By Jim Geraghty
Monday,
January 22, 2024
In
the closing days of Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial-reelection campaign in 2022,
his campaign ran an ad, “God made a fighter.” The ad deliberately evoked the “So, God made a farmer” speech of the late Paul
Harvey.* The ad declared:
“And on the eighth day, God looked down on
his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector.’ So, God made a fighter.
God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, kiss his family
goodbye, travel thousands of miles, for no other reason than to serve the
people — to save their jobs, their livelihoods, their liberty, their
happiness.’ So, God made a fighter. God said, ‘I need someone to be strong.
Advocate truth the midst of hysteria. Someone who challenges conventional
wisdom and isn’t afraid to defend what he knows to be right and just. So, God
made a fighter. I need someone who will take the arrows, stand firm in the wake
of unrelenting attacks. . . . So, God made a fighter.”
Previously,
DeSantis and his campaign had unveiled
a Top Gun-styled ad in which DeSantis instructed, “Never,
ever, back down from a fight.” One of DeSantis’s rallying cries was, “I have only begun to fight.” DeSantis’s super PAC chose to
call itself, “Never Back Down.” That super PAC’s first ad touted
DeSantis as “a man of steel roots,” and featured audio of him boasting, “we
will always be courageous, and we will never back down.” When prepping for the
televised debate with California governor Gavin Newsom, the DeSantis campaign
asked voters to “choose your fighter.”
Last
Monday, when the Iowa caucus was complete, and DeSantis had finished a
disappointingly distant second, he stepped onto
the stage and insisted nothing was over:
They threw everything but the kitchen sink at
us! They spent almost $50 million attacking us — no one’s faced that much just
through Iowa! The media was against us! They were writing our obituary months
ago! They even called the election before anyone got a chance to vote! But they
were just so excited about the fact that they were predicting that we wouldn’t
be able to get our ticket punched out of Iowa, but I can tell you, because of
your support, in spite of everything they threw at us, everyone against us,
we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa!
And
then, six days later, DeSantis suspended his campaign and endorsed the man
who last month accused his wife of planning a “plot to rig the
[Iowa] caucus through fraud” in the Iowa caucus.
Apparently,
getting your ticket punched out of Iowa didn’t mean all that much, after all.
What
changed between Monday night and Sunday afternoon? Our Audrey Fahlberg reported Sunday afternoon, shortly
before the DeSantis announcement, that “in recent days people close to DeSantis
have begun making calls to top donors laying out what the campaign sees as
their options at this point, which include possibly dropping out of the race in
the coming days.” What’s more, Fahlberg reported, by early Sunday afternoon,
the bundler page on the campaign’s finance website was no longer working, which
signaled to those in his orbit that a drop-out announcement was imminent.
If
it was indeed a lack of support from top donors that prompted the end of
DeSantis’s campaign, that explanation contradicts what the governor said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program on Thursday:
Hugh Hewitt: Are you staying in through all
of March’s races? Is there any way Ron DeSantis drops out before the end of
March?
Ron DeSantis: Look, my goal
is to, is to win the nomination. If we’d won Iowa, we would have been in a
great spot. You know, coming in second gives us the ticket to continue, but I
told me people this from the very beginning. I don’t want to be V.P. I don’t
want to be in the cabinet. I don’t want a T.V. show. I’m in it to win it, and
at some point, you know, if that’s not working out for you, like I recognize
that this isn’t a vanity thing for me. But I do believe that we have an
opportunity in November to do very, very well. I also think that there’s
pitfalls by choosing the course that the party faithful chose in Iowa. And I
don’t think any of that’s changed. I don’t think that there are people
necessarily talking about it. There’s a lot of sense on the Republican side
that somehow, you know, Biden will win, anyone could win like a Regan landslide
against Biden. And they haven’t even started. The Dems haven’t even started.
They’re going to drop billions of dollars. And what they want to run on is they
want to run on all the stuff surrounding Donald Trump, January 6th, all the
legal issues. That’s what they want to run on. And the question is, is that
going to be effective with those independent voters that we need to win? I can
tell you in Florida, we showed how to win all of those people, with strong
leadership.
Hugh Hewitt: But Governor, before we go to
the break, are you in through the end of March? Do you have the money and the
staff and the ability to compete through the end of March?
Ron DeSantis: Oh, yes on
that. One hundred percent. We can do that.
For
what it’s worth, Politico cites a Republican familiar with
the DeSantis campaign’s deliberations who said, “By Thursday, [DeSantis] was
thinking seriously about exiting the contest, even though he had been
encouraged by the reception he was receiving in South Carolina.”
Even
before DeSantis’s announcement Sunday, the polling in New Hampshire was
painting a consistent picture — Trump enjoyed the support of about half the
vote, Haley trailed by anywhere from eleven to 19 percentage points, and
DeSantis was in the mid-single digits. By itself, it wasn’t a particularly bad
sign for DeSantis, as New Hampshire had never seemed like a priority for his
campaign. No, it was the grim outlook in South Carolina and Florida that loomed larger.
Can
the polls be wrong? Sure. Will the polls be wrong? Unlikely:
·
The latest CNN poll of likely New Hampshire Republican
primary voters has Donald Trump at 50 percent, Haley at 39 percent, and Ron
DeSantis at 6 percent.
·
The
latest Suffolk University/NBC10 Boston/Boston Globe survey of
likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters has Trump at 55 percent (!),
Haley at 36 percent, and DeSantis at 6 percent.
·
The latest Saint Anselm College survey of likely New
Hampshire Republican primary voters has Trump at 51 percent, Haley at 38
percent, and DeSantis at 6 percent.
·
The
most recent Emerson survey of likely New Hampshire
Republican primary voters has Trump at 44 percent, Haley at 28 percent, and
DeSantis at 7 percent. (Note that that survey was conducted before Vivek
Ramaswamy dropped out of the race.)
The
best sign for Haley came in the American
Research Group survey that had Trump at 46 percent and Haley at 44 percent. We’ll
know by tomorrow night if ARG saw some trend that other pollsters missed.
Note
that candidates who dropped out a while ago, such as Mike Pence, Vivek
Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, and Asa Hutchinson,
will still appear on ballots.
It
is likely that the Haley campaign expects results in the ballpark of those grim
polls listed above. New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, who has been
campaigning for Haley relentlessly in recent weeks, said on Meet the Press yesterday:
KRISTEN WELKER: But you’ve have — you’ve
softened, though, those expectations. You’re saying she can win. Does she have
to win? Is this make or break for her to stay in this race?
GOV. CHRIS SUNUNU: No. No. She
doesn’t have to win. I mean, look, nobody goes from single digits in December
to “you absolutely have to win” in January. I think that’s a media expectation
that’s being set out there. The fact that it can happen at all, right? Trump said
he was going to run the table and win all 50 states. And everyone said, “Yep,
it’s a – it’s a done deal.” It’s not a done deal. She’s challenging him here,
and now she, again, gets to go to her home state where she’s won a lot before,
she knows how to do it on the ground. And people don’t realize that South
Carolina isn’t next week. It’s three or four weeks, you know away, and Nikki’s
going to have a lot of time to build on the momentum she’s already created.
(By
the way, Haley was not in single digits in polls of New Hampshire in December,
as Sununu claimed. Last month, her lowest poll finish was 18 percent and her
highest was 30 percent. She hasn’t been in the single digits in the Granite State since
August.)
And our Fahlberg reports from Exeter, “With two days to go
until voters head to the polls, her own Granite State supporters — many of them
self-described independents — are doubtful she can pull off a surprise win here
against her former boss, let alone secure the GOP nomination.”
You’re
going to hear arguments from the Trump team that Haley’s support is driven by crossover votes from Democrats. It is more
accurate to say that she is likely attracting the support of independents and
unaffiliated voters. Any registered Democrats who wanted to vote in the
Republican presidential primary had to change their party registration before
October 6, 2023. But if you’re an unaffiliated or independent voter, you can
vote in either primary. As of
November 20, New Hampshire had 303,060 registered Democrats, 298,470
registered Republicans, and 399,395 registered “unaffiliated.”
There’s
this perception that Iowa’s caucuses are determined by registered Republicans,
while New Hampshire always has a lot of crossover voters. But it’s actually
easier to vote in the other party’s contest in Iowa than in New Hampshire; in
Iowa, voters could change their party registration up to the day of the caucus.
For what it’s worth, in the entry poll, just 2 percent of those attending said they
identified as Democrats. Then again, it’s always possible some people are
lying.
*The
Trump campaign has its own arguably blasphemous version, “God gave us
Trump.” These campaign videos are about one step away from reasserting the
divine right of kings. There’s only one savior, and his name isn’t listed on
the ballot; we’re hiring a temp worker for a four-year contract.
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