Is Ron DeSantis for president doomed?: Governor Ron DeSantis, who looked late last year like a legitimate threat to knock off Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, seems to be doing worse the more voters see of him.
What Will Ron DeSantis Do To Catch Trump?
What was it that hurt Ron DeSantis’ once-promising presidential chances?
Was it bad strategy or the Florida governor not being particularly good at face-to-face, real-world campaigning?
The answer is unclear, but it’s likely some degree of both.
Now, DeSantis has hit lows in the polls, with the Morning Consult tracking poll putting him at just 17 percent, a nearly 40-point deficit to Donald Trump. A recent CBS poll had DeSantis with 23 percent, compared to 61 percent for the former president.
A report this week says that DeSantis has been “brutally honest” with donors, about the predicament his campaign is in.
Per CBS News, DeSantis has been getting lots of questions at recent fundraisers about how he is far behind Trump, and what his strategy is for making up that gap.
Per CBS, the candidate “remains confident about the campaign strategy and his path to the White House, despite that in both national and most state polls, DeSantis has trailed Trump by double digits.”
Ron DeSantis has been arguing that while he’s certainly behind Trump, it’s a “two-man race,” and he’s better positioned against President Biden than Trump is.
“He didn’t try to spin from it,” a donor present at a recent event told CBS News. “He said, ‘Yeah, we’re (polling) in the 20[s]. It’s a good spot to be right now, this early. It’s about the states that matter.”
Another quote in the CBS story was perhaps more indicative of DeSantis’ problems.
“When you see the polls bump up for Trump after he’s indicted, that’s not a rejection of [DeSantis], that’s a sign of people being very unhappy with how the Democratic Party conducts itself when it’s in power,” the donor told CBS.
This shows that rather than actually hit Trump, the person he’s running against, for having possibly committed indictable crimes, DeSantis is taking it as a given that those indictments are unfair and the fault of the Democrats.
If the Republican nomination contest ends up being about who defends Donald Trump most strongly, Trump appears likely to win it.
In March, after Trump was indicted the first term in Manhattan, DeSantis tried to split the difference, giving a speech in which he ripped “Soros-funded district attorneys” and called the indictment unfair, while at the same time stating that “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a [p—-] star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair, I can’t speak to that.” But the Florida governor hasn’t tried anything like that since.
Also this week, NBC News obtained a memo from the DeSantis campaign, which touted that it raised $20 million in its first six weeks, which it described as “the largest first-quarter fling from any non-incumbent Republican candidate in more than a decade,” although there have only been two contested GOP presidential races in the last 11 years.
The memo went on to state that “the ballot is very fluid.”
It adds that the campaign will focus on different subjects in each month, including the border in June 2023, the economy in July and August, foreign policy and China and debate in August, with “more to come” in the fall, “including woke military, the deep state; School choice and beyond.”
Some may be perplexed by that last thing since it appears that DeSantis has been emphasizing culture war ephemera way more than anything else since before he began running.
“The best thing DeSantis could’ve done was help convince 10 GOP senators who secretly preferred him to convict Trump over the coup,” Tim Miller a former Republican strategist who left the party over its embrace of Trump, said on Twitter this week. “Regrettably DeSantis was tacitly pro-coup and has decided to attack Trump for being too nice to homosexuals instead.”
Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
