The Florida governor’s strength was being exaggerated earlier this year, and his weakness is being exaggerated now.
The Florida governor’s strength was being exaggerated earlier this year, and his weakness is being exaggerated now.
R ounding up Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles, Axios’s Mike Allen observed the “weird” way in which bad news seemingly works to the former president’s political advantage. Allen concluded, “For the first time in a long time, top Republicans and Democrats are telling us the same thing, in the same words — Trump looks impossible to beat for the Republican nomination.”
The sense that Trump is unstoppable has grown in recent months, due to the outpouring of support following his indictment in the Stormy Daniels case and early stumbles by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, particularly when trying to thread the needle on Ukraine policy. This view has been bolstered by early polling showing Trump well ahead of DeSantis and the rest of the pack. But talking about anybody being inevitable at this point is absurdly premature.
The overstated narrative of DeSantis in free fall is largely a function of the fact that his rise was being overstated at the start of this year as he basked in the glow of his smashing reelection, and many in the party were blaming Trump for Republicans’ abysmal showing in the midterms. But the race has been much more stable to this point than most of the coverage would have you believe. As of this writing, the RealClearPolitics average has Trump up over DeSantis nationally, 52 percent to 23 percent. Last November 15 — the day Trump announced he was running for president — Trump was at 52 percent and DeSantis was at 21 percent in the RealClearPolitics average.
One could point to this as evidence of Trump’s enduring strength, of course. But another way of looking at it is that Trump has been running for president for six months, hammering DeSantis mercilessly on a regular basis, and he has gained no ground. In 2016, any rival who became the focal point of Trump’s attacks cratered within weeks. DeSantis has already shown himself to be more resilient.
Another way in which this race is already different from 2016 is the distance between DeSantis and the next closest candidate. When Trump entered the race in 2015, the top six Republican candidates were within three points of each other — effectively tied. The dynamic that persisted throughout that primary was that all of the non-Trump candidates remained close enough so they all had a plausible case to remain in the race, preventing any one candidate from consolidating voters who were looking for somebody other than Trump. But so far, nobody has challenged DeSantis’s position as the favored alternative. In November, Mike Pence was the next closest at 7 percent, and he is now at 5 percent. Nikki Haley has barely moved the needle in three months of campaigning.
Well before anybody had even entered the race, it was known that DeSantis was facing reelection in 2022 and that he couldn’t immediately announce his candidacy. It was expected that he would have to wait to get at least one more legislative session behind him before he could join the fray. The big debate among political observers was about whether waiting so long would make his eventual entrance too late. Would he be able to survive Trump’s attacks? Would another candidate supplant his position as the leading non-Trump candidate? The fact that DeSantis has taken all of Trump’s shots to date, racked up another series of legislative wins, and stayed in roughly the same position as he was six months ago is something that his team should be happy about ahead of an expected announcement.
It cannot be emphasized enough how early we are in the presidential race. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton was treated as the prohibitive favorite, while Barack Obama was talked about as a flash in the pan, for most of 2007. He came off as unprepared in early policy forums organized by liberal activist groups. Many who remembered his rousing speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004 were disappointed by his relatively subdued town halls, where he gave long, rambling answers. In the meantime, Clinton built up her lead, and nobody was able to lay a glove on her in debates. As late as October 2007 — just over two months before Iowa — Clinton was up 48 percent to 20 percent over Obama nationally — a similar lead to Trump’s over DeSantis, only much later in the cycle.
Of course, this is not to discount the very real challenge DeSantis will face assuming he formally declares his candidacy in the coming weeks. There is no magical force that is going to rid the Republican Party of Trump. He didn’t go away after he lost to Joe Biden, he wasn’t run out of town after the moral abomination of January 6, and Republican voters didn’t decide he was unelectable after his handpicked candidates got obliterated in the 2022 midterms. So far, evidence suggests that his numerous legal challenges have helped him in the primary rather than hurt him. If DeSantis is going to win, he is going to have to earn it. He will not only have to learn to hit back effectively at Trump, but to make a compelling case for why he should be president, especially to people who barely know who he is at this stage in the race.
DeSantis’s strength was being exaggerated earlier this year, and his weakness is being exaggerated now. The reality is that he had an opening then — and still does now. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll, which showed Trump up 36 points over DeSantis if the vote were held now, nonetheless found that 79 percent of Republicans were either considering DeSantis, or “might consider him, but haven’t heard enough.” Saying Trump is “impossible to beat” at this stage is silly. To borrow from Rocco Lampone, beating Trump will be difficult, but not impossible.