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Did any of it change anything? By the late evening news Monday night, we should know whether DeSantis’s presidential campaign, which once looked like the best shot for dislodging Trump as the leader of the Republican Party, has much of a future.
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Cold weather is expected to bring down turnout a bit from the 186,000 who participated in the last competitive GOP caucus here in Iowa, in 2016. Informed Republicans in the state expect DeSantis’s army of door-knockers to help him do at least a little better than his poll numbers. Perhaps Iowans will bristle at former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s comment last week at a campaign event in Milford, N.H.: “You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it.”
DeSantis certainly can come out of Wednesday’s debate feeling good that his opponent sounded like a malfunctioning robot, programmed to mention “DeSantisLies.com” every two minutes.
But this all amounts to tweaking on the margins of what is likely to be a “Trump wins big” headline Tuesday morning. This in a state where DeSantis was endorsed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, where he visited all 99 counties, and where his campaign and supportive super PACs spent tens of millions of dollars on television and radio advertising.
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DeSantis did everything a Republican is supposed to do to win the Iowa caucuses. And it doesn’t appear to have come close to working.
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It’s not that DeSantis is obligated to quit if the final numbers from the caucuses are disappointing for him. But there is the stinging question of where he goes to rebound. He’s in single digits in the next contest, the New Hampshire primary. He’s about 40 points behind Trump in South Carolina, traditionally one of the decisive moments in a Republican presidential primary. On top of that, he’s about 40 points behind even in his home state of Florida.
Where does DeSantis, you know, win?
DeSantis’s campaign was based on a seemingly plausible but ultimately erroneous theory of the race: that the Republican Party hungered for a candidate that had Trump’s populism and pugnaciousness, but without Jan. 6 or his other scandals.
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Instead, the more times Trump was indicted, the more grass-roots Republicans rallied around him, choosing to interpret the former president’s legal problems as a sign of how much he threatened the “establishment” or the “deep state.” It’s as though some Republicans believed supporting another candidate would be a de facto betrayal of Trump — a failure of a kind of loyalty test.
And if DeSantis wasn’t going to peel away Trump supporters, then he had to unify the roughly half the party open to options other than Trump — but there has never been a cohesive non- or anti-Trump coalition within the GOP. Some oppose Trump from the left or center; some oppose him because they see him as an erratic, unreliable advocate for conservative positions. In the end, DeSantis settled into the sweet spot of being too Trumpy for the anti-Trump GOP voters and not Trumpy enough for the Trump fan base.
Maybe that early debate swing at Trump and the dismissive “word vomit” assessment are a sign that DeSantis realized he could never overtake Trump without more direct criticism. Coming now, just days before the moment of reckoning, we’re left to wonder whether things would be different if DeSantis had been this aggressive from the start.
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DES MOINES — Crunch time wasn’t supposed to arrive so early for Ron DeSantis.
It wasn’t the first time the Florida governor has criticized former president Donald Trump, but at Wednesday’s Republican debate moderated by CNN, DeSantis came out swinging from the first minute: “I appreciated what President Trump did. But, let’s just be honest. He said he was going to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. He did not deliver that. He said he was going to drain the swamp. He did not deliver that. He said he was going to hold Hillary [Clinton] accountable, and he let her off the hook. He said he was going to eliminate the debt and he added $7.8 trillion to the debt.” Later, DeSantis dismissed Trump’s “word vomit on social media” and said that Trump failed the country during rioting in 2020. “He sat in the White House and tweeted ‘law and order,’ but he did nothing to ensure law and order.”
Did any of it change anything? By the late evening news Monday night, we should know whether DeSantis’s presidential campaign, which once looked like the best shot for dislodging Trump as the leader of the Republican Party, has much of a future.
Cold weather is expected to bring down turnout a bit from the 186,000 who participated in the last competitive GOP caucus here in Iowa, in 2016. Informed Republicans in the state expect DeSantis’s army of door-knockers to help him do at least a little better than his poll numbers. Perhaps Iowans will bristle at former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s comment last week at a campaign event in Milford, N.H.: “You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it.”
DeSantis certainly can come out of Wednesday’s debate feeling good that his opponent sounded like a malfunctioning robot, programmed to mention “DeSantisLies.com” every two minutes.
But this all amounts to tweaking on the margins of what is likely to be a “Trump wins big” headline Tuesday morning. This in a state where DeSantis was endorsed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, where he visited all 99 counties, and where his campaign and supportive super PACs spent tens of millions of dollars on television and radio advertising.
DeSantis did everything a Republican is supposed to do to win the Iowa caucuses. And it doesn’t appear to have come close to working.
It’s not that DeSantis is obligated to quit if the final numbers from the caucuses are disappointing for him. But there is the stinging question of where he goes to rebound. He’s in single digits in the next contest, the New Hampshire primary. He’s about 40 points behind Trump in South Carolina, traditionally one of the decisive moments in a Republican presidential primary. On top of that, he’s about 40 points behind even in his home state of Florida.
Where does DeSantis, you know, win?
DeSantis’s campaign was based on a seemingly plausible but ultimately erroneous theory of the race: that the Republican Party hungered for a candidate that had Trump’s populism and pugnaciousness, but without Jan. 6 or his other scandals.
Instead, the more times Trump was indicted, the more grass-roots Republicans rallied around him, choosing to interpret the former president’s legal problems as a sign of how much he threatened the “establishment” or the “deep state.” It’s as though some Republicans believed supporting another candidate would be a de facto betrayal of Trump — a failure of a kind of loyalty test.
And if DeSantis wasn’t going to peel away Trump supporters, then he had to unify the roughly half the party open to options other than Trump — but there has never been a cohesive non- or anti-Trump coalition within the GOP. Some oppose Trump from the left or center; some oppose him because they see him as an erratic, unreliable advocate for conservative positions. In the end, DeSantis settled into the sweet spot of being too Trumpy for the anti-Trump GOP voters and not Trumpy enough for the Trump fan base.
Maybe that early debate swing at Trump and the dismissive “word vomit” assessment are a sign that DeSantis realized he could never overtake Trump without more direct criticism. Coming now, just days before the moment of reckoning, we’re left to wonder whether things would be different if DeSantis had been this aggressive from the start.
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