Dan Pfeiffer has some ideas:
Eight months ago, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was the great hope of the establishment Republicans who never liked Trump but supported him nonetheless. After a huge reelection victory in previously purple Florida, DeSantis was the hottest ticket in Republican politics. Billionaire Super PAC donors and highly sought-after political operatives flocked to Florida to sign up with DeSantis’s campaign in waiting.
By almost every measure, the DeSantis campaign has been a resounding flop. His announcement was a technological and political disaster. His awkward and cold interactions with voters became an Internet meme. DeSantis trails Trump in every poll and looks smaller and weaker than his chief rival.
Now, this could all change – and quickly. Joe Biden was written off in the 2020 Democratic primaries, as were previous nominees like John McCain and John Kerry. Obama was left for dead by the pundits more times than I care to count. A new CNN poll conducted after the second indictment week showed Trump losing some of his standing with Republican voters (although still leading DeSantis by 21 points).
Still, it’s early and Ron DeSantis could make a comeback. Here are a few of the reasons why his campaign has been a dud.
Candidate Quality Matters
Ron DeSantis’s biggest problem is not Donald Trump, the pro-Trump MAGA media, or the growing field of candidates splitting the non-Trump vote. DeSantis’s biggest problem is that he is Ron DeSantis. To win the Presidency, you must be able to woo people during one-on-one dinners and in VFW halls in places like Iowa and be deft enough to navigate the brutal levels of media scrutiny. DeSantis can do none of the above. His speeches are boring and poorly delivered. The guy has the charisma of a banana slug and the people skills of the Seinfeld Soup Nazi (I am generationally obligated to make this reference). And every time he appears in public, the Florida Governor makes a gaffe that distracts from his intended message
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My former White House colleague and current Pod Save America cohost often says the most important quality in any politician is the ability to speak like a human. While that may sound easy, most politicians fail this simple test. DeSantis fails it worse than any candidate in recent memory. He uses jargon and acronyms like DEI and CRT without giving explanations. DeSantis assumes that the audience is steeped in the lingua franca of Fox News.
Despite the ads, polls, and digital content, politics remains a people profession. The best candidates are comfortable in their own skin and make people in the audience or in a diner feel like they are the only person that matters in the universe. In every interaction, DeSantis exudes a sense that he would rather be anywhere else.
Candidates can get better over time, but DeSantis has a very long journey to even become mildly terrible.
Electability is a Vibe
Electorally, Donald Trump is a huge loser and Ron DeSantis is a winner. Trump has lost every election since winning in 2016 and DeSantis just won Florida by a huge margin in an otherwise excellent Democratic year. Republicans have won the popular vote once since 1988. They lost the House in 2018 and the White House and the Senate in 2020. In 2022, they suffered a historically miserable midterm performance. Republicans want a winner. And they don’t think DeSantis is a winner.
According to a May Monmouth poll:
Nearly half (45 percent) of Republican voters – including those who lean toward the GOP – say Trump is definitely the strongest candidate to beat President Joe Biden in 2024, and another 18 percent think he is probably the strongest candidate. Just one-third of GOP voters say another Republican would definitely (13 percent) or probably (19 percent) be a stronger candidate than Trump.
Electability is hard to quantify. It’s ethereal and subjective. In other words, it’s more vibes than reality. DeSantis gives off loser energy. He seems small and weak in comparison to Trump who is all swagger and unearned confidence.
We are, however, in uncharted waters when it comes to Trump and the electability question. We have never had a major presidential candidate indicted for felonies twice during the campaign. We don’t know how the public will react to a potential nominee wearing an ankle bracelet or awaiting sentencing when they go to vote. But right now, DeSantis seems electable on paper. In practice, he is the biggest loser.
The Culture War is Only Half the Equation
Ron DeSantis rose to Republican fame by stoking the embers of inflammatory and highly effective culture wars. The “Don’t Say Gay” law, his books, his war with “Woke Disney.” He picked the right fights with the chosen enemies of MAGA. DeSantis also had a knack for getting his culture wars covered in the Right-Wing media. The DeSantis presidential campaign is an extension of that strategy. He continues to use the apparatus of the state for publicity stunts like kidnapping migrants and sending them to liberal cities like San Francisco, while trying to be the most virulently anti-trans candidate in the field. DeSantis never begins a sentence without some pablum about woke-ism run amok.
None of these efforts caught fire in the context of the presidential race because the culture wars are only half of the MAGA equation. DeSantis may be MAGA on cultural issues, but on economic issues he looks a lot more like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney
Trump came to dominate the Republican Party because he understood that culture war politics work best when combined with populism. Trump’s brand of populism is the anti-immigrant, nationalism that propelled Pat Buchanan and others. And while he governed as a corporatist, Trump ran for president in 2016 on an anti-trade platform with promises to raises taxes on the wealthy and protect Social Security, and Medicare. Those positions helped Trump flip some voters who went for Obama in 2012 and jack up turnout in rural counties across the country.
Trump is running that same campaign again. He is relentlessly attacking DeSantis for his efforts to privatize Medicare and cut Social Security. DeSantis has yet to respond in kind. The closest he had come to populism is a ham-handed fight with Disney that has largely blown up in his face.
Fox News is the Smoke-Filled Room
The nominations of party outsiders Obama and Trump led to a lot of discussion about the death of the Party Decides Theory. Political party leaders no longer had sufficient influence to guide the base towards the best choice. The days of power brokers in smoke-filled rooms are long over and the process had become bottom up. That’s an over-simplistic rendering of how it works. It is true that the endorsement of Republican establishment figures like the Bushes or Mitch McConnell would be seen as a net negative for a candidate courting the base, but they are still people of real influence in the primary. The folks at Fox News and the rest of the MAGA elite are the new Republican establishment. The choices they make about whom to give airtime and how to frame the race is massively influential. Nate Cohn of the New York Times summed up this dynamic in a recent newsletter:
But just because an event doesn’t yield a huge swing in the polls doesn’t mean that the event can’t or won’t matter. The indictment might ultimately fall into this category. For now, the way to tell whether it could eventually make a difference may not be to watch the polls, but to watch Fox News instead.
Even more than his loyal base of popular support, Donald J. Trump is protected by a wall of elites — conservative media commentators and politicians who forcefully defend the former president, attack his opposition and deter his rivals from going on offense.
Thus far, the MAGA media barons have stuck with Trump and defended him at all costs. This has given DeSantis little room to run and insufficient oxygen to make a counter-case against Trump. Ever since the first indictment of Trump in the Spring, the prevailing gestalt of the Right Wing media is – you are with Trump or you are with the Deep State. In order to avoided being accused of political treason, Trump’s rivals – DeSantis included – have been forced to echo Trump’s talking points and frame the indictment on his terms.
DeSantis may never figure out why he is losing, but those of us trying to defeat Trump could learn something.
He’s a sour, creepy jerk and he can’t hide it. Even people who love the way he owns the libs know that he’ll take all the fun out of it. And that’s what Trump has always had going for him. He makes hating fun.