On the menu today: We have made it to the last month of 2023. In one of the more baffling and likely self-destructive moves of the 2024 presidential cycle, the Florida Democratic Party has decided it just doesn’t need to hold a presidential primary this year. Now, Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips aren’t exactly political goliaths, but in a cycle where one of the Democratic messages is that your vote for the wrong candidate is a potential threat to American democracy — pause for irony — there’s something spectacularly perfect about a state party concluding that the only way to preserve democracy is to cancel an expected primary election. Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign has, so far, not worked out as he and his biggest supporters hoped. Am I supposed to pretend that hasn’t happened in order to make you feel better?
Florida Democrats Make a Strange Move
You can argue, accurately, that barring some unexpected health issue, President Joe Biden is just about certain to be the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. Marianne Williamson — remember her? — is getting about 9 percent in most national polls. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is off to run as an independent. And Dean Phillips, a relatively obscure Minnesota congressman who stepped in around the time Kennedy departed the Democratic primary, is currently at 3.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of recent national polling.
But there’s a big difference between holding a primary that the incumbent is expected to win easily and not holding a primary at all. And the Florida Democratic Party — which is likely full of people who would tell you, earnestly, that the future of democracy is at stake in 2024 — just decided that it doesn’t need to hold a primary and will automatically award all the state’s delegates to the president. Florida has more than 4.4 million registered Democrats, and the state party is apparently hell-bent on making sure they don’t get any say in the party’s nominee.
“Democracy dies in darkness”? Heck, apparently, you can watch it get smothered with a pillow right under the Florida sunshine:
Under state law, it is left up to the parties to decide who makes the primary ballot. The deadline for parties to submit a list of approved candidates to state election officials is Thursday.
But Florida Democrats acted before then, sending a notice on Nov. 1 to the state that had Biden as the only primary candidate. Phillips had entered the race a few days earlier, and self-help guru Marianne Williamson had been campaigning for months by then. Under state law, if a party only signs off on one candidate for the primary ballot, the contest is not held.
Florida’s primary is held March 19, which puts it in line behind Super Tuesday and several other large states such as California and Texas. It is expected to allocate 250 delegates.
In his statement, Phillips called the handling of the process by the Florida Democrats a “blatant act of electoral corruption” and demanded Biden “condemn and immediately address” it.
The Biden campaign did not provide a comment for this story.
Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, contended the party followed its “standard process” that was outlined on its website.
“We are dismayed by Dean Phillips’ conspiratorial and inappropriate comments comparing the state of Florida to the Iranian regime as part of his knee-jerk reaction to long-established procedures,” Fried said. “This is unbecoming of someone running for higher office.”
If, in the words of Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried herself, Phillips is “someone running for higher office,” why is the Florida Democratic Party pretending that there is only one candidate running for the Democratic nomination?
As Ben Domenech is fond of saying, “Consider the possibility that we are led by idiots.”
No one ever said you had to be a genius to be a state party chair, but there’s a strong possibility that Fried is the dullest knife in a cutlery drawer of varying degrees of sharpness. She has a bad habit of insisting that Governor Ron DeSantis is like Adolf Hitler “in a lot of ways,” earning herself a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League of Florida. She ran a gubernatorial campaign on the #Resistance theme and got absolutely crushed in the primary against that whirling dervish of raw charisma, Charlie Crist.
And now, to defend the state party’s decision that insists Phillips is not a candidate for higher office, she publicly called him “someone running for higher office.”
Wait, it gets worse:
Eden Giagnorio, a spokesperson for the Florida Democratic Party, provided a different timeline. She said that Phillips’ campaign first reached out to the state party on Nov. 22 requesting a conversation. Two days ago, she said the campaign spoke with the party’s executive director and “we learned for the first time that they were asking about this, which is not enough time because we have to give our state executive committee 10 days’ notice to convene them to vote.”
However, Giagnorio acknowledged, “There’s no requirement for presidential candidates to do anything to get on the ballot.” She said there are no plans to add additional names to the list of approved candidates by today’s deadline.
The state party can’t argue that Phillips didn’t meet the requirements to appear on the ballot, because there are no specified requirements to appear on the ballot.
Canceling the primary doesn’t even make much sense as an effort to spare Biden some sort of embarrassment from a disappointing performance. I can’t find any polling of a Democratic presidential primary in Florida, but there’s little reason to think that Biden’s numbers among Democrats in the Sunshine State would be all that different than his national numbers. Yes, Biden’s support is fairly tepid in the abstract, but once you put his name alongside the other potential options, the overwhelming majority of Democrats shrug their shoulders and choose to roll the dice on the octogenarian for another four years. It appears that the only candidates that Democrats like even less than Biden are . . . everyone else who’s willing to run. And that’s why the Democrats’ dissatisfaction with Biden has been somewhat overhyped for much of the past year. When push comes to shove, they’ll fall in line behind the old guy.
In fact, even if you take Biden’s name off the ballot and only leave the other options, most Democrats will still choose Biden. In New Hampshire, where Biden won’t appear on the ballot because the state is violating DNC rules by voting too early, nearly two-thirds of Democrats say they intend to write Biden’s name in.
DeSantis
Some Ron DeSantis fans didn’t like this Corner post from yesterday, and contended I sound like I’m “throwing in the towel.” No, no votes have been cast, and I encourage you to support the candidate you like the best. We’ve seen political fortunes change quite quickly; on the night of February 22, 2020, Joe Biden had finished fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, and a distant second in Nevada. By March 2, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar had dropped out and endorsed Biden, along with Beto O’Rourke, as the mainstream of the Democratic Party united behind Biden to stop Bernie Sanders.
But what am I supposed to do, lie to you to make you feel better? (I suspect some people would answer, “Yes!”) DeSantis began this primary in a competitive second place, polling nationally around 30 percent in March. Lately, he’s been anywhere from 8 percent to 19 percent. I hear, “Jim, you can’t trust the polls!” Eh, polls can have bad samples, but I don’t believe that there’s a vast conspiracy involving every major polling company to hide the fact that DeSantis is neck and neck with or ahead of Trump.
The point of the Corner post was that as much as DeSantis has run a flawed campaign, it’s hard to believe he’s run one so bad that it justifies half to two-thirds of his supporters jumping off the bandwagon. We are witnessing a primary where none of the usual consequences to actions apply. Trump’s poll numbers jumped among Republicans when he got indicted. Trump goes on unhinged tirades on Truth Social, and they have no discernible negative effect on his polling support. DeSantis sends a plane to get Floridians out of Israel, and if GOP voters find that admirable, they’ve hidden it well. One of Trump’s first reactions to the Hamas massacre was to narcissistically whine about how Netanyahu disappointed him, but there’s no sign that any supporter of Trump had any problem with that. Iowa governor Kim Reynolds gave DeSantis her much-coveted endorsement. So far, there’s no sign that DeSantis’s support in Iowa has changed much one way or the other.
There were a whole lot of Twitter folks speculating that the post represented National Review’s encouraging people to support Nikki Haley, or telling DeSantis to quit, or that I or the institution I work for are trying to undercut the Florida governor.
You really don’t need to be a Kremlinologist to discern some sort of secret or coded signal in what I write. I mean what I say, and I say what I mean. On paper, Trump is running a lousy campaign — hosting few events and rallies, skipping debates, offering his usual tired rants on a social-media platform that is usually only read by his own diehard supporters. Trump’s core message is that he’s a victim and he had the presidency stolen from him, and also that only he can outsmart the Democrats and fix the country’s problems. He promises to build ten new “Freedom Cities” and introduce flying cars, when a lot of us would have preferred to see, oh, more than the 69 miles of new border fencing built during his first term. Everyone else grapples with how to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; Trump blithely assures us he could bring peace to the region within 24 hours.
And yet, about half the GOP electorate loves all of this. DeSantis — and for that matter, Haley and the rest — are doing what you’re supposed to do if you want to be the GOP nominee and president. And at best, only half the party is willing to give them a serious look.
For what it’s worth, our Jeff Blehar thinks DeSantis mopped the floor with Gavin Newsom in their debate last night:
Ron DeSantis came as prepared as I’ve ever seen anyone for a political debate in recent years and delivered a rather surprising thrashing to Newsom. He was as relentless as a jackhammer when it came to comparing facts between both states, and deployed his factoids with real skill and timing, with a tone that generally didn’t seem misplaced — though neither governor looked good when talking over one another (Newsom was aggressive about it, frequently talking over Hannity as well, which won’t earn him any criticism from his intended audience).
Newsom seems not to have thought he was going to be seriously challenged (inconceivable) or was particularly determined to brazenly lie, elide facts, and cherry-pick in his attempts at both defense and offense. A number of times it was clear he was intentionally doing Trump’s dirty work, leveling facially absurd attacks at DeSantis like he was a “lockdown governor” (imagine this attack from Gavin Newsom) that nevertheless echo talking points from Trump and his acolytes. But most of the time he was on the defensive — California’s record is notably difficult to defend in recent years, especially in this setting — and he seemed unprepared to do anything except either baldly lie about statistics displayed on-screen or employ clumsy deceit. His sleight of hand on California’s murder rate versus Florida’s was emblematic: Hannity literally displayed California’s murder rate versus Florida’s, and Newsom proceeded to simply pretend the statistics didn’t exist, and instead tried to pretend Florida was worse than California because of gun-murder rates. DeSantis was having none of it, and pointed out just how ridiculous a dodge it was. Then he said that DeSantis considering pardons for people accused of crimes on January 6 was an equally as important public-safety issue as armed robbery, rape, and murder.
ADDENDUM: Noah Rothman observes that, day by day and week by week, the Biden administration is becoming less supportive of Israel’s military operation against Hamas, and wonders what Biden will do once Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli government refuse some sort of American demand to complete military operations. Noah concludes by asking, “So, what’s the play? Because it really doesn’t sound like the White House has thought this through.”
Do Biden and his team ever sound like they’ve thought anything through?