By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, December 28, 2023
Ron DeSantis fans offered a recurring objection to my cover piece about the dismal state of the GOP primary in
the latest issue of the magazine.
“Not a single vote has been cast yet!”
Okay.
What do you want me to tell you, that DeSantis is looking
just dandy in Iowa? That Nikki Haley’s looking great in New Hampshire and that
she doesn’t need Chris Christie to drop out and endorse her to
have a shot at winning that state’s primary? That either one is looking likely
to beat Trump in South Carolina?
I can lie and make you feel good, or I can tell you the
truth and tell you things that will likely depress and frustrate you. I put this choice before people yesterday; so far, about 85
percent of respondents say they prefer hearing what’s going on, even if it
doesn’t make you feel good. Oh, and I cannot emphasize this enough, “both” is
not an option.
Never mind winning the Iowa Republican
caucus, DeSantis hasn’t been above 22 percent in a poll of likely Iowa
GOP caucusgoers since June. Trump hasn’t been below 39 percent, and lately
Trump has been surpassing 50 percent.
“Jim, the polls are often wrong!”
Are they? Are they often “wrong” to the point where the
candidate who is trailing by 30 percentage points wins, and the candidate who
was leading by 30 percentage points ends up losing on Election Night? Are they
“wrong” to the point where the candidate consistently down by 30 points
finishes close?
FiveThirtyEight ran the numbers on 2022 and concluded
that public polling is actually getting more accurate, not less.
In our opinion, the best way to
measure a poll’s accuracy is to look at its absolute error —
i.e., the difference between a poll’s margin and the actual margin of the
election (between the top two finishers in the election, not the poll). For
example, if a poll gave the Democratic candidate a lead of 2 percentage points,
but the Republican won the election by 1 point, that poll had a 3-point error.
As we’ve written many
times, some degree of polling error is normal. Taken altogether, the polls
in our pollster-ratings database have a weighted-average error of 6.0
points since 1998. However, polling in the 2021-22 election cycle had a
weighted-average error of just 4.8 points, edging out the 2003-04
cycle for the lowest polling error on record.
When you’ve got a close race where two candidates are
running neck and neck, then yeah, you’re going to see some late polls that
project the wrong winner. But not in a race like the Iowa caucus, where Trump
has consistently been ahead by 30 points or so.
“What is
your source other than polls?”
What do you think, the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down super PAC canceled a whole bunch of television advertising
reservations because everything was going so well?
You think Jeff Roe left and the super PAC fired a bunch of top officials because they were
spending all that money too efficiently and didn’t want to run up the score
against Trump?
You think it’s a good sign that “federal records show
that, by the time of the Iowa caucuses, the DeSantis campaign is on pace to
spend significantly more on private jets — the governor’s preferred mode of
travel — than on airing television ads”?
You think it’s good news that roughly 75 percent of DeSantis’s campaign money came
from donors who are tapped out and have donated the legal maximum?
Look, maybe that much-touted door-knocking effort by Never Back Down
will have some effect. But if it was building up support for DeSantis, don’t
you think we would see at least some sign of growing DeSantis support in some
recent poll? Actually, as bad as DeSantis’s numbers are, in most surveys he’s
actually improving. In the Fox Business poll, DeSantis increased from 15
percent in September to 18 percent in December. In the Emerson poll, DeSantis
increased from 14 percent in September to 15 percent in December. In CBS News’,
DeSantis increased from 21 percent in September to 22 percent in December. In
the Iowa State/Civiqs survey, DeSantis remained flat at 17 percent from October
to December, and in the Des Moines Register poll, DeSantis
increased from 16 percent to 19 percent.
Another objection: “You just hate DeSantis!”
I was one of the first ones out of the gate making the argument that a President Ron DeSantis would be good
for conservatives, good for moderates, and even good for progressives —
and you’ll notice I wrote that argument for DeSantis in a venue that is not
perceived as particularly pro-DeSantis.
If he’s still around when the Virginia primary rolls
around, I’ll probably vote for him. I’ll probably vote for either DeSantis or
Haley, whichever non-Trump option looks stronger at that point. I know that a
bunch of Haley fans see DeSantis as Beelzebub and a bunch of DeSantis fans see
Haley as Lilith; lots of readers reacted to the suggestion of a unity ticket as blasphemy. But a few
of us out here look at the pair and see two conservative governors who would
represent a huge upgrade on the current occupant of the Oval Office.
I see a lot to like in DeSantis. But that doesn’t mean
I’m blind to his flaws or in denial about how much of an underdog he is right
now, or how high the climb ahead of him is. You folks do know that just because
I’m telling you something doesn’t mean I like it, right? Have you run into so
many people who only report the narrative that they prefer that you’ve
forgotten that human beings are capable of reporting what’s actually happening,
whether or not it’s what they want to report?
Do you think the people who report on plane crashes were
rooting for the plane to crash?
Not every bit of bad news you hear is part of some
elaborate, far-reaching, and insidious psychological operation to dampen your
morale. Sometimes, the news is just bad. Sometimes the candidate you love goes
out and flops, and sometimes the party’s base is hell-bent on nominating
somebody else.
A couple of people were shocked and
irked that Ron DeSantis wasn’t mentioned, either by Bill Scher or myself, in yesterday’s discussion of 2028 options.
Granted, a lot can happen between now and the primaries
of the 2028 presidential election cycle. One of the central points of
yesterday’s newsletter is that it is impossible to predict the mood and
preferences of the party’s primary voters four years or so down the road.
But do you think all those Trump fans who detest DeSantis
right now will come around to the idea of DeSantis as the nominee by 2028? Do
you think Trump will put aside his grudge against DeSantis?
Four years from now, DeSantis won’t be coming off a huge
win in his reelection bid. (He’s term-limited and can’t run in 2026.) Will he
have the financial advantage he had when he started this
campaign?
DeSantis is probably going to get demolished in Iowa in
about three weeks. And whether or not he leaves the race after that, the
outlook in the subsequent states isn’t great. (DeSantis is at 11.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics average
of national polling of the Republican primary. Yes, I know we don’t have
one big national primary, but whether you want to win in 2024 or 2028, you’d
like that number to be a lot higher, wouldn’t you? People keep telling me how
DeSantis has high favorable numbers among Republicans, which is nice, but the
name of the game isn’t to get people to feel favorable about you, it’s to get
them to make you their first choice for president.)
You can make a strong argument that all of this is
terribly unfair. As I wrote in the magazine piece:
Nothing DeSantis does that he
gets right matters, because half the party doesn’t care and always looks for
reasons to reject him. If you were judging simply by the polls, you
would think DeSantis has run the worst presidential campaign of all time.
Has he? It’s been flawed, yes. The
attempted campaign announcement with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces bombed, and
most of the early messaging was way too online. (You never want the word
“sonnenrad” and the name of one of your campaign’s speechwriters to appear in
the same sentence.) DeSantis’s campaign had what felt like a million “resets,”
and apparently his team is beset by infighting. His campaign and his political
action committee have run more than $46 million in television, digital, and
radio ads, but right now, it looks as if they might as well have set that money
on fire.
But was DeSantis’s campaign so bad
that half to two-thirds of people who liked him in the spring had good reason
to jump off the bandwagon? He’s the same guy, with the same stances and
accomplishments and controversies in Florida. He visited all 99 of Iowa’s
counties, a milestone nicknamed the “full Grassley” after Chuck, the state’s
very senior senator. You’d rather have the endorsement of Iowa governor Kim
Reynolds than not have it. But there’s no sign it did anything for DeSantis at
all.
Yes, I concur that it is unfair that the Republican
electorate forgives Trump for any sin while rejecting DeSantis for minimally
consequential traits — “his body language is awkward!” But the fact that it is
unfair doesn’t mean it’s any less true.
As Philip Wegmann of RealClearPolitics began a recent profile of the governor, “Ron DeSantis
struggles with unrewarded excellence.”
ADDENDUM: Henry Barbour, speaking to our Audrey Fahlberg, about the 2024 presidential
race and the finances of the Republican National Committee: “If the
election is about Biden’s miserable record, it won’t matter if we have $12 cash
on hand, we will win. But for that to happen, Republican voters have to go with
a new candidate, because if we nominate Donald Trump, the election is going to
be all about Donald Trump. And we can have a billion dollars in cash on hand
and lose just like we did the last few cycles.”
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