Ten days before the official kickoff of the 2024 presidential race, there plainly is a rush in the media to crank up the DeSantis-buried-here backhoes. Whether all this gleeful digging is premature is soon to be seen.
There’s a reason Hawkeye diehards brave the Iowa tundra to gather in political scrums once every four years, and oftentimes that reason is to deliver a surprise. Iowans breathed life into John Kerry’s campaign (evoking Howard Dean’s iconic yowl), shocked supporters of Hillary Clinton, and rendered Rick Santorum briefly viable.
So, whether Ron DeSantis heads a dead campaign walking or is about to spring a January surprise remains in the hands, and hearts, of the 20% or so of Iowa Republicans who commit to help select the GOP presidential nominee. Until those results are in, we truly don’t know nuthin’.
After all, sports fans, that’s why they play the games. Ask the Washington Huskies, who will attempt to stake their unlikely claim to a national championship Monday night, roughly 24 hours before Iowa Republicans take center stage. The Huskies are college football’s Night of the Living Dead zombies. Rarely favored and unbeloved by pundits, Washington just keeps on winning. One more and they’ll be the most unexpected collegiate titlists since North Carolina State launched Jim Valvano’s hug-seeking dash.
Pre-Iowa, however, Team Media — which, for a wide assortment of reasons, never has cottoned to the Florida governor — is ready with its obituaries. The Miami Herald provides this Friday under the headline, How Iowa could spell the end for Ron DeSantis.
In less than two weeks, the Iowa caucuses will serve as the kick-off to 2024 presidential voting.
Barring a seismic polling error, the result could also essentially end Ron DeSantis’ White House run before it can gain steam.
Nowhere has DeSantis invested more time and resources over the last year. He’s campaigned in all 99 counties, secured the backing of Iowa’s governor and its most visible evangelical leader, and touts 30,000 commitments to caucus on his behalf.
So if Florida’s governor can’t come close to Donald Trump and struggles to hold off Nikki Haley in the early primary state that knows him best, he’s unlikely to strike gold anywhere else, say veteran campaign operatives, political observers and former candidates.
More shoveling from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is likely to lose Iowa. Can he still keep his campaign alive?
As he tries to project an air of confidence heading into the Iowa Caucus, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken to criticizing polls showing him badly losing to former President Donald Trump.
“The polling has never predicted how the results come out because it’s a caucus, and it’s just a different beast,” DeSantis said during a FOX News interview Tuesday.
DeSantis was even more blunt at an event in Iowa Wednesday, calling the Iowa polls “garbage.” …
With DeSantis trailing Trump by more than 30 percentage points in Kimball’s latest survey and other polls, many political analysts believe the Florida governor will lose Iowa when Republicans caucus on Jan. 15.
The biggest question facing DeSantis in the minds of some analysts is whether he can still finish strong enough in Iowa to keep his campaign alive.
Not all the funereal action is in Iowa, either.
A straw poll conducted by Miami-Dade Republicans at their January meeting produced an overwhelming victory for former President Donald Trump at DeSantis’ expense. Politico reports of the 65 party members who attended Wednesday night, 53 picked Trump; five chose DeSantis.
Never mind that in 2022 DeSantis became the first GOP gubernatorial candidate in a generation to flip Miami-Dade County from blue to red — a fact noted, without irony, on the home page of the group’s website.
Also notable: The Miami-Dade GOP Executive Committee consists of 160 members and no straw vote was scheduled for the January gathering. Instead, it was an impromptu vote called for by former U.S. Rep. David Rivera, who had close ties to the Trump White House and, not insignificantly, is under multiple federal indictments (tax evasion linked to acting for Venezuela as an unregistered lobbyist).
It is not beyond imagining the crafty Rivera read the immediate post-holiday room and found it leaning in his preferred direction before moving to conduct the straw poll.
If opportunism it was, that still cannot excuse the unfathomably goofy statements included by Politico, including this:
“I do think [DeSantis] has lost support,” said one member who attended the meeting, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to inflame DeSantis given that he’ll still have three years left as governor if he drops out of the presidential race. “He and many of them have tried to move to the right of Trump. That’s not possible. Trump reflects the right. He is the standard.”
If that’s accurate, and the record-spending, debt-ballooning, wall-shirking, left-coddling, promise-shattering, BLM-embracing, Jan. 6 defendants-abandoning, trans-endorsing former president is “the standard,” conservatism no longer exists. In its place: vanity, vengeance, hubris, deceit, grievance, and grifting. Reagan weeps.
Meanwhile, Tuesday waits. Will we learn then DeSantis is the Washington Huskies of the 2024 campaign, the disrespected, dismissed, and underrated contestant who does nothing but over-perform?
If the caucuses reward DeSantis’ months-long devotion to and organization in Iowa with an outright upset, or something approaching one, what then?
Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Or, maybe, something in between, a crack that reveals Trump’s apparent support, framed in inevitability, to be as thin as November ice on a New Hampshire pond.
