As first debate approaches, is GOP race already over?
Byron York
AS FIRST DEBATE APPROACHES, IS GOP RACE ALREADY OVER? The first debate of the Republican presidential primaries is now just days away. There is still uncertainty about who will take part — there have been reports that former President Donald Trump, who leads second-place Gov. Ron DeSantis by 40 points, will skip the event. But Trump could always change his mind. The Fox News moderators, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, say they are preparing questions for any circumstance.
The milestone of the first debate is a chance to assess where the race stands. The short version: It’s still about Trump and DeSantis. Only now, it boils down to two issues. One, is it already over? Has Trump already destroyed DeSantis and many political commentators are just pretending it hasn’t happened? Or two, is the current moment the product of such bizarre, unprecedented circumstances that the race will change dramatically — will have to change dramatically — in the next six to nine months?
“Having combed through our own polling and focus group data over the past several months, and all the public data, there is no evidence that there currently even is a race for the Republican nomination,” said one veteran GOP strategist, who is not affiliated with any presidential campaign, in an email exchange. “It is of course possible that one could develop, but right now there is no race, and that’s not an attempt to denigrate any of the candidates — that’s just a statement of fact.”
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Certainly, the national polls support that point. Trump’s lead over DeSantis, as this is written, is 39.9 points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. In third place is Vivek Ramaswamy, a huge improvement over his seventh-place position in July. But Ramaswamy is 47.8 points behind Trump. Rounding out the top five are Mike Pence, 49.3 points behind Trump, and Nikki Haley, 51.1 points behind the former president.
No candidate at this stage of the race has ever surged from such deficits to win the Republican nomination.
Looking at the trajectory of the race, Trump’s support stood at 45.9% on March 30, the day he was first indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Trump shot up in the polls afterward, and his ratings have bounced around in the mid-50s since then. Three subsequent indictments do not seem to have affected his standing with supporters at all.
DeSantis has been the opposite story. His support peaked at 31.3% on Jan. 22 and has been slowly falling ever since. It now stands at 14.8%, less than half of what it was at the beginning of the year.
It has become a standard of political commentary to say DeSantis is running a terrible campaign. He has no personal skills, the critics say. The campaign was overspending and underdelivering. There was no coherent message. The critique has reached the conventional wisdom stage, with Trump declaring, “The DeSanctimonious campaign is DEAD!” Democrats are happy to pile on, with veteran strategist Joe Trippi saying, “In my 40 years in presidential politics, I have never seen a worse campaign and candidate. [DeSantis] should withdraw from the race.” Weeks ago, there was a spate of news analyses declaring Trump’s margin insurmountable.
But the conventional wisdom does not fully describe what has happened to DeSantis in this race. While it is reasonable to point out the deficiencies in his campaign, and in his own abilities, it’s also true that the Trump indictment effect, without precedent in American politics, hit him, too. It didn’t just raise Trump’s standing in the Republican contest. It also lowered his chief rival’s standing. People in the DeSantis campaign see the day of the first Trump indictment as the day their momentum stopped.
It’s an insane situation. You’re running for public office. Your opponent is indicted. And the indictment hurts you and helps him. “Every time a Democrat partisan prosecutor indicts the former Republican president on bizarre or over-hyped charges, a lot of Republicans take that personally — some even take it as an indictment of them,” said the veteran, unaffiliated, GOP strategist. “And I’ve found that even ‘Trump hostile’ Republicans agree that the Democrats are weaponizing the judicial system for their partisan purposes.”
That is a headwind that was not created by anything the DeSantis campaign did. And if it ever eases, say, when Democratic prosecutors put Trump on trial in an election year, it will not be because of anything DeSantis did, either. He is essentially along for the ride, as is the rest of the field.
Another headwind for DeSantis is the enormous amount of negative advertising targeting him from all sides. A recent Fox News article noted that DeSantis is “the No. 1 most attacked presidential candidate in the race so far,” having “endured over $20.2 million in negative independent expenditure spending.” That is more, so far, than the money spent attacking Trump and President Joe Biden combined.
The DeSantis campaign sees this as a measure of the threat he presents to both Trump and Biden. “More money has been spent attacking Ron DeSantis than either the current or former president combined,” said campaign spokesman Bryan Griffin in an email exchange, “and we fully expect the candidates at the debate to primarily come after Ron DeSantis because he is the greatest threat to every other Republican primary contender.”
Political veterans outside the campaign see the negative ads as the normal course of politics. You’re being attacked? Welcome to the big leagues. Some also think the big number — $20.2 million in attacks against DeSantis — is exaggerated. In any event, they see it as the kind of hardball politics that serious presidential candidates have to deal with.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, the first voting state, the DeSantis campaign is showing signs of improvement and, perhaps, a small rise in the polls. The campaign is leaner and more organized, with DeSantis holding more small, Iowa-style events where he has more contact with voters. That is seen by Iowa insiders as a direct result of the DeSantis campaign bringing on David Polyansky, an experienced Republican operative who had been working for the DeSantis super PAC and, more importantly, helped guide Ted Cruz’s winning Iowa campaign in 2016. “This is going to be Cruz Part 2 with Polyansky in charge,” notes one Iowa Republican. “Cruz won the [2016] caucus, and it certainly wasn’t his personality. What put Cruz over was pure, raw, efficient ground game.”
That’s a good point to remember when one hears criticism of DeSantis’s campaign style. The last candidate to win an open Iowa Republican caucus was Cruz, who was not the most appealing personality in the field. Iowa GOP voters do not demand Bill Clinton-levels of schmoozing ability when choosing a candidate.
But the success of anything DeSantis does in Iowa and beyond is still dependent on what happens with Trump. “This latest indictment — the Iowans I’m hearing anecdotally are saying a lot of voters think it’s the same old thing,” said the Iowa insider. “Their support for Trump is a pushback toward what they see as an unfair justice system.”
If that is the case, putting Trump on trial, as will surely happen in 2024, might well intensify those feelings. While some observers believe the spectacle of Trump on trial will finally cause some of his supporters to abandon him, it’s also possible it could have an effect like the first indictment, only stronger. What is known is that, right now, some large part of Trump’s support is rock-solid, but another portion is not. “I think there is some fluidity in some of the Trump support,” the Iowa source said. “It’s enough to shrink his lead, but I don’t see that happening to the point of losing the Iowa caucuses.”
If Trump wins the Iowa caucuses, that means DeSantis loses the Iowa caucuses. The conventional wisdom would say that would be the end of DeSantis, the moment thousands of journalists hit “send” on their pre-written DeSantis campaign obituaries. And indeed, it might be. But there really is no conventional wisdom to describe what is happening adequately.
Now, the debate marks the start of a new phase in the campaign. Already DeSantis has stirred controversy when an extensive set of debate preparation documents found their way into the press. Rivals are suspicious about how it happened. At the very least, it appears the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, posted the documents in an obscure place on the web so that the DeSantis campaign could see them, despite legal prohibitions on the two groups coordinating together. And then things got out, as they tend to do on the internet.
The bottom line, as the race enters a new stage, is that for there actually to be a race, something has to change. The DeSantis campaign disputes the public polling averages that show Trump with huge leads, but they concede Trump is ahead and that the margins are significant. DeSantis appears fully prepared to trail Trump for the rest of this year, counting on a major change to occur in mid-January, when voting actually begins. At that point, Iowans will no longer be expressing their preference to pollsters but actually deciding to cast a vote for an actual candidate. Until then, though, DeSantis will have to fight through the suspicion that the race is already over.
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