McManus: DeSantis has hurdles to beat to displace Trump
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t introduced that he’s working for president, however he’s doing a convincing job of performing like a candidate.
DeSantis, who not often speaks with out reminding listeners that he received reelection by a margin of virtually 20%, is on a coast-to-coast tour to courtroom Republican voters and contributors.
He spoke to conservative donors in Florida on Thursday and Texas Republicans on Friday. He’s scheduled to talk on the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley on Sunday and at a GOP fundraiser in Orange County on Sunday evening. He’s reportedly planning journeys to Iowa and New Hampshire, the primary caucus and first states.
DeSantis’ purpose seems easy: He hopes to turn into the consensus different to his get together’s presumptive front-runner, former President Trump.
He’s already succeeding. Public opinion polls, which at this level are entertaining however not predictive, present DeSantis firmly in second place — in a race he hasn’t entered.
“It’s unusual that you have two people so clearly out front at this early stage,” GOP strategist Alex Conant advised me, referring to DeSantis and Trump. “That’s going to make it hard for other potential candidates to make any headway.”
DeSantis has bootstrapped his solution to the highest of the conservative heap by casting himself as a bare-knuckled brawler within the tradition wars.
During the pandemic, he derided Dr. Anthony Fauci and ordered Florida’s faculties to reopen earlier than most different states did. He chartered a jet to dump Venezuelan asylum seekers on the largely liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. He enacted a regulation to ban academics from discussing sexual orientation earlier than the fourth grade (identified by its opponents as “Don’t Say Gay”). When Disney executives criticized the regulation, he denounced them as “woke” and stripped Disney World of its standing as a self-governing district.
Fox News hailed him as a hero. And to many GOP donors and voters, he started to seem like a possible fusion candidate — militant sufficient to attraction to Trump followers, however standard sufficient for Republicans uninterested in the previous president’s chaotic fashion.
Trump seen with mounting anger.
He dubbed DeSantis, whom he as soon as endorsed, as “Ron DeSanctimonious.”
He attacked DeSantis for supporting cuts in future spending on Social Security and Medicare, a place that was conservative orthodoxy earlier than Trump disavowed it in 2016.
“People are finding out that he wanted to cut Social Security and raise the minimum age to at least 70,” Trump wrote on his social media feed final week. “He is a wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy.”
That was an obvious reference to a 2011 Democratic marketing campaign advert that portrayed then-Rep. Paul D. Ryan, who was chairman of the House Budget Committee, tossing a white-haired woman off a mountain.
DeSantis correctly averted buying and selling insults with probably the most completed mudslinger in fashionable politics. “It’s silly season,” he stated.
But Trump’s assaults are unlikely to cease there.
“The question is: Does any of it stick, and how does DeSantis handle it?” Conant stated.
On one level, Trump was largely proper. When DeSantis ran for Congress in 2012, he argued that the Social Security retirement age needs to be raised from 67 to 70.
In the face of Trump’s offensive, DeSantis retreated. “We’re not going to mess with Social Security,” he advised Fox News final week.
DeSantis hasn’t been as nimble on a second check: determining a coherent place on the battle in Ukraine.
As a hawkish congressman in 2014, he criticized then-President Obama for failing to ship weapons to Kyiv. “When someone like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin sees Obama being indecisive, I think that whets his appetite to cause more trouble,” he stated.
But final month, DeSantis criticized President Biden for sending Ukraine an excessive amount of assist. “They have, effectively, a blank-check policy,” he complained inaccurately. “I don’t think it’s in our interest to be … getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.”
If there was a guideline there, it was onerous to seek out — until it was merely opposing a Democratic president.
DeSantis nonetheless has a couple of months to work on his positions. But he’ll face a full-scale check in August, when Republicans have scheduled their first presidential debate.
It’s prone to be a troublesome one, as a result of each different candidate will likely be gunning for him — not solely Trump, however all of the others, since they need to take DeSantis’ place because the main different.
If DeSantis stumbles, a number of understudies could vie to interchange him: former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and maybe others.
And non-Trump Republicans will once more face the problem of coalescing round a single different, conscious of their expertise in 2016 when a big, fragmented subject helped Trump win the nomination.
It could also be a cliche, but it surely’s true: The stakes on this marketing campaign transcend selecting a nominee. The race will decide the way forward for America’s conservative get together.
If the GOP remains to be outlined by allegiance to Trump, because it was in 2016 and 2020, then he’ll be its nominee.
If most Republicans need to transfer past Trump to a much less chaotic model of conservatism — or merely need a candidate who appears extra electable — DeSantis has made himself a logical selection.
But first he has to outlive the following six months.