IN THE NEWS
* President Zelensky will fly to Japan to join the G7 over the weekend, as the alliance moves to toughen anti-Putin sanctions even more.
* A bipartisan fiscal deal to avoid a debt ceiling crisis is closer than ever (but still 1,000,000 miles away from final passage), as the grassroots and media on both sides come to grips with the reality that the only pact that can pass Chuck Schumer’s Senate and Kevin McCarthy’s House is one that loses support from the extremes on both sides (which is a hard thing to pull off in this polarized age….).
* The New York Times scoop on the true state of Dianne Feinstein’s health is the actual true beginning of the end of her Senate career; you can start the stopwatch now.
* The New York Times has joined the Wall Street Journal with access to Jeffrey Epstein’s scheduling records, which those with the very best spideysense will tell you could be the beginning of the end for a lot of famous people.
* The legendary and iconic Sam Zell passed away.
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Ron DeSantis is right that on paper today he joins Joe Biden and Donald Trump as part of the Big 3 club of those most likely to win the 2024 presidential election.
Unfortunately for the Florida governor – as he gets ready to formally enter the race next week – his place in the Top Trio firmament is being questioned on a variety of fronts.
The timing could scarcely be worse.
Any candidate wants to enter this most challenging of contests on an upswing, and Team DeSantis has done its best to create the most powerful aura possible, including with Iowa (last weekend) and New Hampshire (this weekend) shows of force.
But consider the existing conditions the Sunshine State topper faces as he readies his official effort:
1. His poll standing against Trump has plummeted nationally and in key states.
2. The negative impacts of his Disney, Ukraine, and abortion gambits are reverberating loudly.
3. His electability argument appears to many to be as solid as a house of cards made of soaking wet paper towel squares.
4. Everywhere you look, another Republican hopeful is flirting with a presidential bid, rather than jumping on the DeSantis bandwagon.
5. Despite the strong-armed, fear-instilling-based effort by Team DeSantis to limit leaking and harmful blind quotes, this news cycle features some really ominous treachery.
6. Donald Trump and his high command are going to continue to relentlessly pummel DeSantis, including the Mother of All Bracketing for his soft-launch announcement next week.
DeSantis could end up as the Republican nominee and maybe, even, as the next president.
But if you were putting down odds right now of both things happening, the chances would be significantly longer today than just a few weeks ago – again, not an ideal narrative to kick things off with.
Let’s look at the swirl one by one.
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1. THE POLLS
Here are just a few examples of the clear trend, demonstrating Trump is up and Ron is down in the data:
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2. THE OWN GOAL ERRORS
As best I can tell, in the history of America, no governor has ever publicly mocked or threatened the state’s biggest employer like this.
Disney cancelling thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in investment in the Orlando Metroplex with the scrapping of two mega projects produced major headlines in Florida and around the nation. The conventional wisdom among donors and other elites is that Bob Iger is proving to be tougher than Ron DeSantis, which is not a great look for a pol who is trying to demonstrate that he is tougher than the rest.
Team DeSantis tried to play down the mousetrapping of their guy, but this is now a no-win situation for them. Continuing the battle with Disney is not a good look, but caving in is so off-brand as to be unimaginable.
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3. ELECTABILITY, SMELECTABILTY
The New York Times was able to listen in live as DeSantis did a conference call with his top bundlers on Thursday (that leaky access alone is a separate and significant problem…).
Here is one key section:
“You have basically three people at this point that are credible in this whole thing,” Mr. DeSantis told donors. “Biden, Trump and me, and I think of those three, two have a chance to get elected president — Biden and me, based on all the data in the swing states, which is not great for the former president and probably insurmountable because people aren’t going to change their view of him.”
Now, there is no doubt that for a certain class of Red donors and pols, the choice is clear, since they don’t think Trump can beat Biden and they think DeSantis can. Or, at least, they pretend to think that, and brandish it as their main talking point – because they want to banish Trump and they can’t think of anything better to try to convince primary and caucus voters to pick someone (anyone!) else.
On Thursday, Texas Senator John Cornyn gave the full-throated treatment to this argument in a call with Lone Star State scribes:
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Thursday that former President Donald Trump cannot win the 2024 general election and that he'll be looking for alternatives as his party plans to take on Democrat Joe Biden next year.
"I think President Trump's time has passed him by," Cornyn said during a conference call with Texas reporters. "And I think what's the most important thing for me is that we have a candidate who can actually win…
"Electability to me is key," he said, "because unless you can win an election, you don't get to govern."
Two questions:
1. Do voters actually care about electability?
2. Will voters who prioritize electability vote for DeSantis over Trump?
On (1), go to any Red-area diner in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina, and ask folks over breakfast if they are going to base their 2024 nomination votes on “electability,” as Senator Cornyn is urging them to do.
On (2), remember the old truism, electability is the first argument of those desperate to beat the scoundrel, and then read Ramesh Ponnuru:
The critique that DeSantis is making of Trump — that he would lose in November 2024 — might be popular among the governor’s supporters, but it would probably fall flat among the Republican voters he needs to persuade to win.
For one thing, Trump has defied such predictions before. He was written off as a joke candidate in the Republican primaries when he entered the presidential race in 2015. When he won the nomination, it was assumed that Hillary Clinton would handily defeat him. (I’m among those who said he wouldn’t win either time.) Then he won against her, too.
To convince Republican voters that Trump is a loser would thus require getting them to believe that the same argument everyone made back then and saw blow up in their faces is right this time. For many conservatives, Trump’s 2016 victory reinforced the idea that “electability” is a ploy used by the media and squishy Republicans to discredit candidates who are willing to fight for them.
One might think that the fact that Trump lost the last presidential race to Joe Biden would strengthen the case that he would lose a rematch. But Trump has shielded himself from this reality by insisting falsely that he won the 2020 election only to have the Democrats steal it. Pollsters find that most Republican voters say they believe some version of this story, which presumably is why DeSantis has never explicitly rejected it.
The claim that Trump can’t win will also continue to run into polls that suggest otherwise. Which leads to one last reason the electability argument is a dud: In its strongest form, it is almost certainly false. Trump might well be a riskier candidate for Republicans than DeSantis would be. Given the right national environment 18 months from now — if, say, gas prices spike again or a recession hits — Trump could win.
Someday, the electability argument might carry DeSantis to a major comeback win over Trump. But the conditions do not appear to be there right now.
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4. THE FIELD GETS BIGGER
The culminative impact of 1-3 above – all the signs of DeSantis weakness – is exactly what Team Trump was aiming for in pounding their chief rival over the last few months.
If DeSantis isn’t a lock to beat the frontrunner, well, then, other folks are going to try.
Everywhere you look, another Republican hopeful is flirting with a presidential bid, rather than jumping on the DeSantis train.
And many of the current and potential horses are having pretty good moments in the sun.
* Vivek Ramaswamy is riding high on many fronts, rising in the polls, winning the Biundo Primary, and in general enjoying It Candidate momentum, as per, even, the New York Times:
* Mike Pence is getting his best coverage of the whole cycle.
* Tim Scott’s expected Monday announcement, stops in Iowa and New Hampshire, and touted multimillion dollar spring/summer ad campaign garnered him New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press coverage, which suggests DeSantis will be sharing billing and attention next week. There are a lot of Republican House and Senate members who know and love Scott (who don’t know or love DeSantis) who would far prefer the South Carolinian as their nominee and president, and those folks create a lot of chatter in the press.
* Chris Christie has apparently won the Scaramucci Primary and one New Hampshire newshound reports he is in:
* North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, with vast self-funding potential, is moving towards a run – and the seriousness with which the media is taking his effort (despite most not having heard of him two days ago) is a direct reflection of the current DeSantis weakness.
* The Domiant Media continues to fawn over Chris Sununu, like OMG.
* And Glenn Youngkin put out a wow video featuring his Reagan library speech that the whole Establishment took as an indication of “don’t you forget about me or count me out – yet.”
This could end up being one crowded debate stage – and a lot of folks dividing the anti-Trump vote with DeSantis.
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5. LEAKY LEAKY CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST
Check out this passage from TIME magazine’s cover story on DeSantis:
In 2010, DeSantis left active duty and settled near Jacksonville, where he worked as a lawyer and married a local TV anchor, Casey Black, whom he met at a driving range. As the Tea Party fervor crested, he self-published a book of conservative ideas, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, and traveled to local activist meetings to give talks and sell it. DeSantis was looking for a way into elected office but unsure where to start until he met two Florida consultants, Tim Baker and Brian Hughes, who had made a specialty of electing conservative insurgent veterans. DeSantis thought he might run for state legislature or some other low-level office. The consultants persuaded him he had a shot at a Jacksonville-area congressional district that had just been redrawn to favor the GOP.
The 2012 primary was crowded, and DeSantis had little money or name recognition. The consultants devised a guerrilla strategy designed to tap into the new conservative zeitgeist. Casey, a local celebrity, began using her married name on television. The couple went door to door, using his advisers’ data to target households with the strongest record of voting in Republican primaries. Meanwhile, his consultants, who had agreed to backload their fees, gambled by spending nearly all of the campaign’s meager budget on an ad on Fox News.
DeSantis began to close the gap on his more experienced rivals. He impressed national right-wing groups and won the endorsement of the influential Club for Growth, which brought a flood of cash from donors. He won the seven-way GOP primary by a wide margin, drawing nearly 40% of the vote.
Buoyed by this success, the consultants drew up a plan to raise DeSantis’ profile as he headed to Washington. But the candidate dismissed them: he didn’t want to spend more money with his election to Congress all but assured. It was only when Baker and Hughes expressed concern that the dispute might become public that DeSantis relented, according to two people familiar with the episode. Their role in his early career is not mentioned in DeSantis’ new memoir, The Courage to Be Free, which describes the door-knocking strategy as if it were DeSantis’ own idea. “He has a habit of rewriting history,” one of the people familiar with the episode told me. “There’s Richard Petty, there’s Tom Petty, and then there’s Ron DeSantis petty.”
Now I’m not here to tell you that I know that Tim Baker or Brian Hughes was the source for that story and that killer blind quote.
What I am here to tell you is that Ron DeSantis has left many unhappy enemies in his wake and you can expect to hear from a lot more of them in direct proportion to the success he has on the campaign trail.
The aggrieved don’t care about the Tallahassee omerta.
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6. TRUMP IS READY TO PERSONALLY KILL DESANTIS
Here is something else DeSantis told his donors on that call the New York Times listened to Thursday:
Mr. DeSantis quoted a voter he had talked with at an event in Iowa as saying, “You know, Trump was somebody, we liked his policies but we didn’t like his values. And with you, we like your policies but also know that you share our values.”
Here is a portion of DeSantis’ seminal March interview with Piers Morgan:
RON DESANTIS: Growing up, I knew what was right and wrong. That was instilled in me. That’s just something that carries with you all the way for the rest of your life…
PIERS MORGAN: Does personal conduct in any leader, politically, in America, does it matter, how you behave as a leader?
RON DESANTIS: I think at the end of the day…I think you really want to look to leaders like our Founding Fathers… It doesn’t mean you never make a mistake in your personal life, but I think what type of character are you bringing….I think the personal is more about how you handle your public duties and the kind of character that you bring to that endeavor.
All I have to say for now is that Donald Trump is not going to sit back and let Ron DeSantis tout his superior “personal” “values” to the voters of Iowa and beyond.
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DeSantis wanted to enter this phase of his quest seen as the only Republican who could beat Trump and Biden, limiting the size of the GOP field, dominating the donor class, winning the endorsements, riding high in the polls, and fully in control of his public image.
Trump’s brand is all about the projection of strength. Beating Trump is likely going to require coming across as stronger than he is, in all sorts of subtle and explicit ways. Falling in the polls, falling to Iger, losing the electability argument, watching the field grow, seeing leaks pop up, and being hit with oppo with impunity – none of that projects strength.
Let’s see how next week goes. But as of now, the status of Ron DeSantis for President is looking pretty good at Mar-a-Lago.
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