DeSantis is in the worst lane, with the exception of every other lane
How exactly does one run against Trump?
Ron DeSantis is in a tough spot. He’s trying to dislodge Donald Trump from frontrunner status and is not making much progress. But he also remains the only candidate with double-digit support against Trump. And he’s taking an interesting approach by attacking Trump from the right, even though that’s not necessarily where the available voters are. Is he doing this right?
Just looking at FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, it looks like the race has been largely frozen since April, when the Manhattan indictments against Trump came out. Trump has been hovering just above 50 percent support, with DeSantis in the low 20s, and no one else over 10. (Trump also has the overwhelming share of party endorsements.) I don’t think it will stay this way, and I expect that several other candidates will have polling surges following some of the debates this summer and fall. But needless to say, the longer the race hardens like this, the better it is for Trump.
What’s more, DeSantis’ unfavorables have been rising since April, while his favorables have been dropping. That’s consistent with the discovery-scrutiny-decline model of presidential nominations; more people are learning about DeSantis, and a lot of people (particularly Democrats) are really bothered about what they’re learning. This doesn’t necessarily hurt him in a Republican nomination contest, but it’s still notable. (Also, to be sure, his negatives are not as high, nor his positives as low, as Donald Trump’s.)
But what’s been most striking is just how DeSantis is choosing to run. He’s mainly going after Trump from the right. He has attacked Trump for not following through on his anti-immigration rhetoric from 2016, for wavering on gun ownership rights, and for not being anti-woke enough. In a recent video promoted by the DeSantis campaign, DeSantis goes after Trump by citing Trump’s pledges of support to the LGBTQ community back in 2016, and then basically says through a series of images and clips that DeSantis would be the most anti-LGBTQ president in history, unlike Trump.1
Is this the right way to run against Trump?
So here’s a way of approaching this question. In my June survey of Republican county chairs (details coming out next Monday at Politico), I asked the respondents if they were committed to a presidential candidate at this point. About half are uncommitted. Most of the rest lean toward Trump, although some portion are with DeSantis. In the table below, I’ve divided up the answers to a few of my questions based on their support for Trump, DeSantis, or uncommitted.
I should note that this is not a terribly large number of respondents, so I wouldn’t dwell too deeply on it. However, what we can see is kind of interesting. DeSantis supporters are of a similar age to the uncommitted, whereas Trump backers are older. DeSantis supporters and the uncommitted are pretty close on Ukraine policy, while Trump supporters appear far less supportive of Ukraine. Abortion attitudes do not vary significantly, although the uncommitted are somewhat less supportive of a nationwide ban. And DeSantis supporters and the uncommitted are far less likely than Trump supporters to call themselves “very conservative.”
How would we sum this up? It would suggest that, if DeSantis wants to win over the undecided, the bulk of them are more moderate than Trump, and also that he’s already primed to pick them up, since the undecided look more like his supporters than Trump’s. This suggests that victory lies in a more moderate approach.
Possibly. On the other hand, there are a number of candidates to Trump’s left already, none of whom have gotten any traction. In a series of posts at Bluesky, Justin Higgins says that DeSantis missed an opportunity by not attacking Trump during his recent indictments:
Except, this is exactly what Chris Christie did. It got him great publicity, but no movement in Republican nomination polls. Same with Asa Hutchinson. And to some extent, the same with Mike Pence. The principled critiques of Trump got them roughly no good press out of Fox News or other conservative media outlets, and Republican primary voters appeared largely uninterested. This is also what we saw in 2016, where candidate after candidate tried to appear as the more reasonable and responsible alternative to Trump and it got them nowhere.
Michael Cohen, meanwhile, argues that the anti-LGBTQ video and other recent right-leaning appeals by DeSantis are “emblematic of a candidate and campaign that is terminally online and obsessively focused on the various right-wing outrages that drive social media.” I would push back on that narrative, as I did here, by saying that one cannot possibly be losing a contest to Donald Trump, the most terminally online candidate in American history, by being too terminally online. The suggestion is that DeSantis would somehow be doing better if he weren’t hyper-focused on on-line conservative discourse, and I think the evidence for that is extremely scant.
DeSantis seems to be gambling that the most active Republican primary voters, donors, reporters, and others lie to Trump’s right, not his left. And yes, a lot of them are extremely on-line. That may not be where most Americans or even more Republican primary voters live, but it’s where a crucial portion of party insiders are right now. (Also, being hyper-focused on on-line conservative discourse is how DeSantis became governor!)
DeSantis may also be looking at the trajectory of the parties and assuming that further polarization is likely, or even inevitable. That’s not a bad judgment. The Republican Party, in particular, has moved substantially to the right with each passing administration for decades. Donald Trump was something of an odd duck in that he was somewhat moderate or disengaged on a number of key Republican issues, such as the social welfare state, but he pushed hard right positions on abortion and immigration, positions that would have seemed beyond the pale for the Bush or Reagan presidencies. DeSantis is betting that active Republicans want even rarer meat than Trump was serving seven years ago. This isn’t obviously wrong.
DeSantis might also be pursuing this somewhat fatalistically, figuring that he can’t beat Trump in the current environment, but if Trump drops out due to legal problems DeSantis would stand a decent chance of inheriting many of his supporters. Conversely, if Trump gets the nomination and loses to Biden again, DeSantis, still in his 40s, would be best positioned to become the 2028 nominee.
The plain fact is that Trump has a lot of advantages going into this contest in terms of polling, establishment support, and more. Of all the available paths for someone like DeSantis, he may well be on the best one. He could still lose on this path, but the other paths may well have contained bigger, earlier, and more humiliating losses.
The ad is a rather remarkable statement of homophobia and transphobia, and somehow also includes some homoerotic imagery in support of DeSantis(?) and even enlists Brad Pitt’s Achilles from “Troy” to his side, and that was not exactly the most heterosexual figure in Greek mythology. The video also multiple times highlights the title character of “American Psycho.”