The Real Reason Trump Is Beating DeSantis

It's simple and depressing. But there's a way to fight back.

Paul notes that the DeSantis campaign has not only failed to overtake Trump, but seems to be falling farther behind.

Why? DeSantis is perhaps the most successful governor in the country, and recently won a landslide re-election in a very large and diverse state (and a state that, pre-DeSantis, was politically mostly evenly divided). Meanwhile, Trump is piling up felony charges, some merely products of political grandstanding (the Alvin Bragg show, in particular), but some more serious than that (Jack Smith’s federal indictment for misappropriating classified documents and obstruction of justice). More legal trouble is likely on the way, both from the Atlanta prosecutor and, more worrisome for Trump, further charges from Smith relating to Trump’s egging on the January 6 riot. And Trump continues acidly to trash good men and strong conservatives he appointed, in particular Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr.

So why does he continue to enjoy, not merely a big, but a commanding lead over DeSantis, and one that seems to be growing?

I’ve quoted Abe Greenwald from Commentary before, and I’ll do so again now, because I think he nails it as succinctly as I’ve seen. His piece is titled, ominously as I see it, “The GOP Race Won’t Be Decided by Arguments.” Ladies and gentlemen, here’s the bad news:

Arguments, vision—are these even capable of altering the shape of the race? Is Donald Trump way out ahead among Republican voters because of the strength of his arguments and the clarity of his vision for the United States?

Hardly. While Trump’s argument against a crooked establishment and his vision of populist retribution are welcome among a broad swath of Republican voters, they’re not his alone. What Trump preaches has become boilerplate on the right. It’s easier to count the elected Republicans who dissent from new-right populism than the ones who embrace it. And DeSantis not only embraces it; he speaks it more coherently than Trump and makes headline news by enacting bold new-right policies. If argument and vision counted as much as we’d like to think, DeSantis would be, at least, in striking range.

We’re eight years into the Trump phenomenon and long overdue in facing this simple, absurd, fact. What people love about Trump is Trump: The sub-Catskill zingers, the bronze-plated pomposity, the boundless egomania that winks at self-mockery, the tacky marketeering, the tabloid outrage, the fearless lying, the sincere disdain for standard political cant, the simpleness of his spite, even his idiosyncratic gestures and aborted sentences. They love the reality-show, pro-wrestling conflation of real life and theatrical battle.

When Trump first ran in 2016, I had a conversation with a brilliant friend of mine — a Harvard-trained physician in a very demanding specialty. It seemed to me that Trump was just full of bluster, the reality-show salesman, and not really a serious candidate. My doctor friend right off told me what I’d been missing: “Trump wants to kick over the table, and talks to people so they understand it.”

I had been in the government (the Justice Department) for a long time, and I didn’t think wanting to kick over the table was much of a plan. And it might not have been a plan, exactly, but it was indeed enough to get him elected. Trump lost the popular vote handily (by close to three million votes), but won the electoral college because of close victories in, e.g., Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And his presidency was mostly successful. Until COVID hit, the economy was going strong, and America was at peace even while taking far stronger stances against Iran and in favor of Israel than had been the case under Obama/Biden.

Biden, by contrast, has had an unsuccessful presidency, riddled by uncontrolled immigration, inflation, supply-chain problems, surging interest rates and stagnation and, abroad, by unanswered aggressive behavior by both Iran and China (not to mentioned the largest war in Europe since WWII). He’s way underwater in his approval rating (according to Gallup, 54% disapproval to 43% approval), and his chosen Vice President is even more unpopular, and visibly incompetent, than he is.

Yet, as Paul notes, Biden is running even with Trump in almost all polls. What this means is that one of DeSantis’s strongest arguments for nominating him instead of Trump — electability — just isn’t there. And DeSantis simply doesn’t command the national stage the way Trump does, because (1) Trump is, for good or ill, more of a larger-than-life figure than DeSantis; and (2) even more than that, because that’s the way the MSM wants it, understanding that the Republicans’ nominating Trump is very likely the best, and possibly the only, way to get a dottering, tottering, sputtering Biden re-elected. Not for nothing does CNN cover Trump and his legal troubles virtually every night, whether there’s any news about them or not, while the most newsworthy thing about Biden seems to be his eating ice cream.

If it’s true that the GOP nomination will be decided more by mood than by argument, what is DeSantis to do? I can’t say I have any great ideas; I’m an appellate lawyer and a law professor, not a political consultant. But it seems to me that the answer is to make arguments that capture mood. By that I mean make arguments that hit home in voters’ daily lives, arguments that speak to their fears and hopes. Talking about ballooning national debt, critical though I think it is, isn’t going to get it done. What will get it done is, for example, focusing on crime and the sprawling pollution of daily life that exploding crime creates (an issue on which DeSantis is especially strong); on how white and Asian-American citizens (together still approximately two-thirds of the electorate), and in particular their children hoping to earn their way into top colleges, have been picked out by the Democrats to send to the back of the bus for no reason better or more worthy than Amerika Stinks guilt-tripping; and how Woke propaganda is not some far-away threat but an everyday reality in your kids’ school, from pornography in the fourth grade library, to teenage boys in the girls shower, to the ruination of women’s sports, to the debasement of educational standards supposedly to be “inclusive” but actually to insure that the lowest common denominator is the most challenging thing your kid is ever asked to master. (And then we wonder why other nations are pushing past us in educational attainment).

Of course, DeSantis or any other Republican who campaigns on these issues will take lots of flak for “exploiting the culture war.” Fine. And it’s fine not just because, as any sensate person knows, it’s the Left that created the culture war — indeed jammed it down our throats — but now wants to pretend to be aghast that anyone dissents. It’s fine because, as is often and correctly said, when you’re taking flak, you’re over the target.