DeSantis tried to pass Trump in his own lane and lost control
The cult wasn’t buying it. And neither was anyone else:
Some moderate Republican voters here recoiled at ads that Ron DeSantis’s allies started running last month broadcastingthe Florida governor’s vows to use deadly force at the southern border.
“I don’t like the fact that we’re going to start murdering people,” said Becki Kuhns, 71, who is eager for an alternative to Donald Trump and brought up the commercials unprompted.
Down the road at a cigar bar in Nashua, where regulars talk politics and watch debates together, a different DeSantis problem came into focus: Trumpsupporters were unmoved by DeSantis’s pitch that he’d deliver the former president’s agenda more effectively.
The people he’s targeting “belong to Trump,” said Howard Ray, 43, who went to a DeSantis event but wasn’t persuaded. “He comes across kind of hard right.”
He added:“Those types of people are in Trump’s camp, and they’re not moving.”
DeSantis began the year widely viewed as theRepublican with the best chance to build awinning coalition against theformer president — the Trump alternative who could entice Trump critics yet was alsoin many ways a continuation of Trump’s “America First” platform. But DeSantis’s support has shrunk dramatically since then, erodingon both ends of the party spectrum, interviews with dozensof early state voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, show.
The GOP minority that disapproves of Trump — and thatfavored DeSantis before he and most other candidates announced — has splintered to other hopefuls. Boosted by them and by independents, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has surpassed DeSantis in New Hampshire and, in one poll released Monday, pulled even with the Florida governor in Iowa — where DeSantis has poured his resources.
At the same time, DeSantis has struggled amongTrump supporters, losing ground with those who approve of the former president, who has used his four criminal indictments to re-energize a base that once looked readier to move on from him. And DeSantis has struggled on both ends to make personal appeals that resonate, with a stiffer presentation than freewheeling Trump.
Now, DeSantis is left in a perilous position with just over two months until the first nominating contest, mired in a second tier of candidates well behind Trump.
Despite his appeals to the Trump base, DeSantis has at times tried to offer something for everyone, eliciting sometimes discordant descriptions of his candidacy from voters.
Tosome in Iowa and New Hampshire he was a “fresh voice” and a “true conservative” unlike Trump. To others he was “America First” or, to those who disdained him, a “Trump wannabe.” They said he stood for “freedom” and “families” and fighting wokeness in schools, with his record in Florida sometimes defining him despite his months-long efforts to talk in national terms.
DeSantis’s average support in national polls of the GOP primary dropped from more than 30 percent in March to 24 percent in May, when he officially joined the race, to 14 percent today.
Faced with that slide, DeSantis’s team has focused most of its attentionon Iowa, where it hopesintensive campaigning and a sophisticated ground operation will turn the tide against Trump. They note that a pro-Trump super PAC is resuming ad spending there against DeSantis — after earlier signaling that it was focused on the general election — and that polls show a growing share of voters considering candidates besides Trump, who holds a large polling lead.
But Haley, rather than DeSantis, has been gaining there, with a highly-anticipated Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll on Monday showing both Haley and DeSantis at 16 percent and Trump in the lead at 43. In a sign of Haley’s rise, a pro-DeSantis super PAC has started to air ads against her.
Advisers and allies argue that Haley appeals to the anti-Trump wing for stances that alienate the rest of the GOP and that DeSantis is still the only candidate who can bridge those camps — with most of his voters migrating to Trump if he drops out. Anti-Trump voters will eventually coalesce behind whoever can beat the former president, they say.
“The reality is this party is going to nominate somebody … that has a record of delivering on America First principles,” DeSantis said last week in New Hampshire, embracing that core identity even as he underlined moderate-friendly themes like “economic vitality.”
Speaking to voters at a bar in Creston, Iowa, this month, DeSantis said he would enact Trump’s ideas and take them further. He said he would “clean house” at the Justice Department, push to end the war in Ukraine and finish the wall at the southern border. He said that he would “make Mexico pay for it” by charging fees on remittances and that if drug traffickers tried to break through, they would wind up “stone cold dead.”
Trump backers ‘just not voting for him’
As DeSantis launched his campaign in May, adviser Ryan Tyson laid out the strategy to wealthy fundraisers who gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami. “Trump without the crazy,” was how supporters saw him, Tyson said.
The “Never Trump” voters in the party were saying DeSantis was too much like Trump, he added, but they made up about 20 percent of the GOP. Tyson was more focused on what he called “soft” Trump voters. “These voters here in this segment are gonna collapse to the governor,” he predicted.
Trump has instead consolidated support, surging back from a low point after last year’s midterm elections, when many Republicans blamed him for their losses and took note of DeSantis’s landslide reelection victory. Indictments on a slew of criminal charges, starting in March, galvanized the base and rallied the party back to Trump’s side, all as the former president attacked DeSantis. “I am your retribution,” Trump has told voters.
Some DeSantis allies debate whether he should have announced earlier, to capitalize on his post-midterms momentum. Maybe, they say, he should have hit Trump hard from the start. They lament certain comments — like DeSantis’s dismissive statement about a “territorial dispute” in Ukraine — as unforced errors. But mostly they view Trump’s resurgence as a force beyond DeSantis’s control.
“To this day he has a very high favorable rating among those favorable to Trump,” said Charles Franklin, who directs the Marquette Law School Poll. “They’re just not voting for him.”
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Dennis Martin, for instance, worries that Trump’s indictments will be a distraction and even says, “I don’t like Trump as a person.” The 57-year-old from a suburb of Des Moines is considering Trump, DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a first-time candidate who has also embraced the Trump agenda.
But Martin is also outraged at the charges against Trump, thinks he did “a hell of a job as president” and says he’s leaning slightly toward supporting Trump again.
Heading to breakfast in nearby Ankeny, David Melssen said he’d been following DeSantis’s response to the war between Hamas and Israel. “Great man. He sent an airplane to bring back Americans,” he said immediately when a reporter mentioned DeSantis’s name.
Asked if he could vote for DeSantis, he said: “Yeah, if Trump decides that Ron DeSantis is the guy to back.”
The Trumpers are in cult and they aren’t abandoning their Dear Leader for a usurper. And the few Republicans who don’t like Trump aren’t going to vote for an extremist jerk like DeSantis because that’s exactly what they don’t like about Trump. What lane did he think he was running in anyway? His strategy was always flawed.
If he thought he was just doing it to be the fallback in case Trump falls over on the golf course and breaks a hip, he’s now revealed himself to be a creepy weirdo so I don’t think that would work either. And anyone who thinks Trump is going to endorse DeSantis is smoking something very, very potent.