How Well is Ron DeSantis Really Doing?
The Republican nomination is still winnable, but his current strategies just don't seem to be cutting it.
Ron DeSantis is hands-down the best presidential candidate conservatives have had in decades. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at Republican primary polls. How much should this worry those of us who see nominating DeSantis instead of Donald Trump as a key battle for the soul of the American Right?
On the surface, things don’t look good. RealClearPolitics and Race to the WH’s national polling averages both have DeSantis trending downward alongside Trump trending upward since around February, before which the gap between them was narrowing. In response, Team DeSantis has embraced three main talking points: voters aren’t really paying attention yet, the polls are garbage, and DeSantis’s intensive coverage of Iowa (coupled with a recent endorsement by the state’s governor, Kim Reynolds) will start a snowball effect that turns the race around. Are they right?
It is true that some of the polls that feed these averages have serious issues. For example, as Townhall columnist Scott Morefield and data analyst Chris Wilson for pro-DeSantis Super PAC Never Back Down have detailed, digging into crosstabs reveals findings that are preposterous on their face, such as Joe Biden only getting 53% of the black vote when he got 87% in 2020, or Trump winning women despite losing them by more than a dozen points in both previous elections, and the GOP losing them by eleven in 2022. There’s no question that the Left’s smartest want Trump to be their opponent, and liberal pollsters certainly wouldn’t be above slanting polls to that end.
But is it plausible to assume every poll is bogus, or responsible to proceed under that assumption as if we have nothing to worry about? Because out of the almost 200 primary polls in RCP’s full list, DeSantis only led in one of them. Granted, the list is not exhaustive, but it speaks to the scale of what we would be alleging by giving this explanation too much weight. Remember that MAGA are the ones who cry FAKE! and RIGGED! at any whiff of bad news. We’re for DeSantis in part because we don’t like wrapping ourselves in denial when things don’t go our way.
What, then, of DeSantis’s Iowa ground game? Blaze TV’s Steve Deace, who supports DeSantis and has long been clued into the political environment of the Hawkeye State, says:
Given what I see in the actual election results, and what I am currently seeing on the ground, I can’t make sense of the polls. The on the field results are not matching them as of now. As cynical as I am, do I believe they are all intentional lies? Well, that would be a Covid-level psyop given their one-sided nature, so that would be something. Yet their internal methodologies often reveal fantastical things — like Trump getting 50% of the black vote or winning the youth vote by double digits. Things incapable of happening in any of the 9 realms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Also on the ground here, Trump has now had multiple disappointing turnouts for events. Meanwhile, DeSantis has built the best organization in Iowa I’ve ever seen at this juncture. We also have two big endorsements to come [Bob Vander Plaats] and (probably) [Kim Reynolds] that will have significant influence as well. For they each come with their own grassroots networks that help turnout on game day well beyond a single cycle’s favorable headline.
So at this point I would recommend watching the behavior of the campaigns themselves more than anything else, given the disconnect between “muh polls” and the results on the ground. They always have the best data and they always know more than we do before we know it. Yesterday it was reported that Trump is going back in on DeSantis in Iowa. If you reconcile that with DeSantis’ actions, you can reasonably come to this conclusion of where things stand:
The former president is the favorite, but his ceiling is low enough, and the amount of voters who can still be persuaded voluminous enough, that it is a volatile electorate with many still yet to engage. What is currently asleep can suddenly be awakened. Especially given the level of organization DeSantis has to manifest any late momentum into votes. So despite brash messaging, Trump isn’t taking it for granted.
This is all encouraging, to be sure. No actual votes have been cast yet, history tells us a lot can change in the months between the Iowa Caucuses and the Republican National Convention, and we know most of the voters currently defaulting to Trump are still open to other candidates. DeSantis is absolutely still capable of winning the nomination, and I’m still filling in the circle next to his name on my Wisconsin ballot no matter what.
But whether DeSantis will win without changing his current strategies is a different question, and right now, gun to my head, I would have to say no.
Unless we’re just going to emulate the MAGA approach to bad news, we can’t ignore the fact that, rather than even starting to close the gap with Trump, DeSantis has lost a lot of ground. Recall that last year, shortly after Trump helped ruin the midterms for the GOP, DeSantis was leading Trump in a slew of polls, both nationally and in numerous primary states.
What happened? The midterm debacle had produced a high watermark for Republican exasperation with Trump and receptiveness to an alternative, and rather than capitalizing on it by channeling righteous indignation and unequivocally offering himself as the antidote, he assumed the contrast between the Red Fizzle and his Florida miracle would speak for itself. Instead, he allowed the opportunity to pass and months of unprovoked Trump attacks and lies about him to go mostly unaddressed, so that when the indictments against Trump started rolling in, there was nothing to slow down primary voters’ natural impulse to rally around a target of perceived Democrat persecution.
And as for everything we’ve heard about DeSantis visiting as many counties and meeting as many voters as possible in Iowa...
Yes, the polls are probably off to some degree. Yes, Deace says what he sees on the ground doesn’t line up with them. Yes, Iowans still have a couple months before having to make up their minds. But are we going to content ourselves with not only seeing zero progress in the polls, but negative progress? At what point does “voters just aren’t paying attention yet” no longer cut it? How much of Trump’s rise this year would have been preventable with earlier and more aggressive efforts to inform Republican voters of everything about Trump that sellout “conservative” media isn’t telling them?
And are we really going to fall back on “trust the plan” after years of mocking Trump’s acolytes for the exact same thing?
Lastly, it’s true that candidate support moves around a lot once the actual voting starts. But looking back at the 2012 and 2016 primaries, the eventual winners, while not uninterrupted frontrunners from the start, did have and maintain higher support than most of their competitors from well before November:
At this point in the previous races, Mitt Romney had been briefly overtaken nationally by Herman Cain and Trump found himself in a momentary tie with Ben Carson, but neither change lasted. Romney would go on to be temporarily surpassed again by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, but both flamed out. His and Trump’s national frontrunner status for most of their races did accurately reflect that they would be the eventual winners…and their position was neither as strong nor as durable as Trump’s is now.
Again, this doesn’t mean it’s over; the reasons past primaries turned out how they did can be learned from. But it does mean that convincing ourselves Trump’s current lead is just an illusion and therefore DeSantis should simply keep doing what he’s doing is a recipe for disaster.
The DeSantis campaign’s insistence that all their hard ground work in Iowa is going to pay off with a big victory that changes everything may sound appealing, but it’s only worth anything if they really do know something they’re not sharing. Because if January 15 comes around and a resounding win doesn’t materialize, there needs to be hell to pay.
Right on Calvin. DeSantis was always great when he took on the media and he needs to use that edge when he talks about Trump. He still seems to be caught on his heels most of the time.