually settled their legal fight in 2024.
And here’s where the corporate wing of the Republican Party showed its hand. With the brawl at full boil in April 2023, Nikki Haley, then running for President, rolled out the welcome mat. She wrote that her state would “happily accept your 70,000+ jobs if you want to leave Florida,” then added, “SC’s not woke, but we’re not sanctimonious about it either.”
Nobody in that wing ever asked why one company deserved its own government. They only asked how fast they could book the next ribbon cutting.
Critics called the whole thing payback for speech, and the feud did start when Disney attacked a law. That charge would carry more weight if the same company hadn’t sidelined its own anchor for criticizing a vaccine mandate. Disney discovered a deep love for free expression right around the time a governor started looking at its privileges.
Republicans Taught a Generation That Capitalism Means Bailouts
The rot DeSantis described didn’t start with artificial intelligence. Not even close.
The Federal Reserve kept money cheap for years and helped inflate the housing bubble that blew up Wall Street in 2008. Then a Republican administration asked Congress for $700 billion to rescue the banks. The House voted the bailout down 228-205 at the end of September. Four days later, after leadership worked the phones, the House passed it 263-171, and President George W Bush signed it the same day.
Kids who watched their parents lose jobs while bankers kept their bonuses learned a lesson from that. By September 2011, protesters had pitched tents in a Manhattan park for Occupy Wall Street. Five years later, Bernie Sanders packed college arenas from coast to coast.
Those kids are in their 30s now. Their younger brothers and sisters just voted.
And the AI giveaway DeSantis flagged ran off the same script. Washington Republicans tucked a 10-year freeze on state AI laws into the 2025 budget bill, and the Senate stripped it out 99-1 that July after governors and state lawmakers revolted.
The companies chasing that shield are the same Big Tech outfits that throttled conservatives over COVID policy, the 2020 election, and January 6. Even Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, has predicted AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10 to 20 percent inside one to five years. A Left that writes the rules for that technology would use it to punish dissent the way Silicon Valley did in 2020, only faster.
But the Democrat answer to crony capitalism is the biggest crony of them all: Washington itself. Socialism doesn’t spread power around. It piles every favor into one building and hands the keys to the people who already run it.
Look at what voters just bought. Breitbart counted four of the country’s largest cities now living under socialist mayors. Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) ran on Medicare for All, the same government-run model that left Canadians waiting a median of 30 weeks from a doctor’s referral to treatment in 2024, according to the Fraser Institute. The Democratic Socialists of America want public ownership of the largest corporations. That isn’t the end of cronyism. It’s cronyism with a bigger desk and no competitors.
Young voters weren’t the only ones who walked. NBC News exit pollsters found 63 percent of voters calling the decision to take military action against Iran the wrong one, and Democrats won that group 83 to 15. The neoconservatives who sold that war tend to sit at the same donor dinners as the folks hunting for federal favors, and neither crowd seems eager to rethink anything.
DeSantis warned that a country with no “clear contrast between freedom and socialism” will “end up having socialism.” If the choice comes down to cronyism versus a government promising to start “stepping in on behalf of people,” he figures enough voters will take the second option.
He’s probably right about that. Nobody in the Republican cloakroom has volunteered yet to give up the first favor.
Sources: Breitbart News, “Ron DeSantis Calls Out Republicans over ‘Crony Capitalism’”; North Dakota State University, 2026 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey; Newsweek, Harvard Institute of Politics youth poll coverage; Associated Press, “Sage Steele leaves ESPN after settling her lawsuit over COVID-19 vaccine comments”; Boston Globe, Sage Steele departure coverage; WDW Magic, Reedy Creek dissolution coverage; Central Florida Public Media/WFIT, “Governor Ron DeSantis approves bill to dissolve Reedy Creek Improvement District”; Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/AP, “DeSantis’ signature puts Disney district under state control”; The Christian Post, “Nikki Haley invites Disney World to South Carolina amid company’s feud with DeSantis”; Fraser Institute, Waiting Your Turn 2024; NBC News exit polling