Like everyone else, I listened to DeSantis’s botched Twitter Spaces launch, but then reached some conclusions about the trajectory of his campaign at New York:
Before long, the laughter over the technical glitches that marred Ron DeSantis’s official presidential campaign launch with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces will fade. We’ll all probably look back and place this moment in better perspective. Political-media folk (not to mention DeSantis’s Republican rivals and Democratic enemies) tend to overreact to “game changing” moments in campaigns when fundamentals and long-term trends matter infinitely more. Relatively few actual voters were tuned in to Twitter to watch the botched launch, and even fewer will think less of DeSantis as a potential president because of this incident.
It mattered in one respect, however: The screwed-up launch stepped all over a DeSantis campaign reset designed to depict the Florida governor as a political Death Star with unlimited funds and an unbeatable strategy for winning the GOP nomination. The reset was important to rebut the prevailing story line that DeSantis had lost an extraordinary amount of ground since the salad days following his landslide reelection last year, when he briefly looked to be consolidating partywide support as a more electable and less erratic replacement for Donald Trump. For reasons both within and beyond his control, he missed two critical strategic objectives going into the 2024 race: keeping the presidential field small enough to give him a one-on-one shot at Trump and keeping Trump from reestablishing himself as the front-runner with an air of inevitability about a third straight nomination.
To dissipate growing concerns about the DeSantis candidacy, the top chieftains of his Never Back Down super-PAC let it be known earlier this week that they had a plan that would shock and awe the political world, based on their extraordinary financial resources (fed by an $80 million surplus DeSantis transferred from his Florida reelection campaign account). The New York Times wrote up the scheme without questioning its connection to reality:
“A key political group supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential run is preparing a $100 million voter-outreach push so big it plans to knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.
“The effort is part of an on-the-ground organizing operation that intends to hire more than 2,600 field organizers by Labor Day, an extraordinary number of people for even the best-funded campaigns….
“The group said it expected to have an overall budget of at least $200 million.”
In case the numbers didn’t properly document the audacity of this plan, Team DeSantis made it explicit. The Times report continues:
“‘No one has ever contemplated the scale of this organization or operation, let alone done it,’ said Chris Jankowski, the group’s chief executive. ‘This has just never even been dreamed up.’” …
At the helm of the DeSantis super PAC is Jeff Roe, a veteran Republican strategist who was Mr. [Ted] Cruz’s campaign manager in 2016. In an interview, Mr. Roe described an ambitious political apparatus whose 2,600 field organizers by the fall would be roughly double the peak of Senator Bernie Sanders’s entire 2020 primary campaign staff.
Clearly opening up the thesaurus to find metaphors for the extraordinary power and glory of their plans, one DeSantis operative told the Dispatch they were “light speed and light years ahead of any campaign out there, including Trump’s.”
Now more than ever, DeSantis’s campaign will have to prove its grand plans aren’t just fantasies. Those doors in Iowa really will have to be knocked. Thanks to Trump’s current lead, DeSantis will absolutely have to beat expectations there and do just as well in New Hampshire and South Carolina before facing an existential challenge in his and Trump’s home state of Florida. And while DeSantis had a good weekend in Iowa recently, picking up a lot of state legislative endorsements even as Trump canceled a rally due to bad weather that never arrived, he’s got a ways to go. A new Emerson poll of the first-in-the-nation-caucuses state shows Trump leading by an astonishing margin of 62 percent to 20 percent. And obviously enough, Iowa is where DeSantis will likely face the largest number of rivals aside from Trump; he’s a sudden surge from Tim Scott or Mike Pence or Nikki Haley or even Vivek Ramaswamy away from a real Iowa crisis.
Door knocking aside, a focus on Iowa, with its base-dominated caucus system and its large and powerful conservative Evangelical population, will likely force DeSantis to run to Trump’s right even more than he already has. The newly official candidate did not mention abortion policy during his launch event on Twitter; that will have to change, since he has a crucial opportunity to tell Iowa Evangelicals about the six-week ban he recently signed (similar, in fact, to the law Iowa governor Kim Reynolds enacted), in contrast to Trump’s scolding of the anti-abortion movement for extremism. DeSantis also failed once again to talk about his own religious faith, whatever it is; that will probably have to change in Iowa too. He did, however, talk a lot during the launch about his battle against the COVID-19 restrictions the federal government sought to impose on Florida even during the Trump administration. That will very likely continue.
The glitchy launch basically cost DeSantis whatever room for maneuvering he might have enjoyed as the 2024 competition begins to get very real — less than eight months before Iowa Republicans caucus (the exact date remains TBD). He’d better get used to spending a lot of time in Iowa’s churches and Pizza Ranches, and he also needs to begin winning more of the exchanges of potshots with Trump, which will only accelerate from here on out. All the money he has and all the hype and spin his campaign puts out won’t win the nomination now that Trump is fully engaged, and it sure doesn’t look like the 45th president’s legal problems will represent anything other than rocket fuel for his jaunt through the primaries. So for DeSantis, it’s time to put up or shut up.
Are you spamming Paul?
Not too much sence in your comment.
Regards,
Steeveguy
It’s very pleasant to find wise words here.
Good job, Paul!
Paul
The latest headlines are about terrorism and so that is what we are concerned about at the moment regarding Kerry’s abilities in that area. I completely agree with both Joe and Paul C–this fight will be about national security AND the economy. We cannot afford to cede either.
I see two conflicting strains in polling. Kerry has lost 6 points in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll in the last 2 days. He’s down by four from being up by two. However individual state polling by this group shows Kerry with narrow leads in Ohio, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Can someone explain?
I think the war is an issue because it is all Bush has. Therefore all of us need to be assertive truth squad members in every way we can. i really hope that anyone who has not signed the MOveon censure petition yet wil do so quickly. Also write to your Congressional delegation to get their support. Even if the censure doesn’t pass Congress the debate itself will help spread the truth about the war. Also Moveon is a good place to send money since they are willing and able to put ads out there that are much more clearly expressed and to the point than what Kerry is going to present.
I am frustrated by the Democrats who continue to pussyfoot around the war afraid to say anything. my Congressman and one of my Senators are in this wimp catagory and, even after the exposure of Bush’s lies, are still unwilling to speak up. The Democrats have not yet cured themselves of moral cowardice.
I’m afraid I completely disagree. Presidential elections are almost always decided on economic issues. Jobs will mean a lot more to a swing voter in Ohio or Missouri than vague feelings about a terrorist threat. I think the electoral judo should be the opposite — use Kerry’s status as a war veteran and hero to neutralize Bush’s status in national security (actually a Republican advantage, not Bush’s personal advantage) and pound him on the economy.
This also helps with the “October Surprise” (which may be happening as I type this.) If we do capture bin Laden between now and the election, people can breath a sigh of relief, declare the worst part of the war to be over, and turn to someone who can manage the economy. We can and should start to argue right now that the best way to remain safe and secure is for our economy to boom, create good jobs at home and reduce or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. If we make the election turn on national security, we lose our best trump card and make ourselves hostage to Rove’s manipulation of world events.
I second Joe. My guess (completely unsupported by facts, of course) is that national security is threshold issue for swing voters.
It’s like judo — use your opponent’s strength against him. National security is Bush’s greatest strength with voters. Kerry and his supporters should keep criticizing Bush for failing to pursue the fight against Al Qaeda and terrorism. If the facts and the message get through, Bush loses.
(I want to throw up every time a right-winger argues that if Bush loses, Osama wins. Please. Bush won’t even mention Osama’s name.)
I went over the numbers in the Gallup survey and I see big problems for John Kerry. What came through to me was that voters believe George Bush is doing an OK job of protecting America from terrorist acts and that he’s a focused and strong leader.
Kerry’s problem is that those views trump all of the negagtive perceptions about Bush and the economy, the deficit, his tax policies and his handling of health care and social security.
Bush is talking about national security because he knows that issue is his trump card and that he can win with it, even though he has put the economy and our future in the ditch.
Kerry will need to fight on that national security terrain because the economy and all the other issues that would seem to favor him aren’t going to move appreciably one way or the other between now and election day so as to weaken Bush any further. In fact they could move in the direction of helping Bush, although that doesn’t seem likely.
Simply put, Kerry needs to do three things: first, he should name his choice for Veep as soon as possible to rebut Cheney on national security. That means it needs to be someone credible; say Wesley Clark or Bob Graham. Second, he needs to be speaking about homeland security every day in ways that the American people can relate to. He needs to demonstrate that our security could be enhanced under a President Kerry. Third, he needs to dispatch surrogates with national security credentials into all of the major media markets for the duration of the campaign to point out Bush’s mistakes and Kerry’s obviously superior plan of agressively fighting terrorism.
Events between now and election day will have a greater bearing on the outcome of the contest than any voter attitudes on social and economic policies. Kerry has gained all the benefit from those issues that he will ever get. The trick for Kerry is to position himself to mitigate losses on security events and leverage gain from those events that can be seen as helpful.
It’s astonishing how many people out there believe that it’s all the Democrats fault that the economy isn’t doing better, or that the Democrats are lying and if people can’t find work it’s because they are lazy bums.
People are going to be bullied into voting based on hatred of gays and based on terrorism. Rove was bragging about this yesterday. Those are the 2 big issues and he says they are already getting more and more popular. And he’s right. Just look at the glee in the media over Kerry’s “foreign leaders” flap. Or the federal government banning any anti-discrimination laws for gay employees. Or the Tenn. county which is going to keep gays out of their town.
I don’t know about the large number of independents, but the large preponderence of Bush voters is probably due to people misreporting their 2000 presidential votes. People like to vote for winners, and after any election the percentage of people who *claim* to have voted for the winning candidate is higher than the percentage that actually voted for him/her.
I don’t know whether these people are lying or just remembering incorrectly. I suspect both.
Could you please comment as someone who knows about polling what it means when the number of Republicans in the poll is @386 and the number of Dems is less at @368 and the number of independents seems enormous at @441. (This is from memory)
Second, when asked about their 2000 votes, the percentage of Bush voters at 375 WAS SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER THAN THE GORE VOTERS AT 27%. What impact does that have on the preference breakdown for 2004. Is there some weighting thing to make up for that?
Given the preponderance of Bush to Gore voters does it seem significant that Bush is polling below his 2000 numbers?
Why are the Nader numbers so high? And how high were they in 2002.