What DeSantis must do to turn Trump dominance into Trump doubts
W. James Antle III
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It’s early in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but the basic dynamics are already clear.
Former President Donald Trump remains the larger than life man to beat, defining the race. Either he will once again suck up all the oxygen in the room and steamroll the opposition or Republican primary voters will tire of his routine.
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Trump was a bull in a china shop during the CNN town hall event. He was found liable for battery and defamation. He has been indicted and could face further charges. He has not backed down from his 2020 election claims or virtually any other controversy of the last eight years.
Republicans other than Trump are betting primary voters will eventually tire of this cumulative baggage and focus on past disputes, seeing how it distracted from the case against President Joe Biden and the Democrats during the midterm elections and could do so again in 2024.
Trump’s supporters note that this has been predicted repeatedly since 2015 and never happened. The current polling shows no indication of this happening now. The former president leads nationally by 31.3 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. A Morning Consult poll this week had Trump ahead by 41 points.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is the only Republican to consistently poll in the double digits against Trump and he is not even a declared candidate. The message DeSantis’s supporters are sending is that the Florida governor can give Republicans what they like about Trump while avoiding the distractions, feuds, and baggage.
There are focus groups and surveys that show this can be a powerful argument. DeSantis is significantly outpolling former Govs. Chris Christie (R-NJ) and Asa Hutchinson (R-AR), who have launched full frontal assaults on Trump.
But it also seems that there are limits to what a nuanced approach can accomplish against Trump, who unleashes a constant stream of attacks against GOP primary opponents who appear to be a threat to his nomination prospects.
Trump’s numbers in the national polls currently look like those of other frontrunners, like Bob Dole and George W. Bush at similar stages of their respective primary campaigns. The state-by-state picture is murkier, and in both of those past campaigns challengers emerged to make a race of it. But these frontrunners ultimately wrapped up the GOP nomination without much suspense past the early states.
Trump and DeSantis are hunting where the ducks are. Christie and Hutchinson are hunting where the pundits wish they were.
For DeSantis, a key question becomes when to start making the case against Trump’s erratic behavior, obsession with the past rather than the present and future, poor personnel choices, and November electability more overtly. Maybe that happens when the Florida governor gets into the race. Perhaps it is in the debates, which may happen with or without Trump himself on the stage.
Then the next problem for DeSantis is making these arguments in a way that succeeds where nearly 20 other Republican candidates and countless Never Trumpers have failed. Can DeSantis take shots at Trump while still hunting where the ducks are, without ending up in Liz Cheney territory?
There was a period following the midterm elections, when DeSantis won big in a former battleground state and other Trump-endorsed candidates lost key races, where Republicans looked ready to move on from Trump.
But like past controversies ranging from the Access Hollywood tape to his first impeachment to the 2020 election loss to Jan. 6, Trump rebounded. From the Mar-a-Lago raid to the Alvin Bragg indictment, new controversies only seem to be making him stronger.
A strategy that relies on Republican primary voters deciding on their own that Trump is too risky a bet for the 2024 general election may fail, especially when a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll actually showed Trump ahead of Biden. Despite obvious pitfalls and repeated electoral setbacks dating back to 2018, Trump looks better in the RealClearPolitics polling average against Biden at this point than he did for most of the 2016 race against Hillary Clinton.
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The case against Trump may feel intuitive to political professionals. It isn’t to rank-and-file Republican primary voters.
DeSantis may have to make it himself to overcome Trump’s head start.