After starting the year polling almost even with former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis began losing ground in March and continued sinking through the spring. Notably, the decline began before Trump’s first indictment. A July Economist/YouGovAmerica poll shows Trump at 49% and DeSantis at 20% in a multicandidate GOP primary, which is similar to the polling averages. A Morning Consult poll released last week has Trump at a hefty 56% and DeSantis at a dismal 17%.
Fortunes can still change. The complaints about the DeSantis campaign often sound generic. He lacks the special sauce to catapult from statewide office to the presidency. He has no charisma. His staff isn’t presidential caliber. His message is too insular and online.
Maybe all these things are more or less true. Even so, there’s something odd about this campaign, which started with momentum, money and palpable enthusiasm from Republican elites and grassroots alike. Yet the oddness may have less to do with the personal awkwardness of DeSantis, or with any of his (thus far nonfatal) missteps, and more to do with the bizarre mental map of the Republican primary electorate.
DeSantis had carefully positioned himself to be the right-wing avenger that much of the Republican base seems to crave. He proved he would attack the enemies of the GOP’s white nationalist base and smite anyone seeking to displace white Christian conservatives from atop the nation’s political and social hierarchies. Migrants, trans kids, librarians, college professors — the entire woke-industrial-complex — would be made to suffer under a DeSantis presidency. He would deliver Trumpism’s authoritarian menace, but without the ignorance, chaos, criminality and incompetence that defined Trump’s presidency.
Why isn’t that pitch working?