Diehard Cleveland Browns fans are used to distressing post-game press conferences in which media members try to parse out exactly how the team managed to snatch defeat from victory’s jaws. Often there are two explanations: Either the coach called the wrong play for the situation, or he called the right one, but the quarterback managed to throw an interception anyway. The former is a mistake of strategy, the latter is one of execution.
There seems to be a prevailing narrative that Ron DeSantis’s campaign is failing because he’s employing the wrong strategy. A Wall Street Journal editorial claims that “the Governor can’t beat Mr. Trump by running as a more competent, sane version of Trump.” But what if that’s false? What if the play call is the only viable counter to the defensive formation but the QB screws up nonetheless?
The DeSantis “play call” is simple. As Rich Lowry noted yesterday, “the campaign is clearly geared at winning a critical mass of MAGA voters and then, by virtue of being the only alternative to Trump, winning non-MAGA voters, as well.” And while DeSantis has obviously failed to execute, there is a strong case that the strategy itself remains the only path towards a DeSantis nomination.
Take a look at the RealClearPolitics running average of the polls. Two things jump out. The first is that Trump’s and DeSantis’s numbers are strikingly inversely correlated over time. The green and purple lines are mirror images. The second is that the glob of rainbow at the bottom is frozen in place. Granted, this is a picture of the national landscape, and the situation can vary state by state — but only to an extent.
The narrative that DeSantis is hemorrhaging voters, then, is clearly correct. But these voters are largely migrating to Trump, not to Tim Scott or Nikki Haley or Mike Pence. And a recent poll from Morning Consult shows that Trump continues to pose the greatest threat of peeling off current DeSantis voters. According to the poll, Trump is the second choice of 44 percent of DeSantis voters.
There are many fair criticisms of DeSantis’s messaging, but the path forward remains clear: DeSantis needs to capture those voters who have oscillated between him and Trump. They provide the key to the nomination. Without them, consolidating the non-Trump vote means little (and to an extent, DeSantis has already managed to consolidate; RCP has his national polling average as greater than Ramaswamy, Pence, Haley, and Scott combined).
The issue is not that DeSantis is incorrect to focus on appealing to soft Trump voters. It’s that he’s just not doing a good job of it. Sometimes, the right play call fails because of poor execution. But that’s no reason to abandon the play for the rest of the season. The message the coach gives his QB is simple: “next time, just complete the pass.”