What He’s Made Of

F or political junkies, today is a big day. One is tempted to shout, like boxing-ring announcer Michael Buffer: “Let’s get ready to rumble!” Donald Trump’s most credible challenger on the Republican side is entering the race.

It’s a moment when the narrative is going to shift, but expect some resistance. For months, Trump supporters, professional Never Trumpers who depend on Trump’s persistence for their paychecks, and mainstream-media outlets who view Trump as ratings gold and an electoral curse on Republicans have faked up a narrative that Ron DeSantis is stumbling, that he’s the next Scott Walker, an overhyped governor who doesn’t have the stuff to translate onto the national stage.

First it was that he gave Tucker Carlson an explanation of his views on Ukraine, namely that it wasn’t a chief American priority. Next it was a rumor of a fund-raiser getting spooked. Then Donald Trump was wooing Florida legislators to endorse him. Soon we were told that the governor’s fight with Disney was “dragging on” and making him look bad. Fake, fake, fake, fake. These stories, mostly sourced to DeSantis rivals and then repeated endlessly, have created a psychic whirlpool on social media meant to sink the DeSantis candidacy before it begins. Today this effort is shown to have failed, and the dynamic tide will shift quickly once DeSantis announces and begins energetically campaigning.

Ukraine doesn’t rate as a top-five issue among Republican voters, and DeSantis’s “no blank checks” answer offends nobody outside of a think tank or political nonprofit. DeSantis is expected to launch with eye-popping fund-raising numbers. Before launch he’s secured more than a third of the available endorsements in Iowa’s state legislature. He seems to have the support of Bob Vander Plaats, a potential Iowa kingmaker. And he has the backing of 99 out of 113 Republican lawmakers in the Florida state legislature. As for Disney, while the New York Times headline made it look like the Mouse had canceled the movement of 2,000 jobs from California to Florida for political reasons, reporters on the Disney beat quickly corrected the record. Former CEO Bob Chapek’s plan to move those jobs to Florida was widely opposed within the company because it would take creatives away from the Hollywood studio. If anything, Disney’s and Pixar’s lackluster performance at the box office, slashed revenue projections for Disney+, along with lower foot traffic at the parks indicate that perhaps it is conservatives alienated by Disney who are, in part, driving the company to make unwelcome decisions.

It took a lot of willfulness on the part of the media to forget that in a year when many Republicans underperformed, DeSantis beat expectations in Florida by roughly ten points and won the state by 20 altogether.

The only part of the “DeSantis slipping” narrative that has any weight is his slip in the national polls since Trump announced his campaign and then spent five months trying to abort the DeSantis campaign. But scratch a little deeper, and the fundamentals haven’t changed.

Among Republicans, DeSantis has similar favorability ratings to Donald Trump, despite being less well known. In fact, that is also an advantage for DeSantis because almost 30 percent of adults in February 2023 didn’t have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the Florida governor. These are people he can win over. Trump’s numbers are already locked in. Early polling has shown that Trump has a weakness with Evangelical voters, who were so crucial in supporting his first nomination. Trump also has a weakness with Republicans who have college degrees and with upwardly mobile suburban voters, the ones with the highest propensity to vote in primaries. These are voters who had trouble supporting Ted Cruz in 2016 as a Trump alternative, but they seem to show no hesitation about DeSantis.

Trump is running an incumbent campaign on the faulty premise that he won the 2020 election and was cheated out of the prize. But incumbents who command less than 90 percent of the party tend to lose in the end. Trump’s most favorable polls have him nowhere near that mark, which means that voters in the early states are going to give other candidates a serious look and a serious chance.

Many Republicans nationwide started to see DeSantis as their leader even while Trump was still in office. The launch of his campaign will show that, indeed, he’s not afraid of a confrontation with Donald Trump, and it will be an occasion for reminding so many Republican voters of the conversations they had about moving to Florida during the pandemic. DeSantis will be able to make a generational argument: America desperately needs a fresher-faced leadership class. He’ll be able to make an argument about competence. Don’t be surprised if the candidate who spent months blowing hot air starts to look winded when the race finally begins.