By Nick Catoggio
Monday, December
04, 2023
On Friday night, while normal people were off doing
normal Friday night things, the hopeless political junkies congregated in The
Dispatch Slack channel were chortling over this tweet.
If you want to convince your audience that you’re
sincerely excited about something, it’s usually best not to point out up front
that relevant rules and regulations require you to feign excitement about it.
It’s the 2023 equivalent of Bush the elder reading “Message:
I care” off his cue cards.
The tweet was a staff error, obviously. Somehow the
instructions for ballot access in Colorado got copy-pasted into a post that was
designed to comply with those instructions. Writer James
Surowiecki sneered that it was “emblematic of [DeSantis’] entire
mismanaged and misbegotten campaign,” which seemed a bit churlish.
What’s truly emblematic of the governor’s mismanaged and
misbegotten campaign is the fact that the tweet was still available,
uncorrected, more than 48 hours later.
A silly gaffe like that would have been less noteworthy
had it come from a political operation that was running smoothly. But DeSantis’
super PAC, Never Back Down, is approaching week three of a very public meltdown
amid disagreements over strategy that began when its chief strategist, Jeff
Roe, reportedly accused one of its board members, Scott Wagner, of harboring
a stick in a certain orifice. That accusation nearly led to a fistfight.
Soon after, the house-cleaning began.
Chris
Jankowski, the CEO of Never Back Down, resigned. The group’s chairman,
longtime DeSantis buddy Adam
Laxalt, followed a week later. On Friday Jankowski’s replacement, interim
CEO Kristin
Davison, was fired over “management and personnel issues.” So were Erin
Perrine, the group’s communications director, and Matthew Palmisano.
The new CEO—the third in 12 days—is Wagner, he of the
alleged uncomfortably placed stick. How he plans to co-exist with Roe, the
PAC’s star hired-gun consultant, is unclear. Perhaps Roe isn’t long for this
political cycle either. “Who else can spend a hundred million dollars and drop
half in the polls?” Nikki Haley asked recently
of DeSantis, referring to Never Back Down’s enormous war chest. No doubt
DeSantis has the same question for Roe.
The reasons for turmoil at the PAC remain murky (the
governor and his inner circle reportedly are unhappy
with the direction of its advertising) but are ultimately unimportant.
What’s important is that an administrative bloodletting, replete with the creation
of a second PAC to pick up the slack on advertising,
isn’t typically the hallmark of a successful operation six weeks out from the
Iowa caucuses. Frankly, it reeks of scapegoating by a campaign that’s bracing
for the end and looking to shift blame from the candidate preemptively.
The implosion of Never Back Down means the time for a
DeSantis 2024 pre-mortem has come.
***
A few days ago, Jonathan
Chait flagged one of the great ironies of this election cycle. The guy
who’s running as a sober, drama-free alternative to “chaos candidate” Donald
Trump sure seems to have a lot of managerial chaos around him.
Certainly, between the two of them, Ron DeSantis is the
more competent executive. He can discuss policy thoughtfully for longer than
two sentences, for one thing, and he’s less chaotic than Trump in his personal
conduct—a bar which, admittedly, most homo sapiens easily
clear. He hasn’t been indicted for any felonies, let alone 91. You don’t need
to worry about him paying off porn stars or starting a war with one of his
tweets. He’s never attempted a coup.
A DeSantis presidency would assuredly involve less
“drama” than a second Trump presidency would. But, strangely, of the three
semi-credible candidates left in the Republican primary, the governor’s
campaign has easily been the most “dramatic.” For all the hype about him being
“Trump, but competent,” his operation has seemed less competent than
you-know-who’s.
It was different for Trump in 2016. In that cycle he ran
through three campaign managers (one of whom would ultimately require a presidential
pardon to evade prison) and even added a campaign
“chief executive” down the stretch en route to an unlikely victory. He
showed up to most of the debates and turned them into a reality-show spectacle
with yuuuuge ratings. There was never a dull moment. In this cycle, those rough
waters have turned placid: Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita have run his
operation without incident and the Trump-less debates are humdrum affairs.
There’s never a moment that’s not dull—apart from the sporadic Truth
Social posts about exterminating the “vermin,” I mean.
You can explain Trump’s evolution in various ways. Now
that he’s a seasoned pro at campaigning, he runs a tighter ship. Or now that
he’s surrounded by nothing but truly fanatic yes-men and cronies, there’s
destined to be less friction inside his campaign. Or now that he’s transformed
most of the Republican Party into a cult, he has no need to compete
aggressively in the primary in the first place. His “campaign” is basically
just him mumbling about “retribution” occasionally.
Yet the fact remains that Trump 2024, like Haley 2024,
has functioned without organizational drama. If it’s drama you’re looking for,
you need to turn to the candidate who dumped
his campaign manager in August; who burned through donor money at
such an
unsustainable rate that his PAC had to go hat-in-hand to right-wing
billionaires seeking another
$50 million; and who’s “rebooted” his organization so
many times that
it’s hard to tell what number we’re on with the end of Never Back Down.
That’s not Trump. That’s “Trump, but competent.”
It’s not as surprising as it may seem. The rap on Ron
DeSantis has always been that he’s insular to a fault, trusting his wife Casey
and basically no one else. When he was fortunate enough to land an experienced
adviser in Wiles for his first gubernatorial campaign, he ended up chasing her
off (reportedly at
Casey’s urging) under suspicions of
leaking or of amassing too much influence or some such. He even
allegedly blackballed Wiles by warning her lobbying firm that it would lose
favor in Tallahassee if it didn’t ditch her.
That may explain why he turned to an underperforming
hired gun like Roe to mastermind his presidential run: He just hadn’t built an
infrastructure of loyal pros around him willing and able to help him take a
campaign national. In fact, the candidate billed as “Trump, but competent” has
arguably ruled his own political kingdom by fear and without charm to a greater
degree than Trump himself has. When DeSantis finally needed some competent and
influential friends in national Republican politics, he discovered he
didn’t have many.
If he hasn’t been competent organizationally, he hasn’t
been very competent strategically either.
DeSantis has run a strange hybrid campaign that’s equal
parts “Cruz 2016” and “Twitter Troll 2023.” The New
York Times wrote about the failure of his online operation back in
October, recounting the numerous embarrassments it’s caused him—the disastrous
buggy campaign announcement with Elon Musk on The Platform Formerly Known as
Twitter, astroturfed videos featuring white-supremacist symbols created and
promoted by his communications team, and general feebleness in
counterprogramming Trump toadies bent on turning their guy into a punchline.
According to the Times, back in May the
DeSantis camp invited a number of right-wing social media influencers to an
event aiming to recruit them as surrogates. But there was a problem: “Mr.
DeSantis’s advisers were defensive when asked about campaign strategy, they
said, and struggled to come up with talking points beyond the vague notion of
‘freedom.’” Even then, even chatting with a friendly audience, they couldn’t
articulate a clear rationale for populists to prefer the governor to Trump. All
they knew was that they wanted to win the Twitter primary.
Result: The influencers ended up underwhelmed while the
great mass of Republican voters doubtless ended up befuddled by much of the
Very Online DeSantis 2024 messaging they encountered on social media.
Parallel to the “Twitter Troll” campaign was a more
traditional operation being conducted in Iowa and, well, really just Iowa.
DeSantis’ fans in New Hampshire have grumbled for months that he never
put in enough face time with voters to create some distance in the
polls between himself and Haley. He’s since faded to single digits and fourth
place there, which makes him like Chris Christie insofar as both men have
staked their entire campaigns on a single state in the vain hope that winning
there will somehow catapult them into national contention. Christie is wagering
on New Hampshire; DeSantis is now making the same wager about Iowa.
The problem is that we’ve been reminded repeatedly in the
past 15 years that winning Iowa is no predictor of future primary success. Mike
Huckabee won it in 2008—and lost New Hampshire and the nomination. Rick
Santorum won it in 2012—and lost New Hampshire and the nomination. Ted Cruz,
whose campaign was managed by Jeff Roe, won it in 2016—and lost New Hampshire
and the nomination. In all three races, the candidate who did win
New Hampshire went on to become the GOP’s nominee.
So why did Ron DeSantis decide to emulate that strategy
instead of doing what Haley did by dividing her time more evenly between New
Hampshire and Iowa? Haley, not the “Trump, but competent” candidate, is the one
with a fully-formed early-state strategy; DeSantis’ “strategy” at this point is
simply to rack up as many big-name Iowa endorsements as
possible, visit all
99 counties, and wish upon a star that if he overperforms there on caucus
night the results will do for him what they conspicuously failed to do for
Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz.
The likely best-case scenario for him at this
point, in other words, is that he does well in Iowa and then he and Haley split
the Not Trump vote in New Hampshire, allowing Trump to win easily. Then it’s on
to Haley’s home state of South Carolina, where DeSantis probably finishes, er,
third.
This is the “competent” candidate?
***
There’s a big picture strategic critique of DeSantis as
well, one we’ve revisited many times in this newsletter. Did the governor err
fundamentally by running as “Trump, but competent” in the first place?
What if he had run as “conservative, but a little Trumpy”
instead?
I may be the only person left in the commentariat who
thinks DeSantis made the correct play by running as he did. Positioning himself
as a hyperpopulist who would out-Trump Trump if elected president was a
high-risk play, but it was potentially high-reward too: If it had succeeded in
peeling off a chunk of Trump’s MAGA base, the image of Trump’s invincibility
would have been shattered and the great mass of traditional Republican voters
might have rallied around DeSantis as The Chosen One who had finally broken the
cult.
The safer play would have been to run as a recognizably
traditional conservative with populist touches. Be a little more supportive of
Ukraine and vaccines, and a little less eager to use state power against
political enemies. Keep some of the anti-woke stuff to impress Trumpier voters,
but speak more forthrightly about Trump’s personal weaknesses—and much, much
sooner during the campaign—instead of treating him as a sort of “frenemy” a la,
well, Cruz
2016.
That would have been a lower-risk strategy. By following
it, DeSantis might have consolidated the traditionally conservative voters who
were curious about him at the start of the primary but have since been put off
and decamped to Haley. And if he had consolidated them, he’d likely be sitting
considerably higher in the polls than he is now. Think 30 percent, perhaps,
instead of 14.
The problem is that strategy is also lower-reward. Once
he’s at 30 percent, how does he win?
By turning himself into more of a Nikki Haley figure and
less of a Donald Trump, DeSantis would have irritated the populist voters who
had grown to love his pugnacious culture-warring in Florida. In a primary in
which Trump himself wasn’t running, perhaps the governor could have survived
that; even the new, more Haley-esque DeSantis would still be the Trumpiest
major candidate in a Trump-less race, after all.
But in a primary in which Donald Trump is also on the
ballot? Those irritated populists would have written off a more mainstream
DeSantis as a RINO sellout from the “uniparty” and gone back to the cult
leader. To believe that the governor could have won as the “conservative, but a
little Trumpy” alternative, you need to believe that a majority of the primary
electorate would prefer a more traditionally conservative nominee to a
populist—and not just any populist but Donald Trump himself.
I don’t believe it. In fact, I think if DeSantis had run
as a traditional conservative and Trump had ended up dropping out for whatever
reason, Ramaswamy might have become a serious threat to consolidate the
post-liberal vote and possibly to contend for the nomination.
And that’s especially true if DeSantis
had fulfilled Never Trumpers’ fantasy by attacking Trump as a demagogic crank
who’s unfit for office after January 6 even if he ends up beating the rap on
all 91 criminal charges, which he won’t. To call Trump unfit is to step inescapably toward
a conclusion that renders the critic unviable as a candidate in the
Republican Party.
I don’t think there’s any scenario realistically in which
“conservative, but a little Trumpy” could have defeated Trump, especially once
the indictments had begun and the nihilistic dregs of this party had united
behind their leader. But I concede that it’s … tricky trying to make that
argument when the high-risk high-reward strategy I favored has left DeSantis
limping to Iowa and his super PAC in collapse.
If you want to attack his/my “Trump, but competent”
strategy, let me suggest that this is a better way to do so: What evidence is
there that Republican voters give a rip about competence?
And insofar as they do, what would lead DeSantis or me to
think that they’re arriving at their understanding of “competent” government in
any kind of considered way rather than by digesting whatever propaganda they’re
being fed by right-wing media?
Ask the average Republican what they thought of Trump’s
first term and they’ll tell you he was a great president, perhaps one of the
greatest. Never mind COVID, never mind two impeachments, never mind the guy
being comically at sea whenever he was asked to discuss policy: Certainly he
qualifies as “competent,” Republican voters will say, particularly when
compared to the incumbent.
DeSantis has his own successes as governor and even as a
candidate to point to, starting with his laudable decision to keep Florida’s
public schools open during the pandemic. His 19-point margin of victory last
year was impressive, and despite the political tide running against him ever
more strongly during this year’s campaign, he’s continued to work hard in Iowa
and in the media to give himself a chance. Selling himself as a highly
competent executive was a sensible message—if not
quite as
true as DeSantis-friendly media would have you believe.
It’s just that “Trump, but competent” is a contradiction
in terms. In a party in which you’re all but required to believe in Trump’s
greatness (and innocence) as a condition of membership, there’s no political
space to run as a more competent alternative. DeSantis’ New Right fan base of
post-liberal ideologues might swoon over his proactive culture-war agenda as
governor, comparing it favorably to Trump’s achievements as president, but the
average populist Republican voter must be perplexed by the argument.
Sure, it’s great that DeSantis took on Disney and
critical race theory and the gays. But how does that make him more competent
than one of America’s greatest presidents, the savior of the
country?
If competence mattered even a little bit to Republican
voters, the message of Trump’s campaign would have already been revealed as a
catastrophic political error. For months, his opponents in the primary and even
some of his allies in Congress have insisted that Americans are focused on the
future, not on the past, and that they want their own policy grievances
addressed, not the frontrunner’s personal grudges. (DeSantis made a variation
of this argument as
recently as Sunday.) Trump has ignored them at every turn, babbling
manically about the rigged election of 2020 and vowing to his fans that he’ll
be “your
retribution” as president, and … he
leads by 48 points. His lead has more than tripled since
he was indicted in Manhattan at the end of March and started leaning heavily
into his talking points about revenge.
I’m forever reluctant to shift blame for the Republican
Party’s problems away from Republican voters. Because DeSantis is so unlikable,
because his program is offensive to classical liberals, and because seeing
hubristic people fail spectacularly is satisfying, we’ll all be tempted to do
just that once he flames out of the race six weeks from now. He could
have run a better campaign. (He could have.) He should have
tried a different strategy. (He should have.) He would have
been better off waiting until 2028. (Disagree, but okay.)
It’s all fair, but it’s all a coping mechanism for a
harsh reality. The truth is that insofar as the cultishness of the American
right may have weakened briefly after the party underperformed in the midterms
under Trump’s leadership, his perceived martyrdom at the hands of the justice
system this spring reinvigorated and strengthened it. Once it did, DeSantis had
no chance. He’s not to blame—voters are.
