Ron DeSantis’ no good, very bad campaign year

WASHINGTON —  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t officially open his 2024 presidential campaign until late May, but by then, he was already on a downhill slide that now appears to be accelerating.

At least three factors account for DeSantis’ troubles, which led him to lay off roughly a third of his campaign staff — “aggressive steps to streamline operations,” as his campaign manager, Generra Peck told Politico, which first reported the cuts Tuesday.

Two of those factors sit largely outside his control, but the third goes to the heart of his campaign strategy.

One factor is the impact that former President Trump‘s indictments have had on the GOP race. The criminal charges have boxed in Trump’s rivals, keeping the spotlight focused on him, not them, and generating sympathy among Republican voters.

That won’t go away — indeed, attention to Trump’s legal troubles likely will only grow with at least one more federal indictment likely in the coming days as well as potential state charges against Trump in Georgia.

The second is the slow erosion of the boost DeSantis got after a landslide reelection in November, which provided one of the few bright spots for Republicans amid midterm disappointments that many party strategists blamed on Trump.

“I had gotten a lot of coverage in the aftermath of the midterm election,” the governor said in a recent Fox News interview. “That was a sugar-high.”

A long, steady slide

But those factors alone don’t account for the depth and prolonged nature of DeSantis’ slide.

When the year started, polls showed DeSantis with support from close to 4 in 10 Republican voters. Some surveys showed him ahead of Trump, others had him just a few paces behind.

Since then, DeSantis has lost roughly half his backing even as Trump’s support has grown. And while DeSantis can still claim to be ahead of the rest of the pack, even that has begun to look tenuous.

Recent polls by Fox Business in two early primary states, Iowa and South Carolina, showed DeSantis no longer firmly ahead of the rest in places where the candidates have spent extensive time and have begun spending money on advertising.

In Iowa, DeSantis was just slightly ahead of South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, 16%-11%, a near-tie given the poll’s margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. In South Carolina, that state’s former Gov. Nikki Haley, DeSantis and Scott were bunched together, with Haley at 14%, DeSantis at 13% and Scott 10%. In both states, Trump led with nearly half the vote.

All that’s consistent with national surveys that show a steep plunge in DeSantis’ support.

For example, the latest national survey from Marquette University, released Thursday, found Trump leading DeSantis 46%-22%. Support for the Florida governor had dropped from 35% in March and 25% in May, Marquette found.

The most recent Monmouth University nationwide poll, released Tuesday, found Trump leading DeSantis 46%-20%. In December, a Monmouth survey had DeSantis in the lead, 39%-26%.

The Monmouth poll pointed to the crucial, third factor that has weighted down DeSantis’ campaign: Voters haven’t bought the message he’s selling.

DeSantis has tried to pitch himself to pro-Trump voters as a lot like the former president, but a stronger general election candidate and one who would be more effective at getting conservative policies adopted as president. He’s tried to make his attacks oblique and not directly criticize Trump, which would risk turning off conservative voters, who turn out heavily in GOP primaries.

“We’ve developed a culture of losing in this party,” he has said repeatedly at campaign events without specifying who was doing the losing.

“Governing is not about entertaining. Governing is not about building a brand or talking on social media and virtue signaling,” he said during a trip to Iowa a few days before formally announcing his campaign, again without naming anyone. “It’s ultimately about winning and producing results.”

But in making that case, DeSantis has not only tried to run against Trump from the right — wooing the roughly one-third of Republican voters who define themselves as strong supporters of Trump’s MAGA movement — he’s tried to do so by focusing on issues that are hot buttons on social media, but not often top priorities for most voters.

DeSantis’ long-running war with the Walt Disney Co. provides one example. Another is the video that DeSantis’ campaign circulated at the end of June that criticized Trump for supporting equal rights for gay Americans.

That tactic may have reached its point of no return on Wednesday when DeSantis suggested in a YouTube interview with conservative commentator Clay Travis that he could appoint anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and nominal Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control.

Republican voters, especially the MAGA supporters, have been unreceptive.

Just 1 in 5 Republican voters thought DeSantis would be a stronger candidate than Trump in an election against President Biden, Monmouth’s most recent poll found. Nearly half, 47%, said Trump would be stronger. Among strong MAGA supporters, 6 in 10 said Trump would be the stronger candidate.

DeSantis did no better on the effectiveness argument — 19% felt DeSantis would be more effective than Trump at getting his policies put in place, while 49% said Trump would be more effective, a share that rose to 70% among strong MAGA backers.

“DeSantis has not made any headway. The arguments that he’d be a stronger candidate and a more effective president than Trump have both fallen flat,” said Patrick Murray, the head of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

And as other surveys have shown, Republican voters insist they’re not concerned that Trump’s multiple indictments will hurt his election chances.

Only 11% of Republican voters told Monmouth they were very concerned that the indictments would make Trump a weaker candidate against Biden. Another 16% said they were somewhat concerned. Nearly half, 47%, said they were not at all concerned.

Perhaps that’s a rational judgment that attitudes toward Trump are so deeply felt that nothing will significantly shift them, perhaps its whistling past a graveyard. Whichever is true, it’s a powerful wall of denial that has blocked an approach that DeSantis, and other challengers, might have exploited.

Democrats, of course, have delighted in DeSantis’ decline.

“He decided to run on a platform that doesn’t resonate with anybody who isn’t watching Fox News 12 or more hours a day or living on Twitter,” said Eric Jotkoff, a Democratic consultant with long experience in Florida politics. “You can only get so far running a war against Mickey Mouse.”

But perhaps more telling is the lack of Republican voices speaking in DeSantis’ favor: He has won endorsements from just a handful of conservative members of Congress and one Republican governor.

Primary campaigns are often volatile, and there are examples of candidates coming back from slides similar to the one DeSantis is going through. And, to be fair, none of the other candidates has come up with a proven strategy against Trump.

The problem for DeSantis, however, is that he’s given non-MAGA Republicans, who may have flirted with him early this year because they thought he had the best chance of beating the former president, little reason to stick with him now that the aura of inevitability has worn off. Meantime, the lion’s share of MAGA voters have remained firmly with Trump.

His maneuverings have left DeSantis without a clearly defined base of support. If he can’t fix that, nothing else will matter.

An early look at the 2024 map

The presidential election is more than a year away, but several prominent political analysts have begun rolling out their early assessments of how the political map will shape up. The projections have been pretty consistent with one another, forecasting a close race with very few states in doubt and Democrats starting out with a small edge.

The latest entry came Thursday from the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, which projects states holding 247 Electoral College votes as at least leaning Democratic and states holding 235 votes at least leaning Republican. Walter lists only four states, with 56 votes, as tossups: Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Winning the electoral college requires 270 votes.

Larry Sabato‘s Crystal Ball site issued a similar forecast last month, also with four tossup states. The difference is that Sabato’s site lists Nevada as a tossup and Pennsylvania as leaning to the Democrats, giving them a 260-235 edge to start with.

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