DeSantis’s Campaign Is Irrelevant if the GOP Voters Want Trump

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

The GOP primaries and caucuses have not actually started, but Donald Trump appears from the polling to be way ahead. I prefer Ron DeSantis, but if you are betting, you would probably put your money on Donald Trump being nominated again. So be it. That’s what primaries are for—to find out what the base wants and to do that. And if that’s what the base wants, that’s what it should get. I’m going to support the nominee whether it is Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump or… well, it’s going to be one of those two. And I am still going to continue to support the nominee even if it is Donald Trump and he picks Nikki Haley as his vice presidential running mate, which I totally see him doing. I am a Republican, and my party winning is what matters first.

An upset victory by Ron DeSantis in Iowa would probably end all the ridiculous commentary about how Ron DeSantis is somehow running a terrible campaign. The idea his campaign is somehow bad is nonsense. Ron DeSantis is running the only campaign he could possibly run in this situation, and he’s running it just fine. Is it perfect? No. Every campaign has ups and downs and problems. But the breathless critiques of his campaign accusing it of somehow being terrible are just plain silly. This is especially prevalent on social media, where you have people announcing that they have never seen a campaign so bad, which might be true since they only got into politics about one or two cycles ago. His campaign is not bad. His path to the nomination is just incredibly narrow and difficult. Plus, Democrat election interference in the form of disgraceful, bogus lawfare rallies Trump’s supporters and focuses attention on Trump.

The reality is that Ron DeSantis has a real challenge in this election in the form of a popular, at least among Republican voters, ex-president who is running again. Republicans like Donald Trump. No one else does. Independents don’t like him, and Democrats positively loathe him to the extent that he would generate huge turnout numbers even for the senile, desiccated old pervert he will be running against (unless they trade Crusty out for Governor Hairstyle). The only path for Ron DeSantis is to somehow get around the fact that Republicans still like Donald Trump. And they should still like Donald Trump. He can be very annoying, but he was also a pretty good president overall and would probably be perfectly acceptable if he won reelection. 

Still, a challenger has to get around the voters (many of them new voters) who will never vote for anyone else and those who are open to it in theory but will stick with Trump in practice. You’re either going to overcome the Trump obstacle or you’re not, and a lot of that’s out of your control if you’re challenging him. The only way to do that is to win the argument on electability—the case is that Donald Trump is going to have a very difficult time winning in November because about 53 percent of Americans unreasonably hate him. You’re not going to change the voters’ minds on policy because the two are very similar, though I think Ron DeSantis would be stronger on policy because he’s more ideological and a more focused leader. The only differentiator is electability. Ron DeSantis essentially has to win with the argument that you should go with him because he is more likely to win in November than Donald Trump for a variety of reasons. Of course, the risk is that the voters shrug and say, “We like this guy enough that we’re going to take our chances.” 

Which is what the polls, if you believe them, appear to say.

But that’s not the fault of the campaign. Nor does it have much to do with Ron DeSantis. First of all, it’s not necessarily a reflection of the voters’ feelings toward RDS. The polling shows that they like Ron DeSantis just fine, but they prefer Donald Trump this year for various reasons. None of those reasons have anything to do with Ron DeSantis. He remains the second choice of most voters. 

The theory that Ron DeSantis is running a bad campaign fails because no one can actually point to something that Ron DeSantis did or did not do that made voters prefer Donald Trump. There’s no “one weird trick” that he could have made people who are inclined to support Donald Trump stop supporting Donald Trump. What RDS always had to do was demonstrate that he is a viable and effective potential president, which he has done – he keeps winning the debates. And then he has to show that he can beat Donald Trump by beating him in Iowa, which he is still looking to do, and maybe he will pull off. But he’s got to pull it off.

The hits on Ron DeSantis’s campaign are incoherent and kind of ridiculous—most of them sound like talking points from the Trump campaign. That’s not a criticism – if your talking points are out there, you are doing your job, but do not confuse the narrative with objective reality. You can’t blame Donald Trump for running a primary and trying to win. You can blame someone for accepting talking points uncritically. 

The talking points serve less to convince people to vote for Trump than to provide a rationale for pretending to be mad at the most successful conservative governor in America. There is the disloyalty claim that somehow Ron DeSantis owed it to Donald Trump not to run in 2024. Leaving aside that no one owes a politician anything, this argument is never going to switch a single vote. Anyone buying it is already going to vote for Donald Trump come hell or high water. 

Then there are the claims that somehow Ron DeSantis is weird or off-putting. That’s just silly. He’s perfectly fine. Again, no one is going to look at Ron DeSantis and his track record of achievement and say, “Well, his posture’s a little wacky, so I’m going to go with Donald Trump,” unless that person was always going to go with Donald Trump.

Next, there are the people who accuse Ron DeSantis of being some sort of Soros/Ryan/Rove plant, but this is so stupid that you almost have to be willfully dumb or disingenuous to buy it. Hell, Trump’s likely to select as VP the lady Paul Ryan backs. Again, someone who believes this nonsense was never going to vote for him anyway.

Another hit is that DeSantis has failed to spend his time and effort focused on election shenanigans and the unjust prosecution of Trump. RDS actually fixed his state’s election system and has regularly criticized the fascist persecutions. The argument is that he did not do so enough, somehow. But who is the voter who is so mad at DeSantis for not sufficiently addressing these injustices who would have switched to DeSantis if DeSantis had made those grievances the centerpiece of his campaign? None. No one. It’s crazy talk to think that his campaign has made a mistake by not making its central message “My opponent is getting jerked around. Vote for me.”

My new favorite is that somehow Ron DeSantis’s online influencers – by which they mean people who like Ron DeSantis and talk about him positively on Twitter – are so horrible and evil that they have driven away scores of potential Ron DeSantis voters. Boloney. First, maybe 5 percent of the electorate cares what happens on Twitter, and most of them are unlikely to be influenced in any way by the social media fireworks between @GatorRonFan2024 and @FatMAGADeadbeatDad69. Second, it’s kind of difficult to believe that if you were a Trump fan, you are somehow so scandalized by mean tweets that it is going to determine who you vote for in an election. Who is the person who says, “Yeah, I was totally going to vote for Ron DeSantis, but some people who support him had some mean tweets, so I’m going to vote for… Donald Trump instead?” 

Now, there are plenty of people who are quite reasonable about why they support Trump. They think Donald Trump did a good job. They think Donald Trump is likely to win next year. They think it’s important to vote for Donald Trump to show the damn Communists that they don’t get to win. You can agree or disagree with those positions, but those are rational positions. There’s no need for mental gymnastics to try to justify not voting for a great candidate like Ron DeSantis. You have the right to vote for who you want and why. But it’s just silly to make up excuses for it.

Ron DeSantis has run about the best campaign you could run in this situation. I am sure he would change some things if he has to do it over in 2028; no campaign is perfect, and the key is to learn and improve. He had no choice but to run in 2024 – this was his time to strike. Some people disagree with that but regardless, if he was going to run this year, he needed to run the way he did. He could not and did not make his whole campaign about trashing Donald Trump. That would be intellectually incoherent because he agrees with almost everything Donald Trump did with some differences that he has pointed out. He had to make it about electability, and at some point, the voters have to decide whether they want to roll the dice with Trump 2.0 or go with what I and many others believe is the more likely candidate to win. We will know soon, starting in Iowa, what the voters choose. And then we should all support the winner.