Ron DeSantis’ national rollout is a disaster and his 2024 numbers are cratering already

| 3:00 pm EDT March 22, 2023
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When polling surfaced earlier this month which said that a clear majority of Americans identify as being “woke,” it was a bad sign for Ron DeSantis’ national political ambitions. The only thing that most people outside of Florida know about him is that he’s the guy who’s trying to destroy Disney World and ban books from schools under the premise that they’re all too “woke.” When the majority of people in the country strongly disagree with you on the position you’re best known for, how can you succeed as a national political candidate?

As it turns out, you can’t. Simon Rosenberg has crunched the numbers, and it turns out DeSantis’ national political rollout is going rather poorly for him. The more the nation hears from DeSantis and about DeSantis, the worse his numbers are getting. At a time when the entire Republican Party has scurried this far to the right, DeSantis has somehow managed to go so much further to the right that he’s losing ground with Republican voters for being too far right. That shouldn’t even be possible. And yet DeSantis has taken such an extraordinarily dumb approach to all of this, he’s somehow positioned himself as too far to the right of his own right wing extremist party.

This isn’t necessarily surprising. Republican donors and kingmakers have known for awhile that Donald Trump’s criminal troubles were likely to make him non-viable by 2024, and they’ve been trying to hand the next Republican nomination to Ron DeSantis on a silver platter. All that DeSantis needed to do was shut up, stick to the script, and not blow it. But as anyone who has followed Florida politics can attest to, there’s just something wrong with this guy.

DeSantis somehow manages to have zero political savvy. Instead of going precisely as far right as the Republican base wants him to, he goes even further to the right. Instead of starting the kinds of feuds that can help him, he picks fights with Disney and such.

All along it’s felt like DeSantis was trying to mimic the Trump playbook without understanding the Trump playbook. Trump couldn’t care less about any issues, and just picked whichever positions he thought would help him win. DeSantis just picks the rightmost positions possible, without understanding that he’s supposed to be threading a needle. Trump strategically picked fights with the kinds of people his base hated – Black athletes and such – while DeSantis allows himself to get baited into whatever random feud comes along. DeSantis keeps trying to make what he thinks are Trump-like moves, without understanding why Trump made any of those moves. It’s like trying to mimic a language you don’t understand by making grunting noises.

It’s still very early (the 2024 race doesn’t exist yet), and so there’s perhaps still time for someone like DeSantis to recalibrate on the issues. The trouble is, he’s too arrogant to want to have to recalibrate. He’s too much of a dummy to understand how to recalibrate. And because he comes off like a creepy robot, he can’t even pivot away from the issues in favor of a cult of personality.

The best thing that DeSantis may still have going for him is that with Trump’s multiple impending criminal indictments making his 2024 prospects less plausible by the day, there really is no one else after DeSantis – at least not as of now. That’s why unpopular also-rans like Nikki Haley and Mike Pence are looking to run: if Trump is taken out and DeSantis flames out, this could end up being a wide open 2024 Republican field where someone has to end up with it. That’s why right wing megadonors won’t want to have to give up on DeSantis unless they absolutely have to. But his disastrous national rollout sure is making it harder for donors to want to stay behind him.

I’ve said for a very long time that once the endlessly-hyped Ron DeSantis actually made it out onto the national stage, everyone – even on the right – would realize their promised new luxury car was just a junkyard clunker. Now it’s happening. Five minutes in the spotlight and the numbers say DeSantis is cratering already.