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.

Now that we have something more accurate than exit polls for examining the 2022 midterms, it’s time for a reconsideration of that election’s implications, as I noted at New York:

National elections are complicated phenomena. You can determine the results and their immediate consequences soon enough. But the internal dynamics of the electorate and the implications for future elections can take a while to grasp. At first, all you have are imperfect exit polls and pundit insights, and they sometimes produce equally imperfect conventional wisdom.

That’s what happened in the 2022 midterms. We know that Republicans managed narrowly to flip the U.S. House but fell short of expectations in that chamber, as well as in the U.S. Senate and to some extent state contests. There was a lot of talk about Democrats benefiting from highly motivated pro-choice voters upset about the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and Republicans suffering from extremist Senate candidates promoted by Donald Trump. Now we’re getting a clearer picture thanks to the Pew Research Center’s careful analysis of validated voters (those saying they voted and for whom Pew found voter files) from the midterms:

“In midterm elections that yielded mixed results for both parties, Republicans won the popular vote for the U.S. House of Representatives largely on the strength of higher turnout.

“A new Pew Research Center analysis of verified voters and nonvoters in 2022, 2020, 2018 and 2016 finds that partisan differences in turnout — rather than vote switching between parties — account for most of the Republican gains in voting for the House last year.”

So while Democratic turnout may have exceeded expectations, it didn’t exceed Republican turnout. And voters who did turn out overwhelmingly stayed with their own party:

“Overall, 68% of those who voted in the 2020 presidential election turned out to vote in the 2022 midterms. Former President Donald Trump’s voters turned out at a higher rate in 2022 (71%) than did President Joe Biden’s voters (67%) …

“Relatively small shares of voters defected from their partisan affiliation or 2020 presidential vote. Among those who voted for both president in 2020 and for a House representative in 2022, just 6% crossed party lines between elections or voted for third-party candidates in either election.”

Viewed in total isolation, this might be viewed as good news for Republicans going forward; that was how the New York Times interpreted the Pew numbers:

“The report serves as a warning sign for Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with early polls pointing toward a possible rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.

“Though Democrats maintained control of the Senate, all but one of their governor’s mansions and only narrowly lost the House, the Pew data shows that a larger percentage of voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2020 cast ballots in November than those who backed Mr. Biden did. People who had voted in past elections but sat out 2022 were overwhelmingly Democrats.”

But the midterm results and the Pew data on who voted and for whom should emphatically not be viewed in isolation from historic trends. There were two data points supporting the expectation that a “red wave” would form in November 2022. The first was the “midterm falloff” typically experienced by Democratic-leaning voter groups, particularly young and minority voters who have never participated in non-presidential elections in numbers matching the older and whiter voters who now lean Republican. The second is that traditional midterm voter backlash almost always afflicts the party that controls the White House. What the Pew analysis shows us is that the first phenomenon (a Democratic turnout falloff) indeed occurred, but the second (significant vote-switching away from Joe Biden’s party) largely didn’t. As so you had a small Republican ripple instead of a wave.

The other side of the “midterm falloff” coin is that turnout by pro-Democratic voting groups tends to improve in presidential elections. All else being equal, that means if Democrats can again hang onto their voters and they turn out at a higher rate, they should have an advantage in 2024. To put it another way, they should have lost significant ground between 2020 and 2022 but didn’t. The fact that Democrats didn’t do as well as they did in 2018, which the Times analysis emphasized, is extremely unsurprising: Republicans controlled the White House then, and Democrats did produce some vote-switching in their favor.

The exceptional party loyalty exhibited by 2022 voters found by Pew, it should be mentioned, refutes some of the impressions of unusual voter trends that pundits discerned right after the elections, some of them derived from iffy exit-poll findings. The exits showed Democrats carrying women by a robust eight-point margin (53 percent to 45 percent), which reinforced the belief the abortion issue changed the results significantly. The validated voter data showed Democrats carrying women by a more modest three-point margin (51 percent to 48 percent). On the other side of the ledger, exit polls showed Republicans winning 13 percent of the Black vote, more than double the percentage the GOP won in 2018. But Pew’s validated voter data showed Republicans winning just 5 percent of the Black vote, a point less than they won in 2018.

To be very clear, the Democratic advantage in 2024 that I’ve inferred from the Pew data is what would happen if only turnout patterns change in that election. Everything — from conditions in the country, issue salience, and the quality of candidates and campaigns — may not stay the same, which could mean a narrow GOP victory or the first comfortable win for Democrats (or for either party) since 2008. But there’s a reason Democrats were thrilled to come out of the midterms without bigger losses than they sustained, and there’s no reason to assume their position will become more tenuous in a presidential year.

We now have a starting point for the 2024 presidential nominating contest, and the date seems to have been something of an accident, as I observed at New York:

It’s official: Republicans’ first-in-the nation Iowa Caucus is set for January 15, 2024. That means the voting phase of the 2023 Republican presidential-nomination contest will begin in about six months, on a federal holiday.

Iowa Republicans have given themselves an unnecessary headache by scheduling their caucus to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. State chairman Jeff Kaufmann claims they did this without “considering it.” Now Kaufmann is trying to spin the miscalculation as a “tribute” to MLK, but it won’t be a good look for the famously non-diverse Republicans of Iowa to be engaged in full-time presidential politicking when others are reflecting on King’s provocative and progressive legacy. The burden of defending that decision will likely fall, ironically, on the two Black presidential candidates competing in Iowa, Tim Scott and Larry Elder.

While the specific date of the Iowa Caucus had been up in the air until now, the GOP calendar was expected to start early in 2023 owing to some failed efforts by other states to displace Iowa and New Hampshire. Some of this maneuvering was encouraged by the Democratic National Committee, which felt freer to tamper with the calendar as its 2024 contest isn’t competitive. The big development for Republicans was the Nevada legislature’s vote to create a February 6 presidential primary, which led New Hampshire’s secretary of state to move its primary to January 23. Iowa’s decision maintains the traditional eight-day gap between Iowa and New Hampshire. South Carolina Republicans (who do not have to vote on the same day as Democrats) will round out the early states with a primary on February 24. Then other states are free to hold primaries or caucuses beginning in March.

So we are once again virtually guaranteed a snowy-evening launching point for the 2024 presidential primary calendar. Iowa Republicans have a significantly simpler caucus process than the opposition; Democrats’ convoluted if time-honored system of affinity groups, delegate-equivalents, and multiple votes crashed the Democratic caucuses in 2020, contributing to the DNC’s decision to take away the state’s first-in-the-nation status and ban presidential caucuses altogether. Republicans just show up, hear some speeches, eat a few cookies and vote for their presidential favorite in a straight balloting that’s easy to tabulate. Perhaps with the excess time a moment to commemorate a conservative take on the MLK legacy will be obligatory in 2024.

Meanwhile, Iowa Democrats will likely have caucus meetings on January 15. But in deference to the DNC’s wishes, they are not inclined to complete or announce any votes on presidential preferences or the allocation of any delegates on the traditional caucus night. It appears they will have a separate vote-by-mail process for their real decisions, which will be announced when the initial phases of the presidential-nominating contest are safely past. So Joe Biden will not have to compete in rogue Iowa caucuses, and if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson happen to show any strength in Iowa, we likely won’t know about it until Biden has romped to victory in sanctioned primaries.

All the national attention, then, will be on the Republicans engaged in an individual struggle for survival and a collective effort to keep keep current front-runner Donald Trump from wrapping up the 2024 nomination before the first warm weather of spring arrives.

As someone who wrote intensively about Donald Trump’s attempted election coup in 2020, I’ve been on the alert for a recurrence in 2024. And as I noted at New York, we’re not at all out of the woods yet.

Lest anyone forget: The front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is a man who has never accepted his 2020 defeat. More importantly, Donald Trump has convinced a sizable majority of GOP voters to accept his unsubstantiated claims that the presidency was “stolen” from him in 2020. It follows, then, that if Trump loses again in November 2024, he is very likely to deny defeat once again. But his options for challenging the legitimacy of the next presidential race are increasingly limited.

Looking back at the attempted election coup that culminated in the violence of January 6, it’s obvious that Trump’s long-range strategy was to allege widespread Democratic voter fraud based on disputing the legitimacy of voting by mail and in-person early voting, while seizing on and publicizing every available rumor of chicanery by Democratic election officials. This gambit arguably started way back in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, when he insisted on claiming he had won the national popular vote that he actually lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes. It reached a crescendo on Election Night 2020 when Trump claimed victory based on partial returns before mail ballots could be counted.

While Trump has never abandoned his effort to delegitimize non–Election Day voting, he (along with other leading Republicans) is now urging GOP voters to fully take advantage of the voting rules as they exist across the country. And that’s largely what they did in the 2022 midterms; clearly, the partisan “taint” of early voting has worn off. That means there will likely be no basis in 2024 for a “red mirage” phenomenon, in which the Republican candidate will take a momentary lead based on a disproportionate share of the votes that happen to be counted first. If the election is close, Trump would have to wait just like the rest of the country for all the votes to roll in. And unless he reverses course once again, his “stolen election” claims will need a different rationale than the illegitimacy of early voting. What will replace it? That’s unclear.

The three tactics Team Trump pursued in 2020 in an effort to negate Joe Biden’s win probably won’t be available in 2024. Those were (1) the effort to supplant state-certified presidential electors in key states via the unilateral action of Republican-controlled state legislatures, based on an exotic constitutional theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine;” (2) appeals to Republican election officials in key states to put a thumb on the scales to reverse the outcome (e.g., the infamous Trump phone call to Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger), and (3) the culminating bid on January 6 to stop or reverse Biden’s final certification in Congress, which was the object of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-inspired mob.

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently pointed out, all three of these avenues for flipping an election have been at least partially blocked since January 6:

“The Supreme Court’s decision in Moore v. Harper on Tuesday is a major reprieve for American democracy. By rejecting the radical idea that state legislatures have quasi-unlimited power to determine how elections are run, the court made it harder for lawmakers to engage in the shenanigans that Donald Trump encouraged to overturn his 2020 reelection loss …

“Along with the ruling, virtually all election-denying candidates for governor and secretary of state in key swing states lost in the 2022 midterms. [And] Congress reformed the law that governs how presidential electors are counted.”

Aside from the Supreme Court’s rejection of the “independent state legislatures” doctrine, Republicans lost control of legislatures in Michigan and (at least temporarily) Pennsylvania. And beyond the reforms of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that make it much harder to challenge presidential-election results in Congress, the vice-president who will preside over the tabulation of electoral votes in January of 2025 is Kamala Harris.

So the loopholes Trump tried to exploit in 2020 to give his insurrection some legitimacy just won’t be available in 2024. Sure, the sort of state-by-state guerrilla litigation based on rumors and conspiracy theories that made laughingstocks of Trump’s legal team in 2020 will theoretically still be available. But it’s no more likely to succeed than it did before.

Is Greg Sargent correct, then, in arguing that “our democratic system is fortifying itself on multiple levels, unexpectedly reducing the odds of a rerun of Trump’s efforts in 2024”? Let’s hope so. But it’s also possible that in the absence of legal fig leaves for insurrectionary measures, Team Trump will resort to an overtly revolutionary approach, including summoning a mob to the Capitol, this time not to interfere with Congress’s proceedings but to suppress them altogether.

Without question, a host of institutions, including the Biden administration, the federal courts, responsible Republicans (such as they are), and the U.S. military leadership would stand in the way of a outright insurrectionary bid to reverse a presidential election result and impose an authoritarian regime. It probably won’t happen. But it shouldn’t be ruled out as a strategic option for this lawless man and his devoted following. Trump has, after all, openly and repeatedly described the existing U.S. government as an inherently evil and corrupt “swamp” whose inhabitants in both major parties are hell-bent on the destruction of the country and its values. It’s a bedrock principle among MAGA enthusiasts that they enjoy a right of violent revolution (the entire basis, they claim, for the Second Amendment) against “tyranny” as they define it. And Trump represents a lot of people living in a sort of cultural — and even religious — panic motivated by the demographic and geopolitical decline of the “great” America they imagine.

It’s good that Trump has been hemmed in institutionally since January 6 and may be forced to accept an adverse 2024 result even if he won’t admit he lost. The best way to ensure that happens is for voters to rebuke him by a margin that is simply unmistakable, convincing his GOP co-conspirators once and for all that he and his movement represent a losing proposition. But at the same time, we should take the 45th president’s regular revolutionary mutterings seriously if not literally.

I’m old enough to remember when I thought the Republicans of the George W. Bush era had gone far off the cliff into the right-wing fever swamps. As I noted at New York, it’s getting far worse during the GOP 2024 presidential contest:

There’s a huge strategic dilemma at the heart of Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign. He wants to convince the MAGA Republicans most likely to vote in primaries that he’s Trump without the drama, and perhaps even more radical than the 45th president. But that’s at odds with the “electability” argument that he’s better positioned to beat Joe Biden. Since DeSantis formally launched his campaign, Trump has maintained and even expanded his lead in virtually every poll of Republicans. The Florida governor has responded by leaning more heavily on a hard-core ideological pitch that may leave some anti-Trump Republicans, not to mention swing voters, cold. The Florida governor is trying to out-Trump Trump, and it’s not clear this strategy has much of a chance of success with the GOP base still in love with the 45th president.

The DeSantis stump speech has been evolving in recent weeks. Now, as before, he touts his record in Florida as a model for his party and for the nation. But his early emphasis on such standard gubernatorial virtues as industrial recruitment and sound fiscal management has gradually given way to a presentation of DeSantis as a culture warrior who gazes at conservatism’s enemies with a sort of unblinking reptilian stare, unlike Trump’s many self-distractions and sideshow antics.

DeSantis’s remarks at the candidate cattle call hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the country’s most politically focused organization of conservative Christian activists, in Washington on June 23 represented his most strident effort yet to get to the former president’s right. Trump is generally seeking vengeance against his enemies in the federal government; DeSantis is promising “accountability” for alleged COVID tyrant Anthony Fauci specifically. Trump is a hero to the anti-abortion movement; DeSantis insisted on a draconian six-week abortion ban that Trump called “too harsh.” Trump wants to finish building his border wall; DeSantis wants to militarize the border to stop the “invasion” of immigrants, and even to blockade Mexican ports to stop delivery of chemicals used to make fentanyl. Trump appointed three hard-core conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court; DeSantis would only appoint a justice as extreme as Clarence Thomas.

Despite all of DeSantis’s huffing and puffing, the Faith and Freedom Coalition event turned into a MAGA rally at which even the mention of Trump’s name drew rapturous applause. When it came time for the former president’s “keynote” address, he was allowed to rant and rave to his heart’s content in contrast to his rivals’ limited time slots. DeSantis may have successfully made himself over in Trump’s image, but he’s still overshadowed by the former president.

The acid test for DeSantis won’t come in any shared candidate event or even in the debates that begin in August (which Trump may or may not deign to attend). It will be in the Iowa caucuses, where in the recent past the candidate successfully depicting himself as the “true conservative” in the field has generally won (e.g., Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, Ted Cruz in 2016). And indeed, it was the site of Trump’s biggest defeat in 2016 (though of course he later denounced it as “stolen”). DeSantis has surrounded himself with veterans of the Cruz campaign. And that is very likely reinforcing his decision to run much like Cruz did, relying on a hard-core conservative message and an expensive field effort focused on the likeliest — which often means the most conservative — voters.

Without question, this strategy will take a toll on the breadth of DeSantis’s support among more moderate Republicans who have plenty of other candidates to choose from. And there’s little evidence that general-election swing voters are really longing for an effective extremist (DeSantis’s big 2022 performance in Florida, which is receding rapidly in voters’ memories, is now his only evidence for “electability”). But you can appreciate that unless DeSantis wins Iowa or over-performs expectations notably, he’s probably sunk. He’s not looking that strong in New Hampshire, and in South Carolina he’s fighting not just Trump but two Palmetto State rivals.

So for the foreseeable future, DeSantis is going to campaign as not just steadier and more effective than Trump, but as the man who will leave the libs, as he likes to say, “in the dustbin of history.” There’s nothing cheerful or swing-voter-pleasing about the message he’s conveying.

It may be rather difficult to soften this image of DeSantis if it doesn’t work to outflank Trump. And it clearly hasn’t so far; Trump continues to lead his governor by 30 points in the national RealClearPolitics polling averages and leads in every early state poll as well. If that pattern continues, even as Trump faces indictment after indictment, Ron DeSantis may wind up in a narrow corner of the Republican Party into which he has painted himself very deliberately.