Hell no. Golden State Republicans like Fred Whitaker, chairman of the influential Orange County Republican Party, say DeSantis should be talking trash about California. 

“Of course! As he should!” said Whitaker, noting that DeSantis raised more than any other speaker in history — $740,000 — for the local party when he spoke in Anaheim earlier this year. 

Mocking California won’t hurt DeSantis with California Republicans because he’s channeling the frustration many of them feel about the state and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. They are largely politically impotent in a state where there are twice as many Democrats, there’s a supermajority of Dems in the state Legislature and where voters haven’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006.

“California Republicans are incredibly unhappy with the way California is,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney who is the state party’s Republican National Committee committeewoman and has provided legal counsel to former President Donald Trump and former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson. “We see Gavin Newsom as embodying all that is wrong with the left in this country. It would be anything but hurtful to (DeSantis).” 

So far, none of the 12-member California GOP House delegation has endorsed a 2024 candidate, but Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove (Sacramento County) told The Chronicle in March that “I’m leaning toward DeSantis.” DeSantis topped a February Berkeley IGS Poll of California GOP voters, garnering 37% of the vote to Trump’s 29%, with no others winning double digit support. That survey, however, was taken while DeSantis was riding high after re-election — and before a series of missteps tanked his national polling numbers. The latest RealClearPolitics.com amalgamation of major polls shows Trump with 56% nationally to DeSantis’ 19%. 

It will be interesting to watch whether any California Republicans publicly back DeSantis’ more extreme conservative positions — like book banning, anti-LGBTQ stances and legislation to ban abortions after six weeks — that could imperil them with moderate voters in California. And will any rip DeSantis for taking time off from his day job as governor — just months after being re-elected in November, like Newsom — to campaign around the country? They regularly jam Newsom for his out-of-state political excursions. 

Few politicians rip Newsom with as much gusto as DeSantis. He will almost certainly tweak his West Coast rival Wednesday when he is scheduled to announce his presidential campaign during an online “discussion” with Twitter CEO and inveterate California basher Elon Musk. The conversation before Musk’s 140 million Twitter followers will be moderated by San Francisco tech entrepreneur David Sacks, a one-time Newsom donor who later became a top contributor to the failed 2021 attempt to recall Newsom. 

No doubt they will discuss one of DeSantis’ favorite talking points: How California’s population is declining while Florida’s is increasing. Like many politicians, DeSantis personalized the migration as opposed to attributing it to what it was really about: a set of complex economic forces. 

“For the entire history of California, they never lost population,” DeSantis said last year, “until this recent governor got into office. And now they’re hemorrhaging population. It’s almost hard to drive people out of a place like California given all of their natural advantages. And yet they are finding a way to do it.”

And no set of Newsom rips are complete without an allusion to the Californian’s dinner at the bougie French Laundry restaurant during the pandemic. At one point, DeSantis’ staff was referring to Newsom as “Governor French Laundry.” 

“As he was locking down his citizens, he would then go and have these extravagant dinners at the French Laundry to basically rub his citizens’ noses in the fact that he was treating them like peasants,” DeSantis said.

And then there’s DeSantis’ ongoing war on woke. Or what he interprets as being woke. 

In March, when DeSantis made the pilgrimage to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley that every GOP White House aspirant must undertake, he said, “I think these liberal states have gotten it wrong, and why are they getting it wrong? I think it all goes back to ideology,” he said. “And it goes back to this woke mind virus that’s infected the left and all these other institutions. I mean, think about the way they have governed their states.” 

Florida, on the other hand, “is where woke goes to die,” as DeSantis regularly intones. DeSantis likes to talk about “woke” so much that he said the word more often than he did the word “Florida” during his election night victory speech last November. 

The bad news for DeSantis is that most Americans view “woke” in a much more positive light than he does. 

A USA Today poll in March found most voters, 56%, view the term “woke” positively — “to be informed, educated on and aware of social injustices.” That’s essentially how Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland defines it. Lee’s name and explanation literally appears in the Merriam-Webster dictionary next to the definition of “woke.”

“Being woke means understanding all the issues each and every day and fighting against injustices each and every day,” Lee told me in 2021 on an episode of my “It’s All Political” podcast.

DeSantis also has sparred with Newsom over their dueling definitions of “freedom.” 

DeSantis uses “freedom” largely in economic and cultural terms to mean the absence of taxes and government mandates.  It’s a familiar refrain in conservative circles. In 2005, President George W. Bush used the word “freedom” 27 times in his 21-minute inaugural address, according to an NPR transcript. That’s seven more times than Martin Luther King Jr. did in his seminal “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

Newsom links “freedom” with fairness. California is a land of freedom, Newsom asserts, because people have a shot at success no matter their background or beliefs.

“We’re living in a society where not everybody is being treated fairly,” Newsom said during his election night victory speech last fall. There is “demonization coming from the other side — these red states where there’s a cruelty, talking down to people, bullying people, making them feel lesser. That cruelty is extended by flying migrants to an island and celebrating that as a fleeting victory at others’ expense.” (That was a reference to the DeSantis administration chartering two planes in September to fly 48 migrants from San Antonio — from red state Texas — to the tony Massachusetts enclave of Martha’s Vineyard to call attention to President Biden’s immigration policy.)

Newsom mentions DeSantis without prompting in many of his public comments. Last year on Independence Day, Newsom funded ads in Florida that said that “freedom is under attack” by leaders there (guess who?) who have banned books and passed laws to restrict women’s access to abortions. Newsom shreds DeSantis for Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which forbids discussing sexual orientation in early grades, to its banning of dozens of math textbooks for alleged references to critical race theory.

Those attacks from Newsom may help DeSantis among California Republicans. 

Just like DeSantis’ constant mockery of California might help him with those same voters who share his beliefs. 

“It’s not going to turn off any Republicans, maybe just a tiny handful that aren’t really focused,” said Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale (Butte County), who supported Donald Trump twice but is undecided now. “Maybe just a tiny handful that aren’t really focused.”

DeSantis’ official entry into the race means that the Republican presidential campaign is heating up. And it means that candidates will soon be coming to the state that will likely offer more delegates than any others, giving California Republican voters the most influence they’ve had in choosing their party’s nominee in a generation.

Soon it will be hard for any voter not to be focused on the race. 

Reach Joe Garofoli: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @joegarofoli