The state of the Republican primary and why Trump has a big advantage

Ron DeSantis has been struggling quite a bit lately. From the moment he announced his presidential candidacy in May, pretty much everything has gone wrong. Even his announcement was bungled. Now, donors are beginning to have doubts and are starting to look at other non-Trump candidates. His standing in national polls has fallen substantially from its peak. In a few state-level polls, he is now in third place. With each passing day, he is starting to look more like Elizabeth Warren and Jeb Bush.

His campaign is running low on cash and has relied heavily on big donors who have maxed out. His super PAC is basically running the show and has taken over some campaign functions. In the last week, his campaign has laid off one-third of its staff. It is still the summer and there is a long time before voting begins. At this time in 2007, John McCain looked dead in the water, but then came back to win the nomination in quick fashion. The sample size of previous presidential primaries is also very small so no definitive conclusions can be drawn from them about how the DeSantis campaign will wind up doing in the end.

The biggest problem he has is the same problem all the other non-Trump candidates have. Trump is very popular among Republicans, especially primary voters. On the surface, DeSantis and some other candidates would seem to have the edge in arguing that they are more electable. But that argument is not making its way to Republican primary voters. In their eyes, Trump won in 2020 so he has the electability edge.

Trump’s popularity is tacitly acknowledged by virtually all the other candidates in that they hesitate to attack him. DeSantis himself has largely avoided explicitly saying anything bad about him. His campaign has run ads that have attacked him as not being right-wing enough. Most notably, he put out an ad accusing Trump of being too LGBT friendly, which produced a backlash among some Republicans. Democrats have been guilty of running campaigns that were too online, but Republicans can be guilty of it, too, and DeSantis is arguably running the most online campaign ever.

The idea that attacking Trump from the right will sink him sounded good in 2015, but anyone still believing that today is kidding themselves. That he wasn’t far-right probably helped him on net. His having no history with the Republican establishment was a big asset. That big donors want to stop him now gives him even more anti-establishment credibility. The fact that so many of the major Republican donors initially flocked to DeSantis probably helped Trump further and will help him against whoever they flock to next if that happens.

A theme I have written about before is that Trump has a unique kind of appeal. His combination of shamelessness, dishonesty, anger and cruelty, along with humor and fun is not something that anyone else can replicate. What is key about Trump’s appeal is that he can sometimes be funny and is clearly having a good time even while he claims to be a victim. His imitators don’t do that. DeSantis is all anger and can only act like Trump while reading from a teleprompter after rehearsing in advance.

That is just on personality. On policy, Trump moderated on some key issues (entitlements, trade) that denied Democrats a weapon they had used against Republicans before. His imitators don’t do that. In the case of DeSantis, he is to Trump’s right on virtually every issue. He is trying to be Trump without the drama, but he has become Trump without any fun and much more right-wing. Bad imitations aside, I find it odd that anyone believed Republican primary voters would go with a Trump impersonator when they could go with the real thing.

Is DeSantis really the stronger general election candidate?

In a general election, Trump is a terrible candidate. Of all the Republicans running, he is easily among the weakest. I used to think he was the weakest, but am having second thoughts. At the rate he is going, DeSantis could be even weaker. Unlike Trump, he has a far-right voting record in Congress and a history of pushing for far-right economic ideas that will get plenty of attention in a general election. As governor, he has now signed a ban on abortion after six weeks, which he tries to never talk about. If he won’t talk about it in a general election, Democrats will talk about it for him. He has also refused to expand Medicaid, leaving nearly one million people uninsured.

When it comes to the midwestern states, it is not obvious that DeSantis has any strong appeal. His voting record in Congress and advocacy for right-wing economic ideas of all kinds is the opposite of the approach Trump took that allowed him to make inroads there. As for whether he can win back suburbanites, he would probably stand a better chance than Trump, but that’s not guaranteed. His culture warrior persona probably has little appeal with them if for no other reason than that he is obsessed with things nobody else cares about. His position on abortion won’t help either.

When it comes to personality, unlike Trump, he has no charisma at all. He can’t finish a sentence without saying the word woke. He is obsessed with the latest culture war fight of the hour, which I doubt even Republican primary voters are interested in. The more people see him, the less they like him. While his campaign is talking about a reset and has gotten rid of some problematic staffers, the biggest problem is the candidate. Being an obsessive culture warrior way out in right field on every issue is who he really is. A reset of that would require him to become a different person.

His obsession with things that few others care about is a feature, not a bug. He is a weirdo and makes Trump look normal. Voters tend to prefer candidates who are closer to normal, even in primaries. His bizarre obsessions may not have mattered when he was governor and probably got little attention, but running for president is a totally different story. The amount of scrutiny and attention candidates for president get is unlike anything else. There is a long list of candidates who looked great on paper, but turned out to be duds. As of this writing, DeSantis looks like he will join their ranks.

Just looking at his own electoral track record, there is a case to be made that DeSantis is not as strong as he looks. The only truly impressive win he had was last year. He did that in part by doing normal things like raising teacher pay and dealing with hurricanes. On abortion, he signed a ban after fifteen weeks, which was the smart move and likely in line with public opinion. Biggest of all, he got a lot of good will for opening schools and businesses and keeping them open in 2021 while blue states were soiling themselves and reinstating mask mandates.

That combination, along with the Florida Democratic Party being a joke, allowed him to win massively. The problem for him is that the pandemic is over and nobody cares about it anymore so it is no longer something he can use to his advantage. A writer I follow put it this way: is he savvy or just lucky? It sure looks like the latter. He benefitted from his handling of the pandemic, plus doing normal things that people like. But that isn’t something that can be repeated and he has been unable to find something new to use.

As for Florida, it is a red state now. It has been a swing state for so long and has been decided by close margins every time for years that it has become ingrained in everyone’s head that it will always be that way. By that logic, DeSantis winning a perennial swing state in a landslide should make him a strong candidate. That may have been true a short while ago, but it no longer is. Florida is not a swing state anymore and Democrats should not spend a penny there next year.

During the last three election cycles (2018, 2020 and 2022), many different things have happened. There have, however, been a few consistencies. One is that in each of those cycles, Democrats did poorly in Florida. Even in 2018, when they were killing it in most places, they blew very winnable races in Florida. Despite consistently bombing there, what happens in Florida has had no bearing on anywhere else. Democrats have done well in plenty of other places in each of those cycles. What happens in Florida stays in Florida.

I’m biased on this being a Texan, but it would be nice to see a Democratic presidential campaign spend money here. If the Biden campaign is going to spend money in a big state next year, Texas is the place to do it. Biden’s odds of winning here are much better than they are in Florida even if they aren’t very high. At this point, any Republican who doesn’t have an advantage in Florida has no business running for president. It would be like a Democrat not having an advantage in Colorado or Virginia.

Is Trump unbeatable in the primary?

I recently wrote about this question before when discussing Trump’s strengths in the primary and weaknesses in the general election. I didn’t think Trump could be dislodged by other candidates and still don’t. The best opportunity other candidates would have to do that is at the debates, which he has so far declined to participate in. Even if he did, the only candidate forcefully attacking him is Chris Christie, who has no chance of winning the nomination. His favorable numbers with Republicans are very low and how effective an attack by him would even be is unclear.

I just don’t see how another candidate will bring Trump down. DeSantis’ attacks on Trump are usually indirect and rarely mention him by name. Other candidates refuse to criticize him at all. Trump doesn’t do the same. At a dinner in Iowa on Friday, for example, most of the non-Trump candidates who spoke didn’t mention him by name. Trump, on the other hand, lashed into DeSantis. When one candidate mentioned his legal troubles, he was booed.

Despite having been indicted twice, Trump still leads nationally and on the state level. In most polls, it is not close. The other candidates are, for now, running for a very distant second-place finish. Maybe some of them hope to be his running mate.

One possibility for Trump to not be nominated is that he loses the Iowa caucuses, which creates a chain reaction that brings him down in New Hampshire and subsequent states. Obviously, that would require someone to overtake him in Iowa, but it’s not clear who that would be right now. Tim Scott is getting more attention lately in light of DeSantis’ struggles, but his trying to be a happy warrior doesn’t really chime with the besieged mood among Republican primary voters. He has also refused to criticize Trump on anything.

If he overtakes DeSantis as the biggest threat to Trump, he will be attacked. How he responds will certainly be something to watch. He may just be enjoying a bounce that will fade soon or he may be peaking too early. Time will tell. As of today, though, the primary is definitively Trump’s to lose.

The only way I see Trump not being nominated is Republican primary voters tire of him. Maybe his legal troubles will slowly drain his support, but I am skeptical of it. Trump has been using his legal troubles as an asset, claiming the deep state is after him. Among Republican primary voters, that is a big selling point. The other candidates, save for a few who have no chance, refuse to attack him for it.

Republican primary voters likely rely heavily, if not entirely, on right-wing media outlets for their information. I doubt those outlets are criticizing Trump much. Most of them probably don’t even mention his legal troubles or waive them away as part of a conspiracy against him. Anyone hoping the right-wing media world would turn against him is likely to be disappointed.

If his getting indicted was going to have a big effect on his support, polls would be showing it by now. That they are not says it all. Making things worse for his primary opponents is that his trial for the classified documents case won’t start until May. By then, he could have wrapped up the nomination months earlier. Yes, he can still keep running even if he is convicted. If his legal troubles kept happening every single day, I could believe that they would hurt his support eventually. The problem is that they get attention for the week or so when he gets in trouble and then fade into the background afterwards.

He is likely to get indicted a third time for his January 6 role. That will get a lot of attention for a while and then will fade into the background. Most Republican primary voters believe he won the 2020 election and that he is either not at fault for January 6 or it was some kind of conspiracy against him. In other words, expect him to keep up the line of his getting indicted being a deep state conspiracy and for Republican primary voters to eat it up. You can also expect the other candidates to come to his defense and to criticize Jack Smith, the special counsel. You can expect all that, too, if he is indicted by the district attorney in Georgia.

As always, I don’t know what the future holds. It is possible DeSantis could have a successful reset and come roaring back. Alternatively, some other non-Trump candidate could surge and win the nomination. Maybe Republican primary voters will finally get tired of Trump and go with someone else. Any of those things could happen and there is plenty of time left before voting starts. Still, none of that looks likely as of today.

The fact is Trump is immensely popular with Republicans. He has universal name recognition and can command attention like no one else. He has a unique appeal that the other candidates lack and can get away with things they cannot. The other candidates tiptoe around criticizing him while he flays them whenever he feels like it. That kind of asymmetry is very difficult to overcome and I don’t currently see how any other candidate can do it.