Ron DeSantis’ Problem Is Not Ron DeSantis
The last few days have been perhaps the best – in terms of the candidate’s performance – for Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign.
Really. He’s been terrific. Here he is being interviewed by BlazeTV’s Steve Deace last week…
Here was the interview DeSantis did with Tucker Carlson at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa over the weekend, which was exceptional…
And here he was on Fox News Sunday hitting Donald Trump on his record, particularly where the COVID response was concerned…
He’s been very, very good of late. He’s tremendously articulate, unabashedly conservative, he has a ready answer for pretty much every question which checks out with the dominant ideological positions within the Republican electorate, he’s more polished and professional than Trump in expressing a governing philosophy which is firmly within Trump’s political lane.
DeSantis is Trump 2.0 in every respect. DeSantis’ advocates would go further and claim that he can take the Trump movement further than Trump because he understands the mechanisms of government far better and has a lot more relevant executive experience within government.
And he’s had some stellar appearances on TV and streaming media of late in which that message has had a chance to get out.
And yet, despite all of that, there is this…
There is also the news that Team DeSantis has cut back on its campaign staff in an effort to chop down an unsustainable burn rate. Despite raising more money than any other campaign so far this year DeSantis is actually third, behind Donald Trump and Tim Scott, both of whom have over $20 million in the bank, in cash-on-hand numbers among GOP primary contenders. The DeSantis campaign sits on a little over $12 million at present.
So you’ve got a very good candidate, you have an attractive message, there is money behind him, he’s where most of the GOP voters are on the issues…what’s wrong with DeSantis that he isn’t making headway so far?
The answer: nothing.
Mind you, things can change quite a bit between now and the heat of the presidential primaries early next year. This time in 2008 it was expected that you’d have a Hillary Clinton-Rudy Giuliani presidential contest, for example, and this time in 2016 it was expected you’d have a Clinton-Scott Walker matchup. Very often these things don’t work out like they’re supposed to, and as DeSantis noted during the Carlson interview in Iowa, you could very well have a DeSantis-Newsom presidential matchup with not just Trump faltering but the Democrats dumping Joe Biden as well.
But if the chalk holds, and those current polls reflect an iron reality, which is more than possible, Ron DeSantis’ problem isn’t Ron DeSantis.
It’s that he’s not Trump.
Trump has lots of flaws. We all know that. He regularly says and posts things which are not politically useful. He’s wrong more often than you’d like your presidential candidate to be wrong, though typically Trump is wrong on petty things but not the big, substantial ones. Trump’s first term was certainly successful in a host of respects but there were lots of things – the COVID response, as DeSantis pointed out, was a good example – where you’d hope and expect better performance from a GOP president.
But the populist conservative “MAGA” movement, which pre-existed Trump and has roots going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, is nevertheless loyal to Trump. That movement is grateful to Trump for the promises he did keep to it. It believes that the 2020 election was stolen or at least rigged by and for the Deep State, the corrupt and incompetent ruling elite which has so damaged our culture, economics and politics over the past generation or two. And it thinks Trump is owed the opportunity to finish the reform efforts that he began in his first term.
DeSantis’ value proposition to these voters is that he’s capable of taking the Trumpist reform effort further than Trump can, and he’s proven that in Florida. There is nothing wrong with that claim, and he has evidence he can show to back it.
But it’s an age-old sales problem. When the customer is satisfied with the incumbent brand, whether we’re talking about gasoline, milk, blue jeans or an American president, it’s exceptionally difficult to move him or her. And within the GOP electorate, there is a great deal of satisfaction with Trump. Better than half of Republican voters see no reason to change him out as the nominee, because they don’t believe he legitimately lost the 2020 election.
And as such, the DeSantis talking point that Trump can’t win the suburban female voters he lost in 2020 but DeSantis can simply isn’t moving votes into his column.
This might change. As noted above, Joe Biden might find himself displaced as the Democrats’ nominee somehow. By any honest reckoning he lacks the mental acuity and physical condition to continue as president much longer; when his party makes its peace with the idea of changing him out it’s perfectly likely that they’ll make a move on him. And if Biden goes, and someone like Newsom or even Michelle Obama is foisted atop their ticket, the narrative that Trump can’t win against a newer, fresher and more charismatic opponent might overwhelm the Trump loyalism.
Or maybe not. One of Team DeSantis’ challenges is that, thanks to Trump’s non-stop effort to burn DeSantis down as a crypto-globalist Deep State stooge, which is ridiculous but it’s everywhere regardless, the polls which show Trump in a dead heat with Biden show DeSantis in a similar situation. He can’t definitively show that he beats Biden where Trump doesn’t.
And we know that for all the over-the-top defamation the Left has heaped on Trump, from the Russia hoax to the presidential classified documents indictment to the Stormy Daniels payoffs case and whatever else they’ve thrown at him, DeSantis would get it just as heavily. They will smear the GOP nominee nonstop regardless of who it is, and most Republican voters are under no delusion that a more “palatable” nominee would clean up our current dirty politics.
What it’s starting to look like is that the Republican electorate simply doesn’t see a need for Ron DeSantis when they already have Trump. And Ron DeSantis, as good as he is on the stump, can’t do much to change that. It might change, but if it does it will be events-driven through things he can’t control.
This isn’t a call for DeSantis to give up the ghost. If nothing else his current campaign can and should be laying the groundwork for 2028. But it won’t make him president next year without a series of breaks he can’t create through his own efforts.
