The Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, formally entered the race this week in a virtual town hall Twitter event that featured a collection of electronic burps, servers in meltdown and, for those who hung around for long enough, a blue screen of Trappist political communications.
One could almost hear a solitary trumpet scatting out the Girl from Ipanema while Twitter buffered.
Donald Trump could barely hide his glee, mocking the technically challenged announcement, calling it a “disaster” and saying, “I don’t know if it’s recoverable.”
“He’s very disloyal, but he’s got no personality,” Trump said of his Floridian foe. “And if you don’t have personality, politics is a very hard business.”
Asked whether he would participate in debates with DeSantis, Trump responded, “Unless he gets close, why would anybody debate?”
He would say that, wouldn’t he?
But to call upon the Wildean aphorism, the chatter around DeSantis’s technical glitches is a whole lot better than not being talked about.
All politicians are adept at the art of turd polishing. Rather than an embarrassing collapse of server power, the DeSantis camp is claiming his announcement to run for president on Twitter “broke the internet”.
Nice spin.
DeSantis raised a million dollars in the hour after his announcement. It might not sound like much in the context of billion-dollar presidential campaigns but the money came from small donors. The big money comes from wealthy personal donors and the almost innumerable CPACs. But small donors speak of a groundswell of grassroots support.
He’s going to need every blade of it. In polling, DeSantis entered the primary contest 31 points behind Trump nationally, 22 points down in Iowa and 18 points adrift in New Hampshire.
While dates are yet to be fixed, the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary are the first cabs off the 2024 primary rank and set the scene for the battle over the ensuing months.
Only three of the seven US presidents since 1976 won their Iowa caucuses: Democrats Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008, and Republican George W. Bush in 2000.
Iowa caucus losers who went on to win the White House are Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, and Trump in 2016.
But when the results of the New Hampshire primary are included, a clearer correlation emerges. Six of the seven presidents elected since 1976 won one or the other of the two states.
Polling averages in the US at this early stage put Trump ahead in the triangular contest. Trump leads Biden by a point while DeSantis leads by half a point over the 46th President.
There’s a lot to unpack in those figures. Biden’s popularity or the lack of it (his approval ratings are at Trumpian levels circa 2020) are reflected in those results as is name recognition (Biden and Trump have universal recognition in the US while DeSantis’s recognition factor will rise through the primaries but now sits at only 65 per cent).
The prevailing wisdom is that DeSantis can beat Biden and Trump can’t. That’s reinforced by a Marist Poll in March that found 61 per cent of Americans don’t want the 45th POTUS to become the 47th – including 89 per cent of Democrats and 64 per cent of independents. Forget the Democrat figure, almost two thirds of independent voters at this point won’t vote for him.
To put that in context, two thirds of the largest voting bloc in the US – independent voters who make up 38 per cent of the electorate (31 per cent are registered Democrats, 28 per cent Republican) – won’t have a bar of Trump.
Not only has Trump not won an election since 2016, the midterms and the presidential election results since then show that if he is on the ballot or his endorsed candidates are, independent voters and Democrats come out in waves to vote against him.
The real problem for Trump remains the 2020 result and the Big Lie he created which can’t be sustained. Worse, it looks like his second-term agenda can be neatly categorised in one word, revenge.
Just over a year ago, he was babbling about it again. No proof, not one iota of evidence. Interviewed on NPR, Trump stuck to the nonsense that he won in 2020.
“The ones that are smart — the ones that know, you take a look at. Again, you take a look at how Kari Lake is doing, running for governor. She’s very big on this issue. She’s leading by a lot. People have no idea how big this issue is, and they don’t want it to happen again. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen, and they don’t want it to happen again.
“And the only way it’s not going to happen again is you have to solve the problem of the presidential rigged election of 2020.”
Kari Lake was beaten fair and square in the Arizona gubernatorial election in November 2022 and like Trump, took the people’s verdict badly.
During a three-day trial that ended last week, a Maricopa County Superior Court Judge ruled that Lake failed to prove misconduct or illegal conduct by county election officials. The judge confirmed the election of Governor Katie Hobbs (D), who beat Lake by more than 17,000 votes.
Imagine how that nonsense will go over in the heat of a presidential campaign. Trump carries his dummy spit around like luggage that he can’t now walk away from. He’ll look a fool if he walks it back and, if he continues to prosecute the farrago of lies, he looks not only dishonest but yesterday’s man fighting a battle that Americans have moved on from.
Trump’s own appointment as attorney-general, William Barr, put the 45th POTUS’s candidacy succinctly.
“I think that [Trump] would be one of the weaker candidates. We have a lot of young candidates who will fight for principle but don’t have the sort of obnoxious personal characteristics that alienate a lot of voters.”
The Republicans now have a genuine conservative candidate in Governor DeSantis. Relative youth is on his side. A lawyer and two-time congressman with a military background. A perfect political resume for the White House.
Those who don’t think DeSantis can make up ground on Trump should take note that he won the Florida gubernatorial vote by just 27,000 votes in 2018. In 2022, he won by 1.5 million votes.
Game on.
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