Ron DeSantis’s (almost) impossible task
Byron York
RON DESANTIS’S (ALMOST) IMPOSSIBLE TASK. What is the hardest job in politics? Without doubt, at this moment, the hardest job in politics is running against Donald Trump in a Republican presidential primary.
Why is it so hard? Because if you want to appeal to the broad majority of Republican voters, you will have to say that Trump was a great president, that you strongly support his policies and would like to see them return to the White House. And then you have to say: But it’s time to move on. And then Trump himself says: What do you mean, move on? I’m the man who made those policies. And I’m right here. Vote for me.
It’s an impossible dilemma. This is the first time in living memory that a former president is running in a primary for his party’s nomination. Trump is promising GOP voters a return to an administration that many were very happy with. And his challengers are saying, yes, it was great — but let’s move on.
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The job is to convince Republican primary and caucus voters that no matter how happy they were under a Trump presidency, it would not be a good idea to have another Trump presidency. And it is not at all clear that any candidate will be able to do that.
2024 is just the second time any Republicans have run against Trump. In the first go-around, the 2016 primaries, no GOP candidate figured out how to compete against him successfully. Now, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) leads a group of declared and potential opponents who will run the second GOP campaign against Trump. There is no guarantee they will figure out how to beat him, either. So far, the effort is not going well.
In recent polls, taken after Trump’s indictment by a local prosecutor in New York, Trump has actually increased his lead over the Republican field. One month ago, Trump had a lead of 15.9 percentage points over DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Now, Trump has a 28.7-point lead over the Florida governor. Everybody else — Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott — is below 5%. All except Pence and Haley are below 2%.
It’s fair to say that DeSantis, at the moment by far the strongest candidate against Trump with a solid record of governing in Florida, is flailing about for a way to run effectively against the former president. A pro-DeSantis super PAC, run by former Trump official Ken Cuccinelli, has just released an ad hitting back at Trump over Trump’s charge that DeSantis would take away voters’ Social Security. It’s a conventional attack ad, in this case a counterattack ad, but it will likely not sit well with a lot of Republicans who associate attacks on Trump with Democrats.
Recently, the Republican strategist and communications guru Frank Luntz published an article in the New York Times titled, “How to Make Trump Go Away.” The title alone, as well as the publication it was in, would turn off huge swaths of the Republican primary electorate. Reporting on the results of two dozen focus groups, Luntz offered several bits of advice to Trump opponents. The most important was how to deal with Trump’s presidency. This was it:
Compliment Mr. Trump’s presidency while you criticize the person. Trump focus groups are incredibly instructive in helping differentiate between the passionate support most Trump voters feel for his efforts and his accomplishments and the embarrassment and frustration they have with his comments and behavior. For example, most Republicans like his tough talk on China, but they dislike his bullying behavior here at home. So applaud the administration before you criticize the man. “Donald Trump was a great president, but he wasn’t always a great role model. Today, more than ever, we need character — not just courage. We don’t need to insult people to make a point or make a difference.”
That will certainly work with some GOP voters, just like it worked with some GOP voters three or four years ago. Back then, some complained about Trump’s tweets as a way of making a larger criticism that he was too coarse and confrontational for their taste. Now, they say they like Trump’s policies but don’t want to return to “the drama” that accompanied Trump’s time in office. It’s basically a new way of saying the same thing.
The question is, as it always has been, how big is the group of Republicans who feel that way? Big enough to win a GOP nomination for a Trump opponent? At the moment, more than a year before the 2024 Republican convention, the answer is probably no.
Besides Luntz’s advice to criticize Trump’s comments and behavior, there are two other factors that might change the dynamic in the 2024 GOP race. The first is Trump’s age. He will be 78 on Inauguration Day in 2025, making him as old as President Joe Biden was on taking office — and many voters, of course, think Biden is too old to be president. On the other hand, judging by his public appearances, Trump is far, far more vigorous today than Biden, so it is hard to know how persuasive Republicans will find the age argument.
The second factor is Trump’s legal troubles. No one will come out and say it, but some anti-Trump Republicans are hoping there is a prosecutor out there who will do their work for them — that is, take Trump out of the race. Indeed, Trump is facing possible action from a local prosecutor in Georgia about the 2020 election, from the Justice Department about the classified documents case, and again from the Justice Department about Jan. 6. All of that is in addition to the New York indictment.
Will any of those cases turn into criminal charges? And if they do, will they be more serious than the New York case, which many Republicans dismiss as politically motivated? Remember that Trump’s support went up in the immediate aftermath of the New York indictment. There’s a good chance a significant number of supporters will discount any other case against him, regardless of merit, because they see him as having been unfairly targeted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the “deep state,” from the moment he became a serious candidate in 2016.
So what does it all mean? It means that in the absence of some really big, game-changing event, beating Trump in a Republican presidential primary race is a very, very tall order. It is not impossible — it’s far too early to make any such pronouncements — but there’s no proof it can be done, either.
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