Other than a certain former president, no other name dominates the headlines, cocktail chatter, and discourse about the 2024 Republican presidential primary as much as Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor was the original number two draft pick in our 2024 GOP Primary Draft way back in August of 2021, has been a regular instigator of the political news cycle during the Biden era, and is clearly ramping up for a presidential run.

At this point, it seems hard to make the case that DeSantis is anything other than the favorite or second favorite for the Republican nomination. Florida Republicans’ shocking overperformance in the 2022 midterms, during an election that demonstrated a backlash against the party in most of the rest of the country, is an indication of the case he’ll make to Republican voters if and when he runs for president. “I can win,” he’ll argue – and, compared to many Republicans in 2022 and 2023 who have lost otherwise winnable elections to unexciting Democrats, he has an actual election to back it up.

But we at The Postrider instinctively reject the obvious headline. We opt for the boring take that will happen most of the time rather than the story that probably won’t, even if that’s a less interesting one. In that vein, we believe there is a strong case against DeSantis’ candidacy. This is the case against Ron DeSantis.

The Elephant in the Room

Whether indicted by prosecutors, ignored by the mainstream media, or in exile in Florida, Donald Trump – and the Republican base’s revanchist desire for a second Trump term – is a serious obstacle to a DeSantis candidacy. The former president, who has already announced his presidential candidacy, sucks up a lot of air. Maybe the media learned their lesson and will cover him differently this cycle, but it probably doesn’t matter; Trump polls as a clear favorite among Republicans.

Sure, DeSantis received a surge of support in the wake of the 2022 midterms – fair, given his astonishing overperformance, and Trump’s chosen candidates’ astounding underperformance in November – but the polls aren’t where DeSantis needs them to be. The errant poll giving DeSantis an edge (and there have been a couple) were short-lived phenomena in the Ides of March that now appear all-but-extinct. Instead, DeSantis has settled at around a 30% polling average in Republican primary polls, and Trump continues to hover in the 45-50% range.

This 20-point gap is a problem in any primary, but it’s especially a problem in the Republican primary, where winner-take-all races allow the plurality candidate to rack up delegates and crowd out any of the other candidates’ chances to get the nomination. In 2016, Trump received only 45% of the votes in the Republican primary – more than any other candidate, to be sure, but not a majority. He nonetheless had nearly 60% of all delegates, because his plurality victories in most states allowed him to take all of the delegates from the splintered Republican field. 

Even if Republicans allocated their delegates proportionately like Democrats, DeSantis has a math problem. If he can only pull in 35% of the vote, but Trump takes 40-50%, and an array of third tier candidates split the remaining vote, Trump will slowly expand his lead over time. It’d be a slower process, to be sure, but it wouldn’t cause a different outcome at the end of the day. Until a plurality of the Republican Party can coalesce away from Trump and actively settle on an alternative, DeSantis will lose. DeSantis needs to raise his own numbers at the expense of Trump, because if it’s a race between the two of them, DeSantis loses. And if it’s a race including a bunch of minor candidates splitting the vote, DeSantis loses. This lose/lose scenario makes Trump the elephantine obstacle to a DeSantis nomination, let alone presidency.

He’s Bad on the Stump

An increasingly common concern with DeSantis is that he’s largely hypothetical. He’s not officially running yet, so everyone is substituting the actual DeSantis candidacy with a theoretical one. This theoretical candidacy seems to be a strong one. How could this man who swept to an amazing reelection in the perennial swing state of Florida, who secured amazing conservative wins in the state, and whose approval ratings in Florida are surely the envy of Joe Biden, not be an incredible juggernaut on the campaign trail? Just ask the number of presidential candidates who found themselves in the same position… 

The last decade is covered in the remains of candidates who were strong on paper and completely collapsed when they entered the real world of a presidential campaign. New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Texas’ Rick Perry, and Florida’s Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio all seemed like obvious Republican nominees-in-waiting at one point or another. Given DeSantis has a pretty clear and powerful foil in Donald Trump, why should his hypothetical campaign be any different than the lived, hard realities of his failed Republican predecessors? It shouldn’t, and there are a number of signs it won’t be.

Right now, DeSantis is insulated and empowered. As the governor of Florida, he is blessed with Republican supermajorities in the statehouse who protect him from criticism, enable his legislative agenda, and provide minute time to any cause that would deflate his stature. Because Democrats are cut out and the press has little access, DeSantis’ inflated sense of power and prowess appears dominant as he crusades with little legislative resistance on what look like major undertakings: the “Don’t Say Gay” law, his COVID-19 response (or lack thereof), banning diversity programs and education in colleges, and going to war with Disney (once a Florida fiefdom of its own). Any one of these might raise an eyebrow, but DeSantis is on a tear that seems impressive to the national audience, who know little other than the gridlock which perplexes the national government and gradualist approaches of many of their governors. Lost in this narrative is that DeSantis is enabled and protected by the Republican dominance in the legislature, largely avoids the press, and meets few impediments to anything he wants to do at home. This is a major reason to be skeptical of his resume: it’s a lot of safe hype, with little grit. 

Now call DeSantis to mind – when was the last time you heard him speak? If you do remember (and I’d bet a lot of people don’t), do you remember how he stood, what he sounded like, and how he talked (or laughed)? He’s blocky, a bit monotone, and smarmy. If his oration is ever powerful, it’s at the expense of sounding incredibly scripted. DeSantis sounds like a manufactured Republican candidate, overly conscious of talking points and hot rhetoric, while lacking the emotional impulse that powered successful campaigners like Trump. That’d be one thing in 2012, when the Republican machine spat out the robotic Mitt Romney, but in an arena dominated by the charismatic and dominating Trump, DeSantis could come across like Marco Rubio in 2016, mechanical and divorced from what’s actually happening live.

The press, and the politicos, are starting to smell it too. “Lacks the killer spirit,” “the Republican Michael Dukakis,” and “Flaming Out Already?” run just three headlines on DeSantis from the last few weeks. If his recent stagnation in polling is any indicator, Republican voters may not be sure either. His limited outings into a campaign-like environment outside of the Sunshine State in the form of fundraising events or his underwhelming book tour have been unencouraging, spawning stories about the candidate-in-waiting’s tendency to isolate himself away from actual voters. The reality of DeSantis on the stump is all veneer, astroturfed in and isolated to his Florida empire. Outside of the shielded political and media ecosystem of Florida, it may be that the emperor has no clothes. 

He’s Not Demonstrated National Electability Among Primary Voters

DeSantis’ path to become governor of the third largest state in the country is impressive, but there’s a miscalculation in assuming this fine-tuned path paved by opportunity, timing, dedication, and luck provides a clean door to the presidency. A frequent misconception of unlikely governors is that their happenstance success in their purple, or outright politically antagonistic, state translates to both the national primary electorate and the national general electorate. Presidential primary history is replete with examples of candidates who seemed good on paper at the national level because they were able to attract a bipartisan appeal in a state that seemed to lean the other way and then completely fell apart in a primary (looking at you, Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, Montana’s Steve Bullock, New Jersey’s Chris Christie)  – or realized this problem ahead of time and opted to avoid the embarrassment (Maryland’s Larry Hogan). When they faced a national primary, the electorate they were used to being rewarded by became a fraction of a fraction of the country’s engaged voters. The white, moderate electorates in Colorado and Montana were very different from the diverse and more liberal national Democratic electorate that Hickenlooper and Bullock had to face. And the backing of moderate Democrats and Rockefeller-type Republicans in New Jersey and Maryland that pushed Christie and Hogan to power are anathema to the ravenous conservatism of the Republican primary voters in the Midwest and South.

DeSantis will have to overcome this mismatch at the primary level first and foremost, a daunting task even given the Republican Party’s more homogenous base, and – if he’s lucky – the far more moderate electorate in the general election. In the Republican primary, DeSantis will have to face not only an energized right-wing that is immensely loyal to Trump (see “The Elephant in the Room” point above…) but also voters across the nation that look and sound different from voters in Florida. Be they younger (Florida has the second-highest share of voters over the age of 65), less Cuban (a majority of Cuban Americans live in Florida), or motivated by different economic factors (Florida has no income tax and large agricultural and tourist industries), voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, or in the Northeast and Midwest may not look like the current DeSantis coalition. That he’d be able to add a lot of new, different supporters without losing existing ones is not a given.

He’s Not Demonstrated National Electability, Period

But assume that DeSantis is able to get past that, that he leverages his culture war credentials to defeat Trump and the other Republicans in the primary, and looks towards the general election against – almost certainly – Joe Biden.

Now we’ll turn to the general election in earnest. Put aside the natural advantages that an incumbent president has in a reelection campaign and the reasons Joe Biden is strongly positioned to win reelection. If there was one picture that I think best sums up the potential Biden vs. DeSantis presidential race, it is this one of the president’s visit to Florida in the wake of Hurricane Ian. As the awkward Governor DeSantis’ sulks away at the forefront of the image, Biden yucks it up with two people who – if you had to assume, knowing what we do about Florida and men who wear camo hats and shirts with the word “cracker” on them – don’t exactly seem like Biden voters! 

DeSantis has built a political resume out of culture war issues, antagonism, and a fair bit of publicity which may or may not be inflating his value as a candidate (see the “He’s Bad on the Stump” point above…); this right-wing pandering leaves him glaringly vulnerable when he faces a national electorate – and in a couple swing states particularly. Ignoring the national backlash by key suburban swing voters and young voters with whom he needs to make up ground, DeSantis plunged ahead with a six-week abortion ban in Florida. This is understandable from a Republican primary standpoint, but less so when it comes to swing states where pro-choice credentials matter like New Hampshire (66% of adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases) and Nevada (62%). Even Alaska, a canary in the coal mine for Republicans last year, and perhaps a budding swing state, claims 63% of adults who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Then there are the niche issues with which DeSantis may already have shot himself in the leg. While in Congress, DeSantis voted in favor of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository – a campaign-shattering issue in Nevada. Trump flip-flopped on the issue but ultimately came out against it – note that Trump also lost Nevada twice. DeSantis’ rampant loosening of gun laws may be popular in Florida and among Republican voters, but sizable majorities nationally are against no-license concealed carry. 

During the 2022 midterms, DeSantis advocated for the Floridization of other states, “Everything we’ve done in Florida, you will be able to do in Wisconsin and then some,” he told a crowd while campaigning for the (losing) Republican gubernatorial candidate there in 2022. A nuanced national candidate might avoid a crude application of fact patterns across high-profile swing states, cognizant of the local factors and entrenched home state loyalty these voters have. Wisconsinites don’t want to be told Florida is superior, they want to be told that they are special. The presidential campaigns of popular governors (Perry, Hickenlooper, Walker, Christie, Washington’s Jay Inslee) fell short to varying degrees in part because of this “I’m going to take what worked in [my state] and apply it to YOU!” approach. Governors who fail to avoid this pitfall can succeed in primaries and general elections (Ohio’s John Kasich did relatively well, all things considered, in 2016; Massachusetts’ Mitt Romney became his party’s nominee; Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both became president) but DeSantis has built his entire political profile around Florida, the “citadel of freedom.” 

Now let’s finally bring this back to the elephant in the room: reaching this point, where Republican presidential nominee Ron DeSantis faces President Joe Biden in 2024, assumes a lot of things we’ve pointed out ultimately go DeSantis’ way by mid-2024 – including that he defeats Donald Trump in the Republican primary. One thing beyond his control is how Trump reacts to that. Maybe there’s a world where Trump, fresh off a criminal trial and defeat in the Republican primary, recedes into the green golf pastures of Mar-a-Lago and retires in peace, asking his base to support DeSantis in droves as he asked them to support numerous failing candidates in general elections in 2022. Or, you know… Trump may not do that; even if he doesn’t run as a third party MAGA candidate who splits the Republican vote in half, delivering Joe Biden a landslide unseen in this century, Trump may resort to bitter snipes at the Republican nominee who bested him and spend his waking moments antagonizing DeSantis via whatever medium grants Trump the most attention. And that is where this story ends – as it began – even if DeSantis can overcome every overwhelming obstacle on his way to the Republican nomination, he’s stuck dealing with the Trump problem.