John Davidson asks at the Federalist, “Does DeSantis Know What Time It Is? Didn’t Sound Like It In That NBC Interview.” Responding to DeSantis’s assertion that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and was in large part responsible for allowing Covid-driven rules changes that helped Democrats collect a lot of mail-in votes, this is Davidson’s thesis:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have lost his way, unable to articulate a clear position on the most important issue of the primaries, which is what happened in 2020. . . . No issue is more important for DeSantis (and the entire GOP field) than the 2020 election, and if he wants to be the nominee he’d better come up with a better answer than, “Yeah 2020 had some problems but they were all Trump’s fault.” As I argued in these pages recently, DeSantis has zero chance of winning the primary unless he acknowledges unequivocally that 2020 was rigged and vows to go to war against the system that rigged it. . . . No candidate claiming to represent Republican voters in 2024 can do less than acknowledge, without the ritual throat-clearing demanded by the regime press, that a coordinated effort to oust Trump — or, failing that, gut his presidency — was underway in 2016 well before Trump even took office.
Now, it is possible that Davidson is right that no Republican can win the nomination without focusing obsessively on relitigating the 2020 election. But what is a nomination for? My own view — and maybe I’m in the minority here — is that the point of getting nominated is to win the general election. But we have copious evidence from the 2022 cycle that candidates who look backward and run on stolen-election theories almost uniformly lost in 2022, even in otherwise winnable elections, and even when the candidates themselves had some talent.
More broadly, in the history of American presidential elections (with the arguable exception of 1828), parties and candidates never win by challenging how an incumbent won his office or what he did before then — whether that “before” is Barack Obama’s birthplace or George W. Bush’s National Guard service. You beat an incumbent by focusing on what he has done in office. Davidson does not even bother making an argument to the contrary, or referring at all to the general election or to how these arguments played in 2022.
If DeSantis runs a campaign built around the 2020 election, it won’t matter if he wins the nomination or not — Joe Biden will be reelected. DeSantis has his own message about why he thinks the 2020 election was poorly managed in other states by contrast to how Florida runs elections, but by giving answers intended to disarm the issue and pivot to other topics, he’s showing that he does know what time it is — specifically, what year it is. It’s not 2020 anymore, and you can’t win elections by pretending that it is.