Despite the Polls, It’s Too Early to Count DeSantis Out among New Hampshire’s ‘Notorious Political Daters’

A new Saint Anselm College poll finds Ron DeSantis trailing Donald Trump by 28 points in New Hampshire after having fallen ten points since March, but Granite State political observers say it’s too early to count the governor out.

“I think it’s a little early to call New Hampshire and some of the doomsaying about DeSantis I think is a bit premature,” said Dante Scala, a professor of politics at the University of New Hampshire.

“It’s no question though that Trump [has continued to attract] Republican voters here and nationally,” he added. “You can’t discount that. He’s the one to beat. But I do think there’s something to be said for the fact that it takes New Hampshire voters a long time to make up their minds. They may be parked with Trump right now, but it’s possible that . . . they might not be there — not all of them — when it is all said and done.”

DeSantis’s camp painted an optimistic view of its chances in New Hampshire this week as the Florida governor made his second swing through the state.

“We are confident that the governor’s message will resonate with voters in New Hampshire as he continues to visit the Granite State and detail his solutions to Joe Biden’s failures,” DeSantis spokesman Bryan Griffin told the New York Times.

Members of both the Trump and DeSantis campaigns told the outlet they’ve set their sights on New Hampshire with the expectation that the state could offer an early chance to clear the crowded Republican field.

“Iowa’s cornfields used to be where campaigns were killed off, and now New Hampshire is where campaigns go to die,” said Jeff Roe, the chief strategist for DeSantis’s Never Back Down PAC.

New Hampshire house majority leader Jason Osborne, who has endorsed DeSantis, said this week: “People who are talking like this fight is over know nothing about New Hampshire politics or actual primary voters. Stop reading the national press. Come knock on some doors.”

Osborne told me earlier this month that he has chosen to support DeSantis because, given that he’s the Republican caucus leader in New Hampshire, it’s his job to get as many Republicans elected as possible, “and one thing I’ve discovered through a number of election cycles at this point is that you need a strong top of the ticket because the average voter doesn’t know who their state representative is.”

“Seeing the precipitous drop in support for President Trump makes me very worried about the 2024 outlook if we can’t get winners at the top of the ballot, and governor DeSantis in particular has demonstrated an excellent track record at being able to secure reelection wins by historic margins, as well as demonstrating a willingness —  and an enthusiastic willingness — to support the down-ballot candidates as well,” he said.

Political analyst Scott Spradling told me there’s “plenty of reason for the DeSantis camp to be optimistic,” as polling shows he has been the consistent second-place candidate and things in New Hampshire are “not shored up.”

“We’re having this conversation in late June and Granite Staters are notorious political daters, and they don’t decide who to marry until the last second,” he said.

“The polls right now are a decent starting point to get kind of a sense of whether you’re known at all, what people know about you, and maybe a little bit of a guide of first impressions, but we are a finicky group and New Hampshire voters are going to make plenty of visits with plenty of candidates, oftentimes more than once, before they decide who they really like,” Spradling added.

Christopher Galdieri, a politics professor at Saint Anselm College who is not affiliated with the school’s polling work, offered a less rosy portrait of DeSantis’s chances.

“New Hampshire voters are kind of independent-minded, kind of persnickety. They kind of like throwing curveballs. Think about Hillary Clinton coming back here in 2008 after she lost in Iowa to Barack Obama and that sort of thing,” he told me. “But it’s tough for me to think of a candidate who has the kind of lead that Trump’s got who has not wound up winning not just the primary but the nomination.”

While DeSantis has been “built up as a possible Trump-slayer” for the last year, “so far, the more he’s run and the more he’s been up here, the worse he’s doing.”

“Anything can happen — but I’m not expecting that to happen,” he said of a surprise upset.

“I think one thing with DeSantis is he has not gotten great marks as a retail politician,” he said. “I don’t think that’s actually magic here, but I do think it’s something people care about.”

“The other thing is the primary is a lot closer than we think,” he added. “It’s almost July. It’s entirely likely that the primary will take place in January. So there’s actually not that much time left for a candidate who has sort of stumbled out of the gate to turn things around and reestablish his footing with voters.”

Though the uncertainty of Trump’s various legal woes could work in DeSantis’s favor, he said.

The Trump–DeSantis battle was center stage as the pair held dueling events in New Hampshire on Tuesday. DeSantis’s scheduled appearance in Hollis led the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women’s president to put out a statement chastising the governor for scheduling an event in the Granite State around the same time as its Lilac Luncheon, which was headlined by Trump.

“This attempt to pull focus from our Lilac Luncheon only diminishes the efforts of Republican women in New Hampshire who are volunteers, working hard to provide opportunities for our membership to have access to all of the candidates,” the group’s president Elizabeth Girard said.

Two members of the group later resigned over the statement, saying it had not been agreed upon by all members. Kate Day, who resigned from her role as public-relations chair for the group, said the statement violated the group’s commitment to staying neutral in the primary.

After the dust settled, DeSantis earned high marks from the New Hampshire Journal on his retail politicking, with the outlet reporting that he was “working the room hard” on Tuesday and that he took ten questions from the crowd of 200 people.

And a recent NBC poll offered another bit of good news for DeSantis after finding that DeSantis leads President Biden by six points in swing states, while Trump trails Biden by two points.

Nationwide, DeSantis and Biden are tied at 47 percent in a head-to-head matchup, while Biden leads Trump 49 percent to 45 percent.

Trump still leads DeSantis 51 percent to 22 percent nationwide, however.

While that poll suggests Trump may not be the best candidate the GOP can select to defeat Biden, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reportedly drew ire from Trump’s allies and advisers on Tuesday when he made the same point aloud, saying he doesn’t know whether the former president is the “strongest” 2024 candidate.

“Can he win that election? Yeah he can,” McCarthy said when asked about Trump’s 2024 prospects during an interview on CNBC on Tuesday. “The question is, is he the strongest to win the election — I don’t know that answer.”

McCarthy’s remarks are “not going down well in Trump world,” according to New York Times political reporter Jonathan Swan.

Meanwhile other candidates talked foreign policy this week — some better than others.

Nikki Haley delivered a foreign-policy speech at the American Enterprise Institute and laid out her plan to take on the Chinese Communist Party.

“President Donald Trump deserves credit for upending this bipartisan consensus. He made both parties take off their blinders. Despite the divisions in our politics today, both parties are now more clear-eyed about the Chinese threat than they have been in a very long time. That’s a good thing,” she said, but added that Trump was “almost singularly focused on our trade relationship with China” and “did too little about the rest of the Chinese threat.”

Among her ideas are to ban all propaganda centers and eliminate federal funding for U.S. universities that take Chinese money, to push Congress to revoke permanent normal trade relations if the flow of fentanyl does not end, to block Chinese purchases of American companies specializing in advanced technology, to strengthen military ties to Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, and the Philippines, and to “get Europe to recognize that China threatens it as much as us.”

Miami mayor Francis Suarez made an embarrassing gaffe on Tuesday when radio host Hugh Hewitt asked if he planned to talk about the Uyghurs while campaigning. Suarez replied, “What’s a Uyghur?”

“I didn’t recognize the pronunciation my friend Hugh Hewitt used,” Suarez later explained after the moment went viral.

Around NR

• President Biden could come to regret his all-in approach to making pro-abortion rhetoric a centerpiece of his campaign, John McCormack warns.

In 2022, House GOP candidates — who are pro-life — cumulatively won more votes than their Democratic opponents in each battleground state: Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. The GOP’s failure to take back the Senate had more to do with kooky Trump-backed candidates than it had to do with the issue of abortion. In Georgia, for example, Republican governor Brian Kemp won his rematch against Stacey Abrams by nearly eight points after signing into law a six-week limit on abortion, but scandal-plagued GOP Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker trailed Democratic senator Raphael Warnock by a point on election night.

• Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis unveiled his plan to address the border crisis on Monday during a trip to Eagle Pass, Texas, an area that has been hard hit by the migrant crisis. The plan includes steps to secure the border — including by ending catch-and-release, reimposing the Remain in Mexico policy, and building a border wall — as well as methods to hold cartels accountable and a plan to work with states to enforce the law.

More from me here.

• Jeffrey Blehar is still waiting for Chris Christie to explain why he was the first major 2016 presidential candidate to endorse Donald Trump. Blehar notes that an explanation was missing from Christie’s recent speech before the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference despite the remarks’ being devoted to “the subject of character and admission of mistakes.”

Chris Christie seems to believe that his very act of running for the presidency is some kind of moral expiation, an acknowledgment of his mistake about Trump’s fitness for office. “I guessed catastrophically wrong about this man, so here’s my way of saying I’m sorry: more of me!” That was the unavoidable subtext of this speech, which in its particulars was laudable but which could not help but turn to ashes in the mouth of the specific man delivering it.

• Rich Lowry suggests an in-between approach where candidates are willing to attack Trump without actually saying his name “might make sense for now, but it’s hard to see how it works in the long run.” Christie, who was booed for his criticism of Trump at the Road to Majority conference, is “going to get credit from some voters for his willingness to speak his mind and stand up for what he believes,” Lowry writes.

• The DeSantis campaign could come to regret flirting with vaccine skepticism, Noah Rothman warns. The DeSantis War Room attacked Trump for being too supportive of Covid vaccines after the former president’s sit-down interview with Fox News host Bret Baier last week.

To whom is this sort of agitation appealing? . . . According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s polling from late March, only 40 percent of Republicans describe themselves as either “partially vaccinated” or “unvaccinated.” Other polling suggests that older Republican voters — a demographic that accounts for a disproportionate share of Republican primary voters and is disproportionately “MAGA” in its political sympathies — are far more likely to self-report having been boosted. Why give these voters any more reason to doubt the seriousness of Trump’s most viable challenger in the race?

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