On paper, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is well-positioned to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee. In reality, it’s not going so hot. Where many Republican candidates are trying to portray themselves as conservative but without the overt cruelty of a Donald Trump, DeSantis is trying to outdo Trump on the cruelty and lib-owning. If there’s a Trump lane and a non-Trump lane to the Republican primary, DeSantis thinks the Trump lane is the path to victory.
The problem, of course, is that Donald Trump is still in his lane, and still has a firm hold on the hearts of the Republican base. DeSantis, meanwhile, is fading. CNN’s Harry Enten looks at one key measure in recent polling: strength of favorability. The question is not just whether Republican primary voters say they feel generally good about a candidate—it’s whether they really, really like him. DeSantis is dropping off there.
“Back in December, 40% of Republican voters in a Fox News poll had a strongly favorable opinion of the Florida governor. That was right near Trump’s 43%,” Enten writes. “Last month, the same poll found DeSantis’ share of strongly favorable support dropping to 33%. Trump’s, meanwhile, jumped to 50%, extending the gap between the two candidates’ strongly favorable ratings from 3 points to 17 points.”
Trump, he points out, won the 2016 Republican nomination despite overall low favorability ratings because his very favorable ratings were good. In a multiway primary, a candidate has to be people’s first choice, not just someone they feel kinda okay about. DeSantis is fading in particular among Republican non-college graduates.
DeSantis’ struggles in the polls revive a comparison he probably doesn’t want people making. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker announced his presidential campaign in July 2015 after months of leading in many polls. His candidacy fizzled almost immediately and he dropped out in September 2015.
The comparisons are easy: Two youngish Republicans who became governors of battleground states and made national headlines with far-right policies and provocations, winning reelection in the year before a presidential primary kicked off. Their charisma, such as it was, came from the perception that they could dominate Democrats, unions, and corporations. More traditional measures of charisma, like being charming on the campaign trail or making good speeches, aren’t necessary when a Republican can crush the opposition in his state—or so goes the hype around these candidacies. In February, though, The New York Times’ Nate Cohn argued that the comparisons were misplaced, because DeSantis was so much stronger than Walker had ever been.
“Overall, Mr. DeSantis has 32 percent support in polls taken since the midterm elections. This is not a fleeting product of a wave of favorable media coverage. Instead, he has made steady gains in the polls over the last two years,” Cohn wrote. “Mr. Walker, in contrast, had 7 percent in the early polls.”
That’s a big difference, although Cohn perhaps underplays the difference between 2016, when the Republican field was enormous and no one had big numbers until Trump started taking off, and this cycle, in which the Republican field is so dominated by one figure. Eight years ago, Republican voters were trying to decide from a long list. Now, they’re either for Trump or they’re looking for an alternative, and the opportunities for the would-be alternatives are narrow.
Since Cohn wrote that in February, DeSantis has steadily faded in the polls, overall as well as in the strongly/very favorable ratings Enten highlights. DeSantis’ struggles haven’t created space for another alternative to Trump to rise: Instead, Trump himself has risen. That’s particularly a problem for DeSantis because a large part of his argument is that he’s a winner. He won big in his reelection in 2022, and he’s winning through policy dominance in Florida. If you want a guy who can really beat up on LGBTQ+ kids and public school teachers, just make their lives intolerable, Ron DeSantis is for you. His campaign message, long before he had an official campaign, was that he didn’t just want to do that stuff, he was already doing it.
“I mean, you can call me whatever you want,” DeSantis said in March, referring to Trump’s various nicknames for him, “just as long as you also call me a winner, because that’s what we’ve been able to do in Florida, is put a lot of points on the board and really take this state to the next level.”
Big-time winner, this guy. But when you run as a winner and you stop looking so much like a winner, it’s a problem. That’s true as DeSantis sinks in the polls, it’s true as he loses proxy fights with Trump, and it’s true as the slam-dunk he thought he had on Disney turns out to be a little more difficult than he expected. Like Scott Walker before him, DeSantis’ big selling point to Republicans was supposed to be that he had owned the libs and he could keep doing it as the nominee and then the president. DeSantis still has time to turn things around, but in Republican-dominance politics, looking like a loser may be something you can’t come back from.
We speak with Anderson Clayton, the 25-year-old chair of North Carolina’s Democratic Party. Clayton has a big-picture plan for 2024, and explains the granular changes needed to get out the vote on college campuses and in the rural communities of the Tar Heel State.
