DeSantis needs to target Trump, not the third-place Ramaswamy
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Thanks to his stunning 20-point reelection as governor of Florida, cementing the formerly purple state as a Republican stronghold, Ron DeSantis entered the presidential primary as the prospective preeminent challenger to former President Donald Trump. Just three months into his frankly disappointing campaign, however, DeSantis axed a slew of terminally online staffers and embraced the adversarial media that made him a rising star in the first place, promising his donors a proper pivot into a campaign capable of beating the incumbent.
Hence, a leaked memo from pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down is frankly baffling.
VIVEK RAMASWAMY TOUTS ‘AMERICA COMES FIRST’ FOREIGN POLICY PLANS AT NIXON LIBRARY
“There are four basic must-dos,” the memo says. “1. Attack Joe Biden and the media 3-5 times. 2. State [DeSantis’s] positive vision 2-3 times. 3. Hammer Vivek Ramaswamy in a response. 4. Defend Donald Trump in absentia in response to a Chris Christie attack.”
What the hell?
While we may still have five long months before the Iowa caucuses, these debates constitute an inflection point for DeSantis. Since the midterm elections, his support has slid from north of 30% in national polling to just 15%. It is true that Ramaswamy is nipping at DeSantis’s heels in the betting markets and in national online polling, but the real candidate closing in on him where it hurts — Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — is Tim Scott.
But fundamentally, Never Back Down is still missing the point of DeSantis’s slide. His problem is not Ramaswamy or Scott. It’s that DeSantis lost sight of the No. 1 reason to vote for him: his electability in a general.
DeSantis’s record speaks for itself. After running as a pragmatic, heterodox, but proud and loud conservative — coupling increasing educational standards and expunging “wokeness” from taxpayer-funded classrooms with increased teacher pay, for example — DeSantis won the overwhelming majority of both men and women, whites and Latinos, and every educational stratum and locality: urban, rural, and suburban Floridians. While he was unrelenting in fighting the COVID-19 wars and the culture wars, DeSantis kept the message practical enough that he managed a Republican victory in Miami Dade for the first time since 2002 and Palm Beach County for the first time since 1986. When Republicans pushed him to nearly 40% in presidential primary polling after the midterm elections, they were doing so because he seemed conservative enough to win over those on the fence about Trump and electable enough to beat President Joe Biden.
But apparently, DeSantis’s inner orbit has not gotten the memo. Hence, we saw DeSantis channel 2004 culture wars and attack Trump on abortion and LGBT issues, two issues the former president is winning, instead of the economy and Trump’s ability to beat Biden.
The debates, of course, mark the real debut of DeSantis’s supposed reset. He has more than enough time to rise to the challenge and point out that two-thirds of the electorate say they absolutely will not or probably will not vote for Trump against Biden. He can still make the case that Bidenomics arguably began with the protectionism and easy money policies of the Trump administration, and he can present voters with the stark dichotomy: Do they want a candidate who is siphoning off tens of millions of dollars of donations to save his own derriere from prison, or one who can focus on taking back the White House from Biden and cleaning house at the rogue bureaucracy trying to jail its political adversaries unfairly?
We’ve seen Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and, yes, Chris Christie try the “defend Trump until you’re the last man standing” technique already, and the result wasn’t pretty for any of them. Voters want to see a spine and a winner. That means standing up to Trump, not those still trailing in the single digits.