'Not dead yet': Columnist argues DeSantis could still turn around his stuttering campaign
It wasn’t supposed to be this way for Ron DeSantis.
The Florida governor, who is tonight scheduled to officially announce a presidential run that has been widely expected for months, enters the race with sagging poll numbers along with the perception that he lacks people skills.
As recently as late February, DeSantis trailed front-runner Donald Trump by less than 13 points (43.3 to 30.50), but the former president has since opened up a commanding lead over DeSantis. Trump led the Florida governor by more than 34 percentage points in the most recent Real Clear Politics polling average (55.5 percent to 21.1 percent).
“It’s never a good sign when political analysts are writing ‘What Went Wrong?’ stories about your presidential campaign before it’s announced,” conservative journalist Rich Lowry writes for The New York Times in a column published under the headline “He’s Not Dead Yet" – an ominous headline for a candidate who hasn't even announced.
But Lowry argues that a path still plausibly exists for DeSantis, and that in the coming weeks “he could well change the narrative of the 2024 Republican nomination fight from ‘Trump is burying DeSantis’ to ‘He’s still kicking, despite Trump doing everything he can to bury him.’”
Lowry notes that DeSantis is "lavishly funded, his favorable ratings remain quite high among Republicans, he can draw a crowd, he’ll finally actually be in the race, and perhaps most important, it seems he has the correct theory of how to try to topple Mr. Trump.”
Lowry believes DeSantis can leverage a compelling personal biography.
“More fundamentally, a presidential candidate needs a personal narrative that dovetails with his political message in a way that candidates for lesser offices simply don’t. Without one, they rarely succeed. Barack Obama was a groundbreaking African American candidate for a country that needed the audacity of hope. Mr. Trump was the outsider billionaire for a country that needed to be made great again,” Lowry writes.
“What is Mr. DeSantis? He has spent the past several months talking about his record in Florida more than about himself, which is admirable in a way, but policies don’t tell a story. At the moment, the average Republican knows little or nothing about his Yale baseball career, his military service during the war on terrorism, his wife’s fight against breast cancer or his life as a very busy father of three young children. In a recent trip through Iowa, his wife, Casey, talked in a more personal mode about their life together; there will have to be more of that.”
Bloomberg News’ Jonathan Bernstein echoes Lowry’s appraisal of DeSantis’ viability.
In a column published under the headline ‘Yes, Ron DeSantis Can Recover and Win,” Bernstein writes that “DeSantis may or may not wind up a serious challenger for the nomination in 2024, but in May 2023 he is still the leading alternative to former President Donald Trump. That’s not a bad position. Many eventual US presidential nominees suffer a protracted downturn along the way to winning in the primaries and caucuses.”
Lowry acknowledged that it’s too soon to know whether Republican primary voters are looking for a toned-down version of Trump, at least from a stylistic standpoint.
“He’s a vastly different politician and character,” Lowry writes in a comparison between DeSantis and Trump.
“His approach as a speaker and campaigner is conventional, whereas Mr. Trump is outlandish. Mr. DeSantis is highly professional, whereas even after being president of the United States for four years, Mr. Trump reeks of amateurism. All indications are that Mr. DeSantis is a dutiful family man, whereas Mr. Trump has been, at best, a playboy and a boor.
“It may be that Republicans decide that they still want the show that only Mr. Trump can provide. If that’s the case, Mr. DeSantis and all the other non-Trump candidates will indeed be done. But he’s not dead yet.”
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