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.
In future postings, especially as the election approaches, can you include ALWAYS the previous poll the corresponds with the “current” finding for say “Florida LVs” so we’ll know whether the current results represent a gain or a loss?
This Osama tape and its timing are very interesting, and could determine the outcome of the election. Obviously, the very fact that they are watching the elections and have something to say on the eve of the elections will likely (whether it “SHOULD” or not is a different question) help Bush. People thinking about Bin Laden and conditioned to the reflexive response of saying that Bush is good in the ‘war on terror’ will tend to be more likely to vote Bush. This is the first video that Bin Laden has released in 2 years, and it comes less than one week before the election and focuses on Bush. Even though there was apparently a hoax report of threats of retaliatory attacks if Bush wins, ANY tape from OBL focusing on Bush predictably helps Bush. Bin Laden obviously DOES have a clue — the 9-11 attacks reflected a sophisticated understanding of the details of the US system. He could not but know that his tape may (decisively) help Bush. Which should make voters think — WHY does Bin Laden do something likely to help, possibly decisively, Bush’s election at the polls. The unsavoriness of the implications go beyond what most “reasonable” people are willling to consider — but it DOESN’T require any kind of elaborate conspiracy thinking either. Al Qaeda clearly sees the predictable results of their tape as being to their advantage. Focusing on Iraq rather than Al Qaeda has been a boon to Al Qaeda in TWO ways. Now, Al Qaeda is acting to (in all likelihood) insure a continuation of this status quo, with the common pattern of reactionaries and terrorists benefitting from one another (as in Israel). In Israel, it was pointed out to terrorists that their attacks during an election season would tend to elect Netanyahu and they said they were AOK with that. But here OBL has GONE OUT OF HIS WAY to issue a statement that could only help Bush. Then there’s Krauthammer claiming that Bin Laden wants a Kerry victory, as the earlier Drudge report suggested. This is VERY BIG in the election folks. The milking of 9-11 goes on. It is “Christmas for Tories” and Santa has returned with more goodies.
An analysis of the battleground polls from 2000, shows that none of the top 5 predicted battlegrounds finished in the top 5 closest contested states.
http://www.campaigndesk.org/archives/001058.asp
Another point to consider when doing today’s battleground analysis.
Sooooo. An RV poll is an opinon poll of registered voters and a LV poll is an opinion about an opinion poll of registered voters. Can I just sleep till November 2?
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or information about the prospect of Bush winning the popular vote because he is slightly ahead in the tracking polls and losing the electoral college because his national numbers are a reflection of increased support in places like Mississippi, Texas Alabama, etc. (the bigoted states of America) but hopefully decreased support in the battleground states.
I would still like you to take on the task of talking about the “unlikely voter.”
http://www.corante.com/mooreslore/archives/026771.html
IMHO the election won’t be decided by undecideds “breaking” one way or another. I don’t think they do break one way or another. I think most stay home.
I believe elections are won or lost by whether you can get a large group of “unlikely” voters to the polls, folks who don’t usually go.
No pollster I’ve heard of has done any work to my knowledge in trying to figure out who these “unlikely” voters are, what they think, and what is the likelihood they will actually vote.
You could do it like this:
50% unlikely (don’t vote usually but say they will this time, or have) B — % K – — %
25% likely (don’t vote usually but say they might)
25% likely (usually vote but say they might not)
10% likely ( usually don’t and say they probably won’t, but might)
Without their own proprietary likely voter model, how would a polling company distinguish itself from the competition?