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Last November, the pitch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to 2024 Republican primary voters seemed obvious. The party had just woefully underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, thanks in part to the nomination of fringe-right candidates with limited crossover appeal — candidates often hyped or endorsed by Donald Trump.
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So this was the angle DeSantis played. He wasn’t Trump, which held its own appeal to a subset of Republican voters, but he also was going to ensure that the party broke the losing streak it had seen in 2022, 2020, 2018 and (at least in votes) 2016. In each of those elections, the pitch went, the problem was Trump. Get rid of Trump and you start to win, just as DeSantis had done in his own reelection bid last year.
As the months passed, though, a significant problem arose: DeSantis kept losing.
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The governor was running near-even with Trump at the beginning of the year according to 538′s average of national polls, but his position just kept getting weaker and weaker. Part of this was a function of Trump actively returning to campaigning. Part of it was the former president’s leveraging his indictments into his victimhood narrative. Combined with DeSantis’s flawed and fumbling campaign, a yawning gap emerged in the polls. Both nationally and in early states like Iowa, Trump built and retained a wide lead.
On Monday, DeSantis tried a soft reset of his campaign. He appeared at an event alongside Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), who, after months of expectations, finally endorsed his presidential candidacy. During the announcement rally, DeSantis connected with Fox News host Sean Hannity for a live interview (to Hannity’s apparent surprise).
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Hannity pressed DeSantis on the incongruity of Trump’s strong poll numbers despite his legal problems.
“You would think that if a presidential candidate gets indicted four times and arraigned four times, it seems to defy all conventional political gravity that every time that happens, the poll numbers go up,” Hannity said. “How do you explain that?”
Normally, one would expect a trailing candidate to jump at the chance to disparage his oft-indicted opponent. But DeSantis didn’t, instead reiterating his position from earlier this year that Trump was being unfairly targeted, especially in New York.
“I think that he got a lot of sympathy, you know, as a result of that in particular. Maybe some of the others, too,” DeSantis said. “But I think that one really just showed just how ridiculous, quite frankly, the justice system has become when it’s in the hands of leftist politicians and leftist activists.”
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This does answer Hannity’s question to some extent, given that it shows how unwilling DeSantis and others have been to treat the indictments as serious. That’s the central explanation for Trump’s not being damaged by the charges. It is also an inexplicable argument for DeSantis to make now, with his campaign struggling and Iowa looming.
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To Hannity, though, he predicted that Iowa would be the turning point.
“There is, I think, much more fluidity than what some of the national media wants to do. And I think the people on the ground here see that there’s a lot of people that just have not made a final decision,” he insisted. “I think the majority of Iowans will probably make a final decision as we get into early January.”
Maybe, though in 2016, a third of the electorate had made up their minds before the last month — and a plurality of them backed Trump. Back before Trump had won any elections at all, back when polls had him in the low 30s nationally. What’s more, recent polling conducted by Selzer & Co. found that 6 in 10 Trump supporters in Iowa say they won’t change their minds. Only 30 percent of DeSantis voters said the same thing.
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DeSantis’s campaign has for some time now insisted that Iowa will be a turning point in the race, which is the sort of thing you say when you are losing. In a memo sent to donors on Monday, the campaign insisted that Trump would underperform in Iowa, opening the door for the Florida governor.
“Additionally, a Trump loss or even a close battle in the Hawkeye State will reveal his political vulnerabilities and inspire Republican voters across the country who are either in the ‘not for Trump’ or ‘consider Trump and others’ camps,” the memo read, according to a copy seen by the Associated Press. Opponents like former ambassador Nikki Haley were “at best, simply playing the role of spoiler — exponentially increasing the odds of a Trump nomination.”
There is research showing that scammers who claim to be princes from Nigeria do so despite the broad stereotype of such claims being scams because anyone not familiar with that stereotype is going to be an easier mark. Perhaps the idea here is that anyone who thinks Haley’s position is that of “spoiler” for the DeSantis juggernaut might similarly be an easier target for fundraising.
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Consider the trend lines above. DeSantis has trended down nationally and in Iowa while Haley has trended up. His leads over her are narrow; in New Hampshire, he trails. She leads him in South Carolina, though that’s her home state. He used to lead the field in Florida, his home state — but a poll released on Tuesday now shows Trump up by nearly 40.
But this idea that he’s the best bet for November 2024, forged in late 2022, simply doesn’t hold up. Like his rhetoric about Florida’s pandemic response, it doesn’t have the punch it used to.
This week, the New York Times released polling from six battleground states pitting Trump, DeSantis and Haley against President Biden. In all six states, Haley fared better than DeSantis. You can chalk this up to DeSantis being better known and, therefore, more disliked than Haley — but Trump matches him or does better in five of the six states.
We’re talking about narrow margins here, certainly, but there is no evidence that DeSantis has a significant lead on the electability question.
Republicans aren’t convinced anyway. CBS News polling released this week shows that two-thirds of the party think Trump would definitely beat Biden. Less than half say the same of DeSantis.
The dynamics have changed over the last year. DeSantis’s effort to position himself as the more-electable version of Trumpian politics has been eviscerated by his own flailing campaign efforts and Trump’s wide leads. There used to be three tiers to the race: Trump, DeSantis and then everyone else. But DeSantis has fallen back into the chase pack, perhaps too exhausted to once again surge forward.
Instead of admitting that his position has changed, DeSantis continues to insist to Hannity — and his campaign to donors — that he’s the natural alternative to a vulnerable Trump. The reality in the past two months has been that Haley is the natural alternative to a vulnerable DeSantis, and the polls reflect it.
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