Yesterday, we looked at DeSantis’ incredibly ugly divisiveness in his attempt to demonize the LGBTQ community to gain some elusive traction against Trump. It isn’t giving him any of that traction he craves and he might as well drop out of the race and hope voters forget him between now and 2028. He’s even losing to Trump among Florida Republicans-- the ones who know him best! A new poll from Florida Atlantic University shows Trump crushing him 50-30%.
But, 2028 or not, Lady McBeth will never let her Meatball give up on 2024 and now their ill-starred campaign is suddenly trying to laughably tar Trump with another ridiculous GOP bugaboo: Big Tech.
It’s as though a desperate DeSantis is throwing every far right talking point at Trump to see if anything sticks. Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece for The Atlantic Sunday acknowledging far right extremism— which comes natural to DeSantis anyway— is probably his only shot to beat Trump. Referring to that hateful anti-LGBTQ ad, Rosenberg wrote that “DeSantis’ anti-trans rhetoric is part of a pattern— and an essential component of his plan to win the Republican primary”— to ignore normal Americans and focus entirely on Republican primary voters who are as filled with paranoia and hatred as he is himself… and especially the deranged, over-the-top evangelical voters in Iowa. That’s where the first GOP contest takes place— in 6 months.
“The outcome of that showdown,” wrote Rosenberg,”has the potential to shape the entire primary to follow, and by pivoting hard to the right on social issues including abortion and gender, DeSantis has been methodically positioning himself to win it.” Visiting churches in Iowa this year, Astead Herndon discovered a surge for Meatball Ron, who he reported is “gaining ground on a surprisingly shaky Trump. ‘We believe the former president’s hurdles are so significant, that most likely, he gives the Democrats the best opportunity to win in 2024,’ Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Family Leader, the state’s politically influential evangelical umbrella group, told him. ‘So we believe we’re doing our base a great service by trying to say who would be a good alternative to the former president.’ Who might that be? At Eternity Church, one of the largest in the area, Herndon found that ‘a surprising number of people are turning to DeSantis,’ who had visited the congregation in May. The pastor himself revealed that he’d donated to the Florida governor— and repeatedly referenced ‘gender’ as one of his top issues.”
Warning, the right-leaning Real Clear Politics polling average among GOP voters in Iowa shows Trump beating DeSantis 47.7% to 23.7% with Nikki Haley at 4.0%, Tim Scott at 3.7%, Pence at 3.3% and no one else in even remote contention. Last Friday, the most recent poll of Iowa’s likely Republican voters from American Greatness show that not only is Trump ahead 44% to 21% but that Trump has momentum while Meatball continues his downward death spiral. “DeSantis is losing among voters who have a favorable impression of him. Twenty-eight percent of these folks say DeSantis is their preferred candidate while 42% chose Trump. Voters who have a favorable impression of both men chose Trump as well, 55% to DeSantis’s 25%. Voters prefer Trump over DeSantis to fix the economy, fight progressives in Washington D.C. and sharing the concerns that voters have. Trump has a slight lead over DeSantis when voters are asked which candidate has the best chance of beating Biden. 35% say Trump has the better chance, while 30% say DeSantis.”
This could hurt Trump in Iowa, where Reynolds is more popular than he is and where she has endeavored to remain neutral even though he loves DeSantis and detests Trump. But he couldn't leave it alone; he has no self-control:
Back at The Atlantic, Rosenberg wrote that the evangelic voters Herndon spoke to “have outsize importance. Because of Vander Plaats’s well-organized political machine, conservative evangelicals and their preferences have determined the winner of the Iowa caucus for the past three Republican presidential primaries. In 2008, they chose the former pastor Mike Huckabee. In 2012, they gave the nod to the culture warrior Rick Santorum. And in 2016, they handed the first victory of the primary season not to the twice-divorced playboy Donald Trump, but to Ted Cruz. None of this would seem to bode well for DeSantis. After all, Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz all lost the nomination. Most other states are not as dominated by the white-evangelical electorate that prevails in Iowa. So why would the Florida governor invest so much effort in courting a community that has previously failed to deliver a durable victory? Probably because taking Iowa is his only chance to take the nomination.”
And maybe he can win in Iowa and maybe he can somehow translate that into a national win, as far-fetched as either proposition seems, but it would mean going so insanely extreme that even mainstream Republicans might be reluctant to vote for him in the general election!
Rosenberg argued that “According to recent polls, about half of Republican voters don’t actually want to nominate Trump again. But as long as other small-time candidates such as Nikki Haley and Mike Pence are in the race, DeSantis has no hope of consolidating this constituency. To beat Trump, he needs to turn the 2024 primary into a head-to-head contest between himself and the former president. And to do that, he needs to win Iowa and demonstrate to Trump-skeptical voters that he is their only realistic option. Just as Biden’s dominant showing in South Carolina convinced establishment Democrats that he was their best chance to beat a surging Bernie Sanders, a DeSantis upset in Iowa could anoint him as the most viable alternative to Trump. Iowa won’t determine the ultimate victor, in other words, but it could determine the contenders. ‘Iowa’s job isn’t to select the nominee,’ Vander Plaats told Herndon. ‘Iowa’s job is to narrow the field.’ In the past, winning Iowa failed to vault the likes of Cruz and Santorum into serious contention, because they were factional candidates without name recognition or major appeal outside the religious right. But DeSantis is a better-positioned candidate with comparable favorables to Trump, thanks to his national profile and prolific appearances on Fox News. If he can quickly narrow the primary field to a one-on-one contest, he has the underlying numbers to make it competitive. If he can’t, his campaign may be over before it really begins.”
Of course, there’s a cost to running a campaign designed to appeal to your party’s most fervent partisans. By staking out unpopular positions to win the primary, a candidate puts himself at a disadvantage in the general election, where independent voters tend to punish perceived extremism. We’ve seen this quite recently. In the 2022 midterms, Trump handpicked many GOP congressional candidates who echoed his 2020 election-fraud claims. But although these individuals easily won their primaries, nearly all of them lost their races. What thrilled the Republican base alienated the broader electorate.
The same trap has also ensnared non-Trumpy politicians. Just ask another former Republican presidential hopeful. In 2012, Mitt Romney began his campaign with a reputation as a problem-solving moderate who had successfully governed the blue state of Massachusetts. But by the end of the primary, he had dubbed himself “severely conservative” on the debate stage and committed to an array of policy stances that dogged him throughout the election.
At the time, a senior Romney adviser infamously assured the media that his candidate would simply wipe the slate clean after winning the Republican nomination: “You hit a reset button for the fall campaign … It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch.” It didn’t quite work out that way. “After running for more than a year in which he called himself ‘severely conservative,’” Barack Obama cracked, “Mitt Romney’s trying to convince you that he was severely kidding.”
Such political sleight of hand might have worked when voters didn’t have immediate access to video recordings of everything a candidate said on the campaign trail. But as Romney discovered, in the age of the internet and viral social-media clips, it’s much harder to escape one’s past pronouncements. Put another way, today’s pro-DeSantis ads boasting of his anti-trans legislation are tomorrow’s anti-DeSantis ads warning voters about his radicalism.
TFG would never support anyone else. NEVER. Besides, he is completely untrustworthy and never keeps any promises. Total b.s.
DSantis is an unlikeable fascist who I suspect has zero chance of any further advancement in politics.
this is silly. meathead knows that there won't be elections after 2024 UNLESS the nazis lose and do not stage a successful coup.
he's pure evil, but he's smarter than your average democrap voter who thinks that there will still be elections after the nazis win or take over.