There are all kinds of scenarios you can read about late challenges to Donald Trump’s very likely Republican presidential nomination. I decided to rain on one such parade at New York:

Among the Republicans who are scheming to prevent Donald Trump’s third straight presidential nomination, there seems to be a notion that if the GOP presidential field him can be winnowed in Iowa and New Hampshire, some savior of the party will emerge and beat him in a one-on-one fight. The argument seems to go back to a highly debatable (I’d actually call it wrong) proposition: The large field of rivals was the crucial factor in enabling Trump to win his first nomination in 2016. But even if it were true that a smaller field could have vanquished Trump in 2016, he’s arguably a much stronger candidate right now than he was eight years ago. For example: He’s currently at 55.8 percent among Republican voters nationally in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. In 2016, he did not hit 50 percent in any national poll prior to nailing down the nomination in May.

Still, some say we should ignore the national polls and just focus on the early state races that could produce a Trump-vanquishing champion. That’s exactly what New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu argued Monday in a New York Times op-ed:

“The best indicator of Mr. Trump’s strength is looking to where the voters are paying attention: in states where candidates are campaigning, television ads are running, and there is a wide range of media attention on every candidate.

“In Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states that will vote in the 2024 Republican primaries, Mr. Trump is struggling. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, he is consistently polling in the low 40 percent range. The floor of his support may be high, but his ceiling is low.”

I wouldn’t call a candidate who has a 26-point lead in Iowa (again, per the RCP averages) and a 30-point lead in New Hampshire one who is “struggling” in those two states. Sununu appears to assume anyone who is not for Trump now will never support him, which wasn’t true in 2016 (when he gained strength every time a rival dropped out) and isn’t much supported by the evidence of Trump’s high favorability numbers among Republicans today.

At some early point, if Trump keeps winning big, he’s going to become unbeatable. No Republican candidate who has won both Iowa and New Hampshire has ever been denied the presidential nomination. Will Trump be the first? It sure sounds like another of those Establishment Republican fantasies whereby Trump is regularly underestimated.

Indeed, the bigger question about the early states in 2024 is whether Trump will have nailed down the nomination before the field is small enough to give anyone a clean shot at the heavy front-runner. Several candidates (notably Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy) are focusing mostly on New Hampshire; they aren’t going to drop out after an underwhelming performance in Iowa. Tim Scott and Nikki Haley are likely to hang onto their candidacies fanatically until their home state of South Carolina — the fourth state to vote — holds its primary in late February.

Even without the post-Iowa winnowing Sununu is counting on, it’s true there is a history of New Hampshire voters interrupting the premature victory celebrations of Iowa winners in both parties. Is it possible an Iowa win by Trump would be Pyrrhic, dooming his candidacy?

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once you examine the recent Republican candidates who have won Iowa and then quickly succumbed in New Hampshire and beyond. In 2008, 2012, and 2016, Iowa was won by Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz, respectively. Huckabee barely had two nickels to rub together; Santorum and Cruz upset national front-runners (Mitt Romney and Donald Trump) who came back to crush them in New Hampshire and later primaries. None of these doomed Iowa winners are in anything like the position Trump is in right now.

Anything’s possible in politics, and Trump’s legal troubles could in theory extend the contest for the nomination even if he’s winning initially (though so far those legal troubles seem to be helping him among Republicans). Candidates should definitely plan beyond the earliest states even if they are unlikely to be around for, say, Florida (where Trump and DeSantis could wage a dual home-turf battle) or Georgia (where Trump’s rivals are angling for an endorsement by Trump’s nemesis Brian Kemp).

But the odds say Trump’s rivals better beat him or at least give him a scare in Iowa, where it’s possible to punch above your weight with a superior ground game. It’s also a state the 45th president lost in 2016. If he romps there, he’s probably all but a lock for the nomination, barring crazy developments. And all those pleas to candidates to get out of the way of a fictional Trump-slayer will represent a waste of time and energy.

Since the latest Trump indictment dropped in my home state of Georgia, I offered some thoughts at New York about the Peach State being his nightmare jurisdiction:

There’s an old saying among southerners that “you can’t go to hell without going through Atlanta,” which is a reference to the many, many air passengers who have to transfer from plane to plane at Atlanta’s Jackson-Hartsfield Airport to reach their destinations. Donald Trump’s journey through criminal courtrooms near and far is taking him through Atlanta, too, we learned on August 14, as a Fulton County grand jury indicted the former president on a variety of charges stemming from the Georgia edition of his plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And unless he gets very lucky, Trump’s legal experience in Atlanta will be as hellish as a layover headed nowhere, as the charges force him to relive some of his least favorite moments of the last three years.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and likely the jurors called forth to judge Trump, can and will be demonized by Team Trump and his MAGA supporters as Democrats “weaponizing” the legal system to take down the 45th president before he can return triumphantly to the White House. But many of the key witnesses testifying to Trump’s criminality will be his fellow Republicans in a state that has defied his wishes again and again. Trump’s losing streak in the state began in 2020, when he lost the state narrowly to Joe Biden in an election result certified by Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who administered the election, and recertified by Republican governor Brian Kemp.

All Trump’s efforts to change that result represented challenges to his own party’s power structure in the state, which refused to back down on the conviction that it was an honest election honestly counted and duly confirmed before God and the federal government. Trump and his allies had to lie like madmen to keep Georgia’s electoral votes contested, and from the president on down, they ensnared themselves serially in fraudulent charges and felonious pressure campaigns, most notably in Trump’s own plea to Raffensperger to manufacture some votes for him. And while their high jinks from fake-elector schemes to made-up fraud incidents echoed what they were doing in other battleground states, it’s the solid phalanx of Republican statewide elected officials fighting the election coup that made Georgia special.

Trump’s humiliation in Georgia didn’t end with Raffensperger’s refusal to “find” him some votes or with the refusal of Georgia’s Republican legislature to certify fake electors. His obsession with his attempted election coup was widely blamed for the defeat of two Republican U.S. senators in a January 2021 general-election runoff that cost the GOP control of the upper chamber. But worse yet, Trump sought to purge Raffensperger, Kemp, and several other GOP officeholders who didn’t bend the knee during the 2022 Republican primaries, and he and his surrogates had their asses handed to them. In the midterm election, Kemp, Raffensperger, and other Republicans romped to victory. The conspicuous loser was Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate Herschel Walker, again robbing the GOP of a shot at Senate control.

Suffice it to say that as Trump faces a potentially devastating criminal proceeding in Georgia, there are very few of his fellow partisans willing to defend him, and some of the biggest names in the state GOP have already testified against him before the grand jury and are likely to incriminate him in open court (a very open court since the proceedings may be televised). Such sympathy as Trump demands as the putative 2024 Republican presidential nominee may be eroded by racketeering charges, which will surely make potential co-conspirators keep their distance. And if Trump is found guilty by a Fulton County jury at trial, he not only cannot pardon himself as he might do with a federal conviction but cannot even throw himself on Brian Kemp’s mercy. In Georgia, pardons are administered not by the governor but by an appointed state board that in the past has limited pardons to offenders who have already done their time.

All in all, Georgia is the last place in America where Donald Trump wants to face the music for his misdeeds. He should have skipped committing election-related crimes in his nightmare state even as wealthy travelers find ways to fly around Atlanta.

 

It can be oddly fascinating to watch a presidential campaign implode, particularly if you don’t like the candidate. That’s where I am with Ron DeSantis, as I explained at New York:

Ron DeSantis remains, for the moment, the most formidable rival to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But it’s been a long, long time since he’s gotten any particularly good news in the polls. A new Emerson College survey shows him dropping into single digits and third place in New Hampshire, behind Chris Christie. In the RealClearPolitics averages of national GOP polls, he’s dropped from 30.1 percent at the end of March to 14.8 percent now. He looks relatively strong in Iowa, where it appears he is making a desperate all-or-nothing stand, but mostly just by comparison. Trump only leads him by 27 points in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, though sparse Iowa polling may disguise a less positive environment for DeSantis.

Polling aside, recent news emanating from the DeSantis campaign has been generally quite bad. He’s had three campaign leadership shakeups, a big round of staff layoffs, and at least one major “reboot” of his message and strategy. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is still building steam, and its main problem is that too much of his vast financial resources are going into legal costs in connection with indictments that aren’t hurting him at all among Republican voters. Another bad development for DeSantis is that a large field of rivals has remained in the race, spoiling his hopes for a one-on-one battle with the front-runner.

Once an almost obscenely well-funded campaign, the DeSantis effort appears to have a high burn rate and some serious donor defections. And more generally, he’s no longer the darling of Republican and conservative elites, most particularly Rupert Murdoch.

The trajectory of DeSantis 2024 should remind political observers of another recent Republican presidential bid that at this point in 2015 was about to enter a dramatic plunge into premature defeat well before voters voted: Scott Walker.

Read my colleague Jonathan Chait’s description of Walker as he appeared at the beginning of that race and see if it doesn’t sound exactly like the image DeSantis had built until his recent troubles:

“Scott Walker won three statewide elections in Wisconsin, which has supported the Democrat in every presidential election since 1984. He led national Republican polling as recently as March. He led in Iowa by enormous margins as recently as August. The Koch brothers loved him. Walker had spent his entire adult life developing an almost superhuman fealty to the principles of the modern Republican Party, its Reaganolotry, and, above all, a ruthless commitment to crushing its enemies beneath his boot heel. If there was anything that gave Walker joy … it was the goal of wiping organized labor off the map. As Grover Norquist enthused in May, ‘when you meet him, it’s like seeing somebody who sits on a throne on the skulls of his enemies.’”

Like DeSantis, Walker was relatively young, in his 40s, and thus was able to generate a sense of generational change in his party (the two previous GOP nominees were 72 and 65 years old, respectively). Like the Floridian, the Wisconsin governor had found the absolute sweet spot of the GOP zeitgeist: the strident ideologue who somehow still appeals to swing voters, and who strikes fear into the hearts of liberals everywhere as he destroys their counterparts in his state. Walker’s very colorlessness (like DeSantis’s) enhanced his reputation as a methodical Death Star come to remake America in his own repulsive image.

The question now is whether DeSantis will also emulate Walker in the ultimate futility of his campaign. There are as many parallels in the decline of their candidacies as in their rise to national political celebrity. Margaret Hartmann’s timeline for Walker’s brief campaign shows some of the same weaknesses as DeSantis’s, and also how quickly his problems snowballed:

“According to Real Clear Politics’ polling averages, during most of the first half of 2015, Walker was among the top three GOP presidential candidates in national polls, and led in Iowa by a wide margin …

“Some outlets ran stories such as “How Scott Walker Will Win” and “Six Reasons Why Scott Walker Will Be Elected President,” but the Times raised the possibility that Walker’s shift to the right on issues like same-sex marriage, immigration, and ethanol subsidies to maintain his lead in Iowa was making him appear inauthentic and costing him elsewhere in the nation.”

Coincidentally or not, DeSantis’s Iowa-driven decision to run to the right of Trump also had less than ideal consequences for his candidacy. Also like Walker, DeSantis seems to have also underestimated Trump. Walker pretty clearly didn’t know what hit him, Hartmann suggested:

“With Trump dominating the political conversation and a crowded field of 16 other Republican candidates, Walker’s campaign began imploding in earnest. After months on top, a CNN/ORC poll found Walker had dropped to third place in Iowa behind Trump and Ben Carson.”

At this point, Walker’s lack of charisma started becoming a problem for him in the retail political environment of Iowa, just as it’s a problem for DeSantis, especially after he made the dubious decision to promise to appear in all the state’s 99 counties. But what actually did in Walker after his campaign lost its magic were mediocre debate performances, beginning in August:

“Walker’s appearance in the first GOP debate was unmemorable. Just before the debate, he had more than 11 percent in an average of the last nine national polls, but afterward he dropped below 5 percent.”

In the second debate, in September, Walker was all but invisible, struggling to draw questions and attention. And then he was done, with his support dropping to below one percent in national polls even as Trump soared and Ted Cruz replaced Walker as the “true conservative” in the race.

It’s entirely possible that Ron DeSantis is one poor debate performance away from the sad fate of Scott Walker. He’s supposedly been deep into preparations for the first candidate debate on August 23 for a while now, though he’s handicapped by not knowing if Trump is going to show. But his margin for error has disappeared. He’s hardly the political behemoth he appeared to be earlier this year, and if he can’t turn things around soon, impatient Republicans will either resign themselves to another Trump nomination or quickly find a new alternative.

You’d figure nonwhite candidates for president would be particularly unlikely to descend to old-school racist tactics. In at least one case, you’d figure wrong, as I observed at New York:

The record number of non-white candidates running for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination is a source of pride for Republicans who deny their party has become a MAGA white-nationalist cult. But the candidates themselves often seem to be walking a tightrope when addressing the overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate. The two South Carolinians in the race are good examples: Black U.S. senator Tim Scott and Indian American former governor Nikki Haley have both touted their ability to overcome racial discrimination as a personal triumph while denying systemic racism is still a problem for the country.

Indian American tech tyro Vivek Ramaswamy hasn’t spent a lot of time talking about the discrimination he might have faced; his whole claim to fame, thanks to lavish attention from Fox News, is being a crusader against “woke corporations” and anything like anti-discrimination policies in the public or private sectors. Predictable as that stance may be, Ramaswamy is now blazing new trails as a non-white candidate peddling racist dog whistles. During an appearance in Iowa over the weekend, his gratuitous attack on Juneteenth as a “useless” holiday that should be replaced with an Election Day holiday drew chuckles and applause from the all-white audience.

Ramaswamy called Juneteenth a “made-up” holiday “imposed under political duress” after the killing of George Floyd.         This actually represented a two-cushion shot to the far-right side of the table. His suggestion that we make Election Day a national holiday was accompanied by proposals to get rid of early and electronic voting and impose a national voter-ID system. I’m pretty sure Ramaswamy is too smart to believe the various forms of convenience voting came out of nowhere in 2020 to thwart Donald Trump. They have been spreading state by state for many decades, often promoted by Republicans. So the premise for his dismissal of Juneteeth comes right out of the MAGA fever swamps..

But the idea of Juneteenth’s arising from nowhere after Floyd’s death is either deeply ignorant or malignantly cynical. Juneteenth commemorations of the last slaves to learn of their emancipation in 1865 date back to 1866; the first state Juneteenth holiday was established in Texas in 1980; and before Joe Biden made it a federal holiday, 49 states had official observances. Ramaswamy’s glib dismissal of Juneteenth as “redundant” is even more insulting. Yes, the emancipation of slaves was the first step in the struggle for justice and equality for which Martin Luther King Jr. died, but both the destruction of slavery and the end of Jim Crow were distinct and momentous occurrences in U.S. history.

As anyone with access to Google can establish, Ramaswamy was singing a different tune about Juneteenth when the holiday was commemorated less than two months ago, when he called it “a celebration of the American Dream itself.”

Even then, Ramaswamy was anxious to make sure no white folks imagined that Juneteenth provided any reason for self-examination or discomfort. But he didn’t call it “useless.” I guess he needed some attention that his vast personal wealth couldn’t buy. Or perhaps he wanted to show Trump, his much-admired role model, that he really was learning the ropes.

In the wake of yet another pro-choice ballot measure victory in Ohio, I offered some thoughts at New York:

During the half-century when Roe v. Wade was law, anti-abortion advocates and their Republican allies frequently complained that the right of “the people” to determine abortion policy had been stolen by the unelected Supreme Court. It became a classic “wedge issue” benefiting the GOP, as frustrated traditionalist Catholics and conservative Evangelical Protestants left the Democratic Party in droves, providing votes and grassroots muscle to the GOP for decades. This legacy culminated in the devil’s bargain that cultural conservatives struck with Donald Trump in 2016.

Well, in the 13 months since the newly reactionary Supreme Court created by Trump reversed Roe and “the people” regained that right (which in reality meant the right to deny other people reproductive rights), voters in red and blue states alike have wherever possible used this freedom to restore the rights the courts and Republican legislators have sought to steal. It happened again on Tuesday in Ohio, the Republican-trending former battleground state where voters decisively rejected a sneaky GOP bid to make it harder to write abortion rights into the state’s constitution through a ballot initiative in November.

This is the seventh statewide abortion-ballot measure since Roe was reversed, and pro-choice forces have won every one of them, even in conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and now Ohio. When Ohio voters (more than likely) enact the constitutional amendment Republicans failed to block, the tally will be 8–0. And in 2024, voters in at least seven other states will decide on measures to protect or deny abortion rights.

If the rout continues, giving “the people” control over abortion policy may be quite the pyrrhic victory for the anti-abortion movement and even more so for the GOP whose electoral fortunes could be caught in the powerful backlash to Roe’s reversal. That backlash is already the prime suspect in the disappointing 2022 midterm results for Republicans who expected a “red wave” that never quite materialized. But the depth and breadth of popular commitment to abortion rights going into what may be an apocalyptic 2024 presidential cycle remains significantly unclear.

It should be understood, however, that the option of using “direct democracy” to restore abortion rights via citizen-initiated constitutional amendments that circumvent Republican legislators (as has now happened in both Michigan and Ohio) is available only in a total of 16 states. Voters may also fight back in cases where GOP lawmakers are trying to abolish state constitutional abortion rights that have been recognized by state courts and need voter ratification of their handiwork (that’s what happened in 2022 in Kansas and Kentucky). But to a significant extent, the fate of the right to choose in many politically contested states will continue to depend on partisan control of major offices, including legislative chambers, governorships, and in some cases elected judges. And that’s aside from the power of Congress to preempt state abortion laws if one party or the other secures a trifecta and can overcome a Senate filibuster. So even in states with no abortion ballot test on tap in 2024, the subject will very much be on the ballot via the two polarized pro-choice and anti-abortion major parties.

The pro-choice state-ballot-measure winning streak, the impact of the subject on key 2022 races, and bountiful polling showing pro-choice majorities in all but the most conservative corners of the country have combined to convince many Republican operatives and even elected officials that the subject is a loser for the GOP. When Donald Trump said just that at the beginning of 2023, it produced a lot of consternation among anti-abortion advocates who had previously adored him for his successfully redeemed promise to appoint justices who would overturn Roe. The Ohio results will convince even more Republicans that the 45th president was right. Perhaps they will even whisper to their abortion-obsessed allies in and beyond religious conservative circles to show some patience, keep their mouths shut, and help the GOP obtain enough power to give their friends what they want when political conditions are more favorable.

But now that Roe is gone, abortion politics is a 24/7 business, and anti-abortion activists are out of patience; that’s particularly true among the newer and more militant organizations like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Students for Life. They are eager to use the competitive Republican presidential-nomination contest to increase, not hide, their leverage over the GOP, and Trump’s candid remarks on abortion politics have encouraged his rivals to pledge greater allegiance to the cause. Mike Pence and Tim Scott have both leapt to embrace the hard-core position of favoring a national six-week abortion ban. Ron DeSantis has punctuated his effort to run to Trump’s right by bragging to Iowans about the six-week ban (deemed “too harsh” by Trump) he signed in Florida.

It’s possible Trump will cruise to the nomination without renewing the vows underlying his marriage of convenience to the anti-abortion movement, and abortion will recede as a 2024 campaign issue. But national Democrats, who know a good wedge issue when they see one, almost certainly won’t let general-election voters who is pledged to protect abortion rights and who has worked hard to abolish them. We don’t have a partisan breakdown of the vote from Ohio (the state does not have voter registration by party), but there were clear indications the “No on Issue 1” coalition included quite a few Republican voters, as did the similar pro-choice coalitions in other states with previous abortion-ballot measures. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has presented county-level data comparing 2020 partisan-vote margins to abortion-ballot measures in Ohio and five other states (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Montana) and the results are striking:

“In Ohio, about one-fifth of counties that voted for Trump in 2020 opposed Issue 1. The same pattern held in the six states included above. Of the 510 counties included in the analysis, only two counties that voted for Biden in 2020 also opposed access to abortion. Among Trump-voting counties, 81 supported that access.

“To use the parlance of political observers, abortion, particularly when presented to voters directly, is an effective wedge issue for the left.”

In a hypothetical Biden-Trump general-election rematch, a significant number of anti-Trump Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will be under pressure to defect to Biden, as a decent number did in 2020. Abandoned pro-choice swing voters of every background will have another reason to conduct their own protest against the GOP, or at least split their tickets.

The prominence of the issue will be enhanced in the media and the minds of voters by conspicuous abortion-rights ballot measures that will face 2024 voters in DeSantis’s Florida, and perhaps in ultra-battleground Arizona. It’s a bad look for today’s allegedly populist, anti-elite GOP to deny people fundamental rights or even the power to determine policies affecting their fundamental rights. Abortion rights could be the populist cause of the next decade or so. That’s a real problem for Republicans.

The clumsiness Ron DeSantis is exhibiting in the 2024 Republican presidential contest is most evident on the fraught cultural issue of abortion, as I explained at New York:

It used to be abortion politics were pretty easy to navigate for GOP pols. Nearly all favored a reversal of Roe v. Wade and demagogued about rare (and usually medically necessary) late-term abortions. Many walked on the wild side and favored fetal “personhood” laws and other total bans that affected not only abortion but contraception; outside the ever-attentive ranks of anti-abortion activists, nobody much cared what these pols advocated. After all, Roe protected pre-viability abortions from sea to shining sea as a matter of federal constitutional law.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in June of last year, it was a huge victory for the anti-abortion movement and, in theory, for its GOP allies. But it has created new and difficult choices for Republican politicians, notably RDS.

When SCOTUS was deliberating over what would became the fatal opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, based on a challenge from Mississippi, the Republican-controlled legislature in Florida enacted, and DeSantis signed, a copycat law, banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Nobody knew for sure at that point exactly what SCOTUS would do; the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was a few weeks away. But DeSantis associated himself with a cruel (and unpopular) approach with no exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

Post-Dobbs, as DeSantis prepared to run for president, the Florida law, obnoxious as it was, became conspicuously modest as compared to the total and near-total bans being enacted by Republicans in other southern states. But at the same time, the backlash to the abolition of abortion rights grew intense almost everywhere, playing a big role in the underwhelming GOP performance in the 2022 midterms. So DeSantis characteristically played it both ways: He welcomed a six-week ban, but he signed it in the dead of night, and for a good while (even at the Christian right bastion of Liberty University) wouldn’t talk about it.

That changed when the DeSantis presidential campaign became focused on Iowa and its extremely powerful conservative Evangelical–anti-abortion constituency, whose leaders were offended by Donald Trump’s public remarks describing abortion as a loser of an issue, even as he refused to back any particular post-Dobbs abortion laws. Meanwhile, influential Iowa governor Kim Reynolds signed her own six-week ban (which is currently held up in the courts), and it began to look like DeSantis had gotten it right, at least for the GOP primaries.

But no, as Politico reported this week:

“The nation’s leading anti-abortion group on Monday called Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failure to support federal abortion restrictions ‘unacceptable’ — a blow for the Florida Republican, who has passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.

“Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America was responding to DeSantis’ recent interview with conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, in which the governor said abortion policy would be best decided by the states.”

Like several other Republican presidential candidates (notably Trump and Nikki Haley), DeSantis had for months bobbed and weaved and avoided taking a firm position on the prospect of a federal abortion ban that would override state laws, even though the more strident anti-abortion groups like SBA had made a 15-week national ban a litmus test for those seeking their support. But Kelly pinned him down, and DeSantis decided alarming blue-state Americans by threatening state-protected abortion rights wouldn’t be terribly prudent, all the more because the Senate filibuster makes a federal abortion ban inconceivable in the immediate future, as he pointed out.

The SBA group’s president Marjorie Dannenfelser wasn’t having any of it, Politico noted:

“‘Gov. DeSantis’s dismissal of this task is unacceptable to pro-life voters,’ Dannenfelser said. ‘A consensus is already formed. Intensity for it is palpable and measurable. There are many pressing legislative issues for which Congress does not have the votes at the moment, but that is not a reason for a strong leader to back away from the fight.’”

Mike Pence and Tim Scott have signed onto the national ban, leaving DeSantis in a conspicuous spotlight as the advocate of an extremist position on abortion who’s under attack for not wanting to impose his extremist position on all 50 states, at least right away. He’s probably lost any advantage over Trump (already beloved of the anti-abortion movement because he kept his promise to get Roe reversed) on the abortion policy that he might have held or imagined. But the candidate who keeps pledging to make America a jumbo-size replica of Florida cannot run away from the fact that his own state’s citizens are being denied reproductive rights altogether.

The political impact of the new felony criminal indictment of Donald Trump could be both massive and complicated. But one thing it will do for sure is keep the 2020 election in view, as I noted at New York:

It’s easy to conflate all of Donald Trump’s legal problems into an undifferentiated blur of litigation serving as a sideshow to his 2024 comeback effort. But it’s important to recognize that the latest indictment from special counsel Jack Smith won’t just serve as a distraction for Trump and other candidates running for president. It will inevitably focus the intraparty and interparty debate already underway on the events of the last presidential election, a dynamic that will only intensify once the expected indictment of Trump under Georgia state law for election interference activities drops in Atlanta any day now.

It is almost impossible to overstate how much this development plays into Trump’s reelection strategy. From the get-go, the 45th president has made his 2024 campaign a vengeance-and-redemption tour based on his contention that Democrats “rigged” the 2020 election and subsequently conspired to waylay his career with an impeachment, the January 6 committee investigation, and multiple civil and criminal proceedings. In various ways, other Republican candidates and opinion leaders have sought to convince their voters to “move on” to a campaign based on negative characterizations of Joe Biden, his “far left” party, his economic and fiscal record, and his age and alleged disabilities.

But now there’s no “moving on” from the events of 2020 in all their wildly improbable trajectory culminating in the January 6 Capitol riot. The pathetic reaction of top Trump rival Ron DeSantis to the latest indictment — basically offering to save Trump’s freedom by wrecking the federal law enforcement system — shows how everyone other than the former president has lost control of the 2024 narrative. The sheer weight of Trump’s upcoming trials on the nomination-contest calendar will force his rivals to adjust the pace and direction of their campaign activities as well, even as they chase the man dominating the political landscape from a great distance.

That’s true, in a different sort of way, for Biden and other Democrats. The new indictment (which, again, will be echoed by the impending Georgia indictment) doesn’t involve some arcane matter like presidential records or some prepresidential or non-presidential Trump misconduct. It focuses on events virtually all Americans read and watched and heard about in great detail as they unfolded. Given the lens of partisan polarization through which the prosecution will be viewed, Team Biden will need to make a persuasive case to a narrow band of swing voters that Trump is the villain of the story and a criminal who must be kept from regaining power lest his crimes bear fruit. And if Trump is indeed the GOP nominee and the general election is as close as it appears to be right now, then Democrats will without question make their crucial voter mobilization efforts turn on characterizations of Trump and his cronies and allies as threats to democracy and the rule of law.

All roads lead right back to the crucial days between the wee hours of November 4, 2020, when Trump falsely declared victory, and January 6, 2021, when his election coup finally failed.

This is the ground on which Trump has always wanted to wage his 2024 election battle, from the day last fall when he announced his comeback bid as an effort to resume his interrupted presidency. If he loses this election or his freedom, it will be entirely his own doing.

Like most Democrats, I’m annoyed by Republican pols who brag they will kick our butts in a general election. I’m glad to report the most annoying braggart of them all, Ron DeSantis, has been getting his comeuppance, as I noted at New York:

As Ron DeSantis tries to catch up to Republican presidential primary front-runner Donald Trump, the Florida governor’s campaign has been making aggressive assertions that he has an advantage in terms of his “electability” against Joe Biden. The case for DeSantis being the better Republican general-election candidate has had less to do with any direct evidence than with the fading memories of his strong reelection performance in 2022, compared to the mixed results of Trump-endorsed midterms candidates and, of course, his loss to Biden in 2020.

But truth be told, a lot of DeSantis’s electability claims are more about Republican voters’ presumed lack of trust in Trump, which isn’t all that well established. In fact, a new Monmouth survey of Republicans shows Trump has an electability advantage over DeSantis. It’s not even very close. If you directly ask Republicans which candidate is stronger against Biden, Trump wins pretty clearly:

“Regardless of whether you currently support Donald Trump, which of the following statements comes closest to your view about which Republican has the best chance to win in 2024.”

Forty-five percent said Trump was definitely stronger and another 24 percent said Trump was probably stronger. Only 13 percent said any other Republican is definitely stronger, and 18 percent said some other Republican is probably stronger. Directly comparing Trump and DeSantis, 47 percent said the Florida governor was weaker than the former president; 22 percent said he was stronger.

It’s not just Monmouth showing DeSantis’s loss of an electability advantage (if he ever had one). As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes, this problem shows up in early state polls as well:

“Fox Business polls in the key primary states of Iowa and South Carolina tell the same tale.

“In Iowa, 45 percent said Trump would be the most likely to defeat Biden, while 23 percent picked DeSantis. And in South Carolina, Trump’s edge on this measure was threefold: 51 percent to 17 percent.”

In recent weeks, DeSantis has deemphasized the argument that he’s more appealing to swing voters and instead focused on out-Trumping Trump by running to his right on immigration, crime, COVID-19, and federal spending. It’s possible he’s abandoning his once-obsessive electability pitch altogether and is going after hard-core “very conservative” and/or ultra-MAGA voters. Some right-wing Republicans believe, improbably, that swing voters actually want stridently ideological candidates rather than any sort of squishy centrists. And in the end, a candidate can’t win the general election at all without winning the nomination. More likely, Team DeSantis is going after today’s Trump voters by abandoning anything like moderation and perhaps making electability an afterthought. It’s a good way to make yourself unelectable altogether.

As a political history fanatic, I quickly read and then wrote about this history-based insight on 2024 at New York:

There isn’t much question that the likeliest scenario for the 2024 presidential election will be a rematch between 2020 winner Joe Biden and 2020 loser Donald Trump. Allegedly, this is a pairing most Americans don’t want (it’s actually a bit hard to tell since Democrats nearly all despise Trump and Republicans nearly all despise Biden, meaning a “rematch” begins by displeasing half of the electorate). But the polls show Biden crushing Robert Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson in the primary and Trump far ahead of 12 intraparty opponents, so anything other than a rematch would be quite a surprise.

But Biden vs. Trump: Part II will not simply be a replay of the 2020 election. Most obviously, conditions in the country have changed with the winding down of the COVID-19 pandemic and the winding up of the economy, along with renewed Russian aggression against Ukraine and all the partisan controversies that have accompanied this latest phase of divided U.S. government.

Perhaps most important, there will be a new incumbent president on the ballot in 2024. But as Jonathan V. Last observes, Biden won’t be the only president on the ballot if Trump wins the GOP nomination:

“No one living has seen an election in which two presidents have run against one another.

“And that changes everything …

“One of the (many) advantages an incumbent president has is that he has proven that he can do the job.

“This sword has two edges: An incumbent’s presidential record can be attacked. Some voters may like it. Some may not. But at the lizard-brain level, they have all seen him sitting at the big desk in the Oval. They know what he looks like as president.

“At the risk of stating the obvious: Joe Biden is president of the United States. Donald Trump used to be president of the United States.”

So in a Biden-Trump rematch, both candidates will have already passed the plausible-president threshold, and both have a recent presidential record to defend. As Last points out, this hasn’t happened since 1892, when former president Grover Cleveland faced incumbent president Benjamin Harrison, who had narrowly defeated Cleveland (while losing the popular vote) four years earlier. Then as now, the rematches came in an extended period of closely contested presidential elections. Then as now, the electorate knew both candidates very well.

But there are some big differences between the 19th-century and 21st-century rematches. For one thing, Harrison’s 1892 defeat was preceded by a financial panic and recession that cost his Republican Party an incredible 93 House seats (out of a total of 332) in the 1890 midterms. The 2022 midterms, by contrast, were a near dead heat with modest Republican gains in the House. But the even bigger difference is that the Cleveland-Harrison transition in 1889 was peaceful. The 2021 transition was perpetually contested by the loser and eventually by a mob that invaded Congress and tried to stop the final certification of the winner. Indeed, those events are an important — to many voters, a central — part of Trump’s record as an incumbent.

The horrific culmination of the first Biden-Trump election has frozen the vast majority of partisans in place as a rematch approaches, with most Democrats regarding Trump as a lawless rogue who had to be impeached twice, and most Republicans regarding Biden as a usurper who stole the White House from its rightful occupant. Conversely, most Republicans view the Trump administration as an era of peace and prosperity, while most Democrats view the Biden administration as a return to normalcy and constitutional governance. It’s unclear how many voters will engage in any judicious comparison of the records of the two presidents, and it’s entirely possible the result will be determined by voters who must decide which of them they dislike the least.

But beware of anyone telling you there is some infallible historical precedent governing a 2024 rematch. As has been so often the case since Trump won the 2016 election in an upset that overturned previous infallible historical precedents, we’re in unexplored political territory.

Sometimes you just have to cringe at the excuses politicians make for their troubles. As I noted at New York, Ron DeSantis has resorted to the hoariest of them all.

It’s never a great look when a politician hits a rough patch and blames it on the news media. But rather than blaming Donald Trump for his recent 2024 campaign troubles — or even taking some responsibility for his bungled start — Florida governor Ron DeSantis keeps making the cringeworthy claim that his campaign is actually going gangbusters but is being artificially downgraded by liberal scribes who fear him.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the media does not want me to be their candidate,” DeSantis recently told Fox News when asked how he plans to overcome Trump’s lead. “They’ve tried to create a narrative that somehow the race is over.”

Let’s say he was just talking about the liberal mainstream media, that great nemesis for all conservative politicians. Is it true that they (we?) fear DeSantis as the GOP nominee and are thus developing a “narrative” that “somehow the race is over,” presumably to head off the awful specter of a DeSantis-Biden general election? You can see why that’s a story Team DeSantis would relish since it both implies the candidate’s problems are imaginary and encourages Republican primary voters to support their enemies’ enemy.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

For one thing, reporting that the DeSantis campaign is encountering problems doesn’t mean writing him off (as a matter of fact, I just wrote a piece the other day arguing it was far too early for that). But the candidate has some basic weaknesses that have been evident for some time.

As my colleague Jonathan Chait observed back in April, DeSantis is potentially a very vulnerable general-election candidate:

“He has gone on the record in the past supporting both privatization and benefit cuts for Social Security and Medicare, a position so deeply toxic that even most Republican voters recoil from it. More recently, he signed a ban on abortion after six weeks, a period so restrictive it virtually amounts to a complete ban …

“Yes, DeSantis would be able to regain some of the orthodox Republican voters repelled by Trump’s personal style. But he would forfeit not only some of the Trump cultists whose only connection to Republican politicians is a personal attachment to the 45th president but also some of the working-class voters Trump attracted by discarding some of his party’s unpopular issue baggage.”

Since April, DeSantis has doubled down on trying to run to Trump’s right. He has gone hog wild not only with an abortion stance that may be kryptonite to his swing-voter appeal but on positions like his hostility to COVID-19 measures (including vaccines) and his demands for militarization of the southern border, which may appeal to the GOP base at the cost of alienating the general electorate. If he keeps pursuing this strategy while chasing Trump from far behind, you have to figure that by the time the deal goes down in 2024, the DeSantis who won an easy reelection in Florida in 2022 may be all but unrecognizable to those who voted for him mostly because the state’s economy was doing well.

But you don’t just have to speculate about how offensive a crazed MAGA monster out-Trumping Trump may be to swing voters down the road. You can look at polls right now and see the evidence that DeSantis has no actual general-election advantage over Trump despite his team’s constant assertions that he is more electable. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, trial heats show Trump trailing Joe Biden by 0.2 percent (43.8 percent to 43.6 percent). DeSantis trails Biden by 1.5 percent. It’s not a meaningful difference, but it does show that the breezy self-confidence with which many DeSantis boosters assume he’s Democrats’ biggest nightmare is based on supposition, if not superstition.

Perhaps DeSantis backers would argue that the governor isn’t kicking Biden’s ass just yet because his sterling virtues aren’t as well known as they will be after he runs a couple of hundred million dollars worth of ads. But a look at DeSantis’s favorability ratio (better than Trump’s or Biden’s but still underwater) suggests that may not be true either. His RCP polling averages are currently at 37.9 percent favorable and 45.2 percent unfavorable. So to know him is not necessarily to love him; more exposure as the 2024 race heats up may not improve his standing against Biden.

None of this data, of course, factor in the signs that are actually the source of recent negative media stories: DeSantis, for all his money and the incessant boasting of his campaign and super-PAC staffs, isn’t running a particularly tight operation.

It’s a separate question, of course, as to whether Democrats would prefer dealing with an actually inaugurated Trump or DeSantis. No one knows exactly how either man would conduct himself in the Oval Office, and a lot would depend on what happens downballot as well. But to the extent that DeSantis’s route to the nomination involves capturing the heart of Trump’s base of support, the odds are very high that by the time Republicans (likely) nominate one of them, their differences would be less significant than ever before. As Chait put it:

“The best option for any liberal, moderate, or believer in democracy is to keep the Republicans away from power until they become sane again. In the meantime, the party has nothing to offer but different kinds of bad choices.”

So no, liberal media aren’t lashing out at DeSantis because he strikes them as a world-beater. Right now, DeSantis’s objective standing in the 2024 contest doesn’t require any negative spin.