Trump and DeSantis
August 1, 2023 Leave a comment
I meant to write a post last week, but never got around to it. Good thing, because the latest NYT polling (and Nate Cohn’s analysis) is even more on point. Here’s a few key tweets from his article:
But even if it might be a mistake to call Mr. Trump “inevitable,” the Times/Siena data suggests that he commands a seemingly unshakable base of loyal supporters, representing more than one-third of the Republican electorate. Alone, their support is not enough for Mr. Trump to win the primary. But it is large enough to make him extremely hard to defeat — perhaps every bit as hard as the historical record suggests.
Here’s what we know about the depth of the support for — and opposition to — Mr. Trump from our poll, and why it’s so hard to beat the former president.
The MAGA base, defined
It’s populist. It’s conservative. It’s blue collar. It’s convinced the nation is on the verge of catastrophe. And it’s exceptionally loyal to Donald Trump.
As defined here, members of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base represent 37 percent of the Republican electorate. They “strongly” support him in the Republican primary and have a “very favorable” view of him.
The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.
Zero percent — not a single one of the 319 respondents in this MAGA category — said he had committed serious federal crimes. A mere 2 percent said he “did something wrong” in his handling of classified documents. More than 90 percent said Republicans needed to stand behind him in the face of the investigations.
As for DeSantis:
The DeSantis challenge
It would be hard for any candidate to consolidate the fractious opposition to Mr. Trump.
It has certainly been hard for Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor.
At the start of the year, it seemed he figured out how to win both conservative and moderate skeptics of Mr. Trump by focusing on a new set of issues — the fight against “woke” and freedom from coronavirus restrictions. This seemed to excite establishment donors and even some independents every bit as much as conservative activists and Fox News hosts.
It hasn’t turned out that way. The fight against woke has offered few opportunities to attack Mr. Trump — strange social media videos notwithstanding — while Covid has faded from political relevance.
Without these issues, Mr. DeSantis has become a very familiar kind of conservative Republican. As with the Ted Cruz campaign in 2016, Mr. DeSantis has run to Mr. Trump’s right on every issue. In doing so, he has struggled to appeal to the moderate voters who represent the natural base of a viable opposition to Mr. Trump…
And Mr. DeSantis would face an entirely different set of challenges if he aimed his appeal at Mr. Trump’s deepest skeptics. He might alienate the mainstream conservative center of the Republican Party if he started to speak the moderate and anti-Trump language of Mr. Trump’s critics — and meet the same fate as Mr. Rubio and Mr. Kasich.
But the promise of the DeSantis campaign was that he could appeal to the otherwise disparate Trump-skeptics factions of the Republican Party, and avoid the challenges that doomed Mr. Trump’s opponents eight years ago. So far, it hasn’t worked.
Yglesias on DeSantis, last week:
A key point of both strength and weakness for DeSantis as a presidential prospect is that he served in the House pre-2016 as a solid conservative with no hint of moderation. That meant, for example, plenty of politically toxic votes for Ryan-style cuts to Medicare.
That’s something the conservative donor class liked about him — he’d be more ideologically reliable than Trump. But it was also an opportunity for Trump to attack him, since even most GOP primary voters don’t like the idea of cutting Medicare. DeSantis, meanwhile, started out with a strong critique of Trump’s disorganized approach to Covid, arguing that he would have been a more forceful and coherent Covid dove. Both of those topics involved positioning DeSantis to the right of Trump, but DeSantis followed up by positioning himself to Trump’s right on basically every topic imaginable. This really odd video slamming Trump for being insufficiently anti-trans is the example that’s gotten the most attention, but he’s done it very consistently.
DeSantis says that Trump is too soft on crime, too soft on immigration, and even too soft on wokeness:
He also accused Trump of “turning the reins over” to Dr. Anthony Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Trump had “endorsed and tried to ram” an “amnesty” bill through Congress and vowed that — unlike the former president — he would finish building the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
In Iowa on Saturday, he hit back at Trump for saying he didn’t like the term “woke” because people have a hard time defining it. “Woke is an existential threat to our society,” DeSantis said. “To say it’s not a big deal, that just shows you don’t understand what a lot of these issues are right now.”
Trump, meanwhile, suggested that the near-total abortion ban DeSantis signed in Florida is a bit too extreme.
Some of this just makes DeSantis look ridiculous, obsessing over the term “woke” rather than the substance of anything anyone cares about. But the immigration stuff is telling in a deeper way because it involves just brushing aside how conflicted most Americans’ views on immigration really are. He’s the governor of Florida, so he must be aware that there are a lot of Republicans who really admire what the Cuban-American community has built in Greater Miami and who are proud that the United States is a beacon of freedom and opportunity to people all around the world. The United States isn’t Hungary, and there’s a reason that George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were pro-immigration conservatives.
Jennifer Rubin:
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Meanwhile, an utterly depressing and exasperating account of Trump supporters in Iowa:
BOONE, Iowa — Vickie Farmer, 66, knows her presidential candidate of choice comes off as “abrasive, offensive and sometimes looks orange,” but she’s all-in for Donald Trump for a third time — especially in the face of what she sees as a never-ending legal witch hunt.
Randy Mitchell, 70, is tired of all the controversy surrounding Trump — he thinks the former president’s legal troubles are a farce — but he concedes that he will vote for him again if he’s the 2024 GOP nominee…
Just a few booths down, Farmer heard that the local GOP was handing out kernels for the corn poll and she made her way to the booth to drop one in Trump’s jar.
“He’s the only choice, in my opinion,” she said.
Farmer has been a Trump supporter from the start, but in the years since Biden came into office, her support for the former president has only grown. She said she’s most worried about the economy, because she sees her adult children living paycheck to paycheck and at times struggling to juggle food and gas costs.
“I was very happy with the way things were going. I don’t think he is guilty of nearly all of the things they’re accusing him of,” she said, sitting next to a table she set up with her husband to sell scented wax melts and other home goods. “I think there’s a smear campaign to try to keep him from getting into office.”
Short version: a massive portion of the electorate is honestly, just completely delusional when it comes to Trump. I don’t know that there’s any solution to this.
About Steve Greene
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