By Noah Rothman
Friday, November 03, 2023
Michael’s points here are all well-taken. His conclusions were also mine after reading the results of Selzer
& Co.’s latest poll of Iowa Republicans. “DeSantis is clearly the candidate
with the most appeal to the Republican Party’s MAGA-flavored populist voters,”
I wrote at the time. Nikki “Haley’s efforts to consolidate the Reaganite wing
of the GOP to rally around her campaign are bearing fruit, [but] that coalition
is a remnant that is likely too small to ultimately dethrone Trump.” Michael
concludes, however, that this condition leaves Republican voters who aren’t
already in Trump’s camp with no choice. They must either get behind DeSantis or
come to terms with the inevitable deterioration of DeSantis’s support as his
voters gravitate toward Trump. Rather, DeSantis seems to be managing that feat
all on his own.
The trajectory of the 2024 Republican primary race is not
hard to discern — particularly when polling aggregators such as RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight visualize it. When the prospect of
a DeSantis campaign remained theoretical, he polled competitively against Trump
nationally. At the beginning of April, the Florida governor averaged a level of
support among GOP primary voters that trailed Trump by just 15 points. Today,
DeSantis is 46 points behind the frontrunner. Haley seems to have convinced the
minority of Republican primary voters who were never considering Trump in the
first place to gravitate toward her camp, but the vast majority of the movement
in the polls has been from DeSantis to Trump. The question is: Why?
Michael posits that, quite unlike Haley, DeSantis is one
of the few candidates in the field who has been directly critical of Trump. He
implies that the former South Carolina governor is angling for a slot on
Trump’s ticket. In contrast, DeSantis remains committed to taking Trump down a
peg and expurgating him from the political scene. But if DeSantis is taking the
fight to Trump in ways that establish a contrast from which he benefits — a
debatable proposition — that is a recent development. Rather, for much of this
year, DeSantis’s theory of the race appeared to be that he could win the
nomination by out-Trumping Trump, even at the risk of alienating Republican voters who are most receptive to
anti-Trump messages.
DeSantis enthusiastically endorsed foreign-policy
prescriptions amenable to the loudest portion of the Republican base but not
the largest. His opposition to deepening America’s support for Ukraine’s
defense against a bloodthirsty Russian invasion wasn’t just illogical on its merits — it ran the risk
of turning off the roughly half of Republican voters for whom opposing Russian aggression is still a priority.
DeSantis’s generally sound instincts on economic policy
were nonetheless subordinated to the desire to appeal the New Right by
endorsing what the Wall Street Journal deemed “Trumpian” industrial
policy, retailing the false notion that economic growth is a zero-sum game in
which gains enjoyed by “large corporations” and “elites” come at the expense of
the middle class. The GOP’s populists might assume that the WSJ editorial
board’s priorities are not reflective of those shared by the vaunted Republican
“base,” but that’s not true. Polling doesn’t suggest Republicans are
hostile toward free trade, right-to-work laws, and a regulatory environment that provides more liberty to
entrepreneurs than bureaucrats.
Those Republicans who recently converted to market
skepticism in the last eight years weren’t convinced by Trump’s sterling
command of the issues. Rather, Trump’s policy preferences were assumed by the
Republican base because those voters were attracted to his personality, not the
other way around. The idea that the GOP could be rationalized out of their
Trump support by policy particulars was flawed as a matter of psychology.
DeSantis also devoted much of his campaign to attempting
to outflank Trump in the alternative media space. From his (literally)
dysfunctional campaign launch on Elon Musk’s experimental online platform to
subjecting himself to comedian Russell Brand’s half-baked ramblings, DeSantis’s
campaign seemed to assume that he could capture terrain Trump ceded when the
former president retreated into a bubble of his own making. But DeSantis’s
exercise in self-siloing only made the governor look small — a conclusion his
recent foray into more conventional media outlets seems to confirm.
Beyond the venues he chose to retail his message, the
message itself was enough to leave plenty of Republican voters cold. The
Florida governor has repeatedly downplayed the events of January 6, entertained pardons for convicted rioters, and joined
only with Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy in denouncing the sentences handed down to the event’s
ringleaders. Again, why? A March Economist/YouGov poll found that 52 percent of
self-described Republicans either strongly or somewhat disapproved of the
rioters. Perhaps there is a Republican constituency that doesn’t mind
associating themselves with the notion that the real victims of January 6 were
the riot’s participants, but a far larger Republican constituency wants no part
of that.
Michael’s diagnosis is unassailable, but his prescription
cuts against human nature. If DeSantis is losing his supporters to Trump, it’s
only because he made himself into a pale facsimile of the genuine article. If
anti-Trump Republicans aren’t gravitating to his camp, it’s only because they
know where they are not wanted. If Haley’s campaign is gaining the voters
DeSantis has alienated by merely asking for their votes, he only has himself to
blame.
Michael argues that Trump-skeptical Republicans should
vote strategically. They must swallow their pride and back DeSantis because if
he falters, Trump will win. And yet, that transposes the blame for DeSantis’s
unenviable condition onto the voters to whom he couldn’t be bothered to appeal.
If conservatives truly believe in personal agency and the consequences that
certain actions beget, that applies to the candidates, too.
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