A good month for the consensus GOP candidate

Ron DeSantis, arguably the closest thing to a consensus GOP candidate for president, seems to have hit his stride recently. A remarkably effective governor, DeSantis had never run a national campaign, so it’s perhaps not overly surprising that there was a bit of a learning curve at the beginning — especially since DeSantis focuses more on actually governing effectively than on simply talking about governing. But the Floridian has recently had a strong month-plus of campaigning, and he might be quietly positioning himself to make this a genuine two-horse race.

You won’t hear this from mainstream reporters, who think that Donald Trump would be easier to beat and know that Nikki Haley would be more to their liking. Nor will you hear it from establishment Republicans, who see in Haley one of their own. And you won’t hear it from fervent Trump supporters, who know that DeSantis is the former president’s only real competition within his own party.

Indeed, DeSantis has been targeted by all three of these groups throughout the campaign, but he now appears — for the first time — to have broken into the open field.

Key endorsements and a lively debate

If this were a football game, the first block that helped spring DeSantis might have come on November 6. That day, Iowa’s popular governor, Kim Reynolds, who many thought would not endorse anyone in the Republican race, announced her support for DeSantis.

“Ron is the most effective leader I have seen in a long, long time,” Reynolds said. “He’ll be the best president we’ve seen in decades.” Former President Donald Trump, expressing his obvious frustration at failing to secure Reynolds’ endorsement for himself, responded, “It will be the end of her political career…. Two extremely disloyal people getting together… they can now remain loyal to each other because nobody else wants them!!!”

Two days later, on November 8, DeSantis did well in the third Republican presidential debate, a debate in which Haley also had a strong showing. Following that, on November 21, DeSantis received the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, a key Iowa evangelical leader who, in the past three competitive Republican races in Iowa, has supported the eventual winner, each of whom was an underdog at some stage in the race. Trump somewhat mysteriously responded, “Vander Plaats, the former High School Accountant from Iowa, will do anything to win, something which he hasn’t done in many years.”

Then, on November 30, DeSantis and California Governor Gavin Newsom engaged in a spirted debate that contrasted DeSantis’ Main Street-focused, “we’re open for business” approach to governance with Newsom’s fondness for authoritarian lockdowns and mandates. That debate helped highlight for voters that there are other options aside from a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, who, as of December 13, have matching 40% approval ratings and 56% disapproval ratings in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polling. No wonder the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins writes that “Mr. Biden’s re-election strategy … requires Mr. Trump to be the GOP nominee.”

Charges with merit

Two days later, on December 2, DeSantis completed his tour of all 99 Iowa counties. Then, on December 6 — exactly one month after he received the Reynolds endorsement — the Florida governor had what was widely perceived to be his best performance in a Republican debate thus far, as he landed blows against both Trump and Haley.

DeSantis — a former college baseball player who says that Trump has “lost the zip on his fastball” — reminded Republican voters that even when Trump wasn’t approaching 80 and was still bringing the heat, “He didn’t … fire Dr. Fauci. He didn’t fire Christopher Wray. He didn’t clean up the swamp. … He said he was going to build the wall and have Mexico pay for it. We don’t have the wall.”

DeSantis hit Haley, too, saying she’s someone who “caves any time the left comes after her, any time the media comes after her,” who’s “not going to fight for the people back home.”

At an Iowa town hall last week, DeSantis opened up a new line of attack, blaming Trump in part for the runaway inflation that is voters’ number-one concern, saying it isn’t just Biden who’s culpable: “Printing trillions and trillions of dollars was a huge mistake. That set the foundation for the inflation that we see.”

The charge has merit. During 2020, Trump’s last full year as president, the federal government obliterated the all-time deficit record of $1.4 trillion, setting a new record of $3.1 trillion. For every $10 that came in, $19 went out.

“He’s a different Donald Trump than in ’15 and ’16,” DeSantis added. “Back then he was colorful, but it was really America first [and] about the policies. Now, a lot of it’s about him.”

In short, it’s been a good month-plus for Trump’s principal challenger.

Big swings still possible

The polling hasn’t yet registered this — but polling can be a lagging indicator, and it has previously been off by wide margins at this stage of the contest (even when there wasn’t a former president in the race with sky-high name recognition).

For example, on December 13, 2011, Newt Gingrich was beating Mitt Romney by 13 points in the RCP average of recent polling. Romney, of course, ultimately won. On that same day in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was beating John McCain by 10 points. Just 50 days later, Giuliani was out of the race, which McCain eventually won.

Past Iowa contests have seen similar dramatic movement. On December 13, 2011, Rick Santorum — another strong pro-life candidate endorsed by Vander Plaats — was trailing Gingrich by 23 points and had barely a fifth as much support as the former House speaker in RCP’s average of Iowa polling (29% to 6%). Santorum eventually won Iowa and beat Gingrich by 11 points in the process — a swing of 34 percentage points in just three weeks.

It seems clear that Republican voters will eventually choose either Trump or DeSantis — for while the GOP establishment doesn’t want to face it, voters are clearly not in an establishment mood. Haley — who in the last debate revealed just how out of touch she is by calling the libertarian organization Americans for Prosperity “the most conservative grassroots group in the country” — is essentially an establishment candidate, which means that she has no realistic hope of prevailing in this cycle.

Polling bears this out. Shortly after the first GOP debate, the American Main Street Initiative — which I founded and run — commissioned Echelon Insights to ask this poll question: “Which person are you hoping will not win your party’s nomination for president?” The poll also asked the conventional question about which candidate each respondent supports.

Among those with more than 1% support, only three Republican candidates had a higher percentage of GOP-leaning respondents rooting for them than were rooting against them: Trump, DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy. Moreover, those three each enjoyed at least twice as much support as opposition (55% supported and 27% opposed Trump; 16% supported and 8% opposed DeSantis; and 13% supported and 4% opposed Ramaswamy).

Meanwhile, the anti-Trump or establishment wings of the party got clobbered. Former Vice President Mike Pence (who has since left the race) had just 6% of respondents supporting him and 20% opposing him, while Chris Christie had just 4% supporting him and a whopping 35% opposing him.

Haley represented the middle ground, with 4% support and 4% opposition.

DeSantis is well positioned

Haley’s support has risen since then, but so has the level of opposition to her. In the Des Moines Register’s polling, for example, Haley’s favorability rating is now up six percentage points since August, while her unfavorability rating is up five points.

Here’s further evidence that Haley’s realistic best-case scenario is a second-place finish: The Des Moines Register’s October polling found that DeSantis supporters’ second choice is Trump, not Haley. But neither Trump’s nor Haley’s supporters like each other’s candidate second-best. They both prefer DeSantis, by wide margins.

Under the old convention system, which was designed to reflect consensus by requiring that a candidate get majority support — and not just after everyone else had dropped out, like now — DeSantis likely would have prevailed. (Jay Cost and I have proposed a new system designed to promote such consensus and empower the GOP’s grassroots.)

Today’s system doesn’t so easily produce a consensus candidate. Still, the popular Florida governor has been on a roll of late and may be poised for a rise in the polls — or for a huge upset win in Iowa. Such a win could potentially spark Republicans to coalesce around a candidate whom almost the whole party could get behind, thereby better positioning the GOP to beat the Democratic nominee.

Only time will tell, obviously, but Ron DeSantis has quietly been positioning himself to make a real move in a race that could be more up for grabs than most people think.