Of course, Ron DeSantis can come back and win. Anybody in the race can win – we saw Trump come back in 2016 when most everyone wrote him off in the general. Now it’s the Florida governor’s turn to be written off, but he’s not exactly in the same place that Trump was. DeSantis is a strong second right now. For him, it’s not a matter of a miracle happening, threading a bunch of needles to win the general when rational betters would bet against you like in 2016. No, Ron DeSantis has a plan, and there’s a method to his muddling through.
As I said, before, what he has to do is channel Fabius and stay alive and win Iowa and New Hampshire.
But can he? His numbers have gone down, although if you listen to guys like @ChubbyNTrumpyMAGA69 on Twitter, you’re going to hear that he’s in single-digits and Vivek is doing much, much better and he’s doomed and he’s done and it’s over and he might as well pack it in. It’s a narrative designed to drive him out of the race and make people think Trump is a done deal. It’s good politics to attempt to set the narrative. That’s what you should do for your candidate – attempt to set the narrative. But when you’re setting the narrative, it helps if you’re not spewing total nonsense because people rarely accept the narrative when they know they’re being lied to. And it’s a lie to say Ron DeSantis is done. Hell, the guy who was president and who did a lot of good things can only get about half of Republicans to support him. That’s not great. That’s awful. And Trump has hit his ceiling. No wonder he’s worried.
In contrast, Ron DeSantis hasn’t even started yet. He’s out there in the news. He’s raising money, and not spending it on legal fees. He’s revamped his campaign, tightened it, focused it. This is not bad. This is good. And it is five months before the first vote…
Remember, this is a primary race, not a Twitter popularity race. The simple fact is that the polls in July 2023 do not reflect the real situation on the ground in 2023, much less 2024 when the actual voting happens. You know who are active right now? The activists. And those aren’t polls of activists. Those are polls of regular people living regular lives who think “Yeah, I like Trump and Trump’s getting a raw deal from the scumbag prosecutors, and he’s the only guy I really know about, so I’m going to put his name down.” They haven’t had to think hard about it yet. They haven’t had to weigh the facts. They haven’t really looked at Ron DeSantis’s record – if they’re looking at Twitter, they’re going to think that he parties with Paul Ryan over at George Soros’s crash pad. That kind of dumb lie is easy to dispel, and when people see that they’ve been lied to, they’re going to look deeper to find the truth.
That’s what Ron DeSantis is counting on. His campaign is not cynical. He believes that when people take a look at him and calculate his chances against Donald Trump‘s in the 2024 general, and when they see his record in Florida, the lost GOP voters – including ones driven off by Trump’s childish name-calling and inane antics – will come home to him. And he figures that most alleged Only Trumpers will come around for him in the general rather than go for another four years of Crusty McCorrupto.
They want a guy who has a proven record of conservative change and who will not get sucked into endless counter-productive distractions about Rosie McDonnell. DeSantis has been raining hellfire on the libs for five years, and this is a campaign of hope.
There’s a lot of huffing and puffing about DeSantis waiting in the wings to take advantage of Trump’s myriad legal troubles. Well, we better have someone ready to step in if things go south for Trump. These disgusting and disgraceful frame jobs are being pursued by the kind of prosecutors that Ron DeSantis regularly fires, and fair or unfair, they are real. Donald Trump has a significant chance of being unjustly convicted, and even if he’s not convicted, these disgusting prosecutions will make it exponentially harder for him to win the general election even though he’s already got a massively uphill fight. We need an alternative – not having one is exactly what the Democrats want and way too many people seem to think there is some magical referee who will wave the Wand o’ Truth and make this garbage lawfare disappear. Grow up.
Ron DeSantis didn’t put Trump in this position. Trump didn’t put himself in his position, though I wish he would stop doing things that help his enemies. The reality is that Donald Trump may get booted out of this race involuntarily, and we better have somebody squared away who knows how to fight and win. I kind of like having the guy who took a purple state and turned it bright red, then won reelection by 20 points, as the standard bearer.
So, if you want to cry that Ron DeSantis is taking advantage of Trump’s misfortunes, get real. you should damn well hope every candidate is doing that. We better have somebody ready to win if Trump gets taken out of the picture after he wins the nomination. That, of course, assumes that Trump is going to win the primary, and he thinks it is owed to him and should be handed to him.
No.
No coronations.
No easy days.
Trump’s strategy is pretty clear – create a narrative that says Ron DeSantis has already lost and that he should get out of the race to allow Trump to sashay into the nomination. But if Trump wants it, he’s got to win it. And he very well might. A lot of people are betting on him. I’m not. I think when Republican voters look at Donald Trump, they’re going to say that he was a pretty good president and we liked what he did, but now he’s nearly 80, and he’s got all this baggage. About 53% of voters will never vote for him in the general election, and we can’t afford to lose because of his feelz.
I’m going to vote for the winner of the Republican primary, and I’m going to work as hard as I can for whoever it is, even if it’s Asa Hutchinson. Now, we know it’s not going to be Asa Hutchinson. It’s going to be Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. Some people ask if I’ll be upset if Trump wins the 2024 election, but I guess they’re not paying attention. All I care about is winning. Politicians and their feelings mean nothing to me. They are fungible. If Politician A isn’t cutting it, you go to Politician B. Sad? Here’s some Kleenex – now get out of here because you’re embarrassing yourself.
All I want to do is win. I want to save this country. I don’t care about egos or moral victories or any of the other nonsense I see kicking around the interwebs. If our guy isn’t raising his right hand on January 20, 2025, we have lost, and our country can’t afford that.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
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