Posted on 08/11/2023 5:24:47 PM PDT by Ennis85
John Davidson asks at the Federalist, “Does DeSantis Know What Time It Is? Didn’t Sound Like It In That NBC Interview.” Responding to DeSantis’s assertion that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and was in large part responsible for allowing Covid-driven rules changes that helped Democrats collect a lot of mail-in votes, this is Davidson’s thesis:
"Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have lost his way, unable to articulate a clear position on the most important issue of the primaries, which is what happened in 2020. . . . No issue is more important for DeSantis (and the entire GOP field) than the 2020 election, and if he wants to be the nominee he’d better come up with a better answer than, “Yeah 2020 had some problems but they were all Trump’s fault.” As I argued in these pages recently, DeSantis has zero chance of winning the primary unless he acknowledges unequivocally that 2020 was rigged and vows to go to war against the system that rigged it. . . . No candidate claiming to represent Republican voters in 2024 can do less than acknowledge, without the ritual throat-clearing demanded by the regime press, that a coordinated effort to oust Trump — or, failing that, gut his presidency — was underway in 2016 well before Trump even took office."
Now, it is possible that Davidson is right that no Republican can win the nomination without focusing obsessively on relitigating the 2020 election. But what is a nomination for? My own view — and maybe I’m in the minority here — is that the point of getting nominated is to win the general election. But we have copious evidence from the 2022 cycle that candidates who look backward and run on stolen-election theories almost uniformly lost in 2022, even in otherwise winnable elections, and even when the candidates themselves had some talent.
More broadly, in the history of American presidential elections (with the arguable exception of 1828), parties and candidates never win by challenging how an incumbent won his office or what he did before then — whether that “before” is Barack Obama’s birthplace or George W. Bush’s National Guard service. You beat an incumbent by focusing on what he has done in office. Davidson does not even bother making an argument to the contrary, or referring at all to the general election or to how these arguments played in 2022.
If DeSantis runs a campaign built around the 2020 election, it won’t matter if he wins the nomination or not — Joe Biden will be reelected. DeSantis has his own message about why he thinks the 2020 election was poorly managed in other states by contrast to how Florida runs elections, but by giving answers intended to disarm the issue and pivot to other topics, he’s showing that he does know what time it is — specifically, what year it is. It’s not 2020 anymore, and you can’t win elections by pretending that it is.
Masters, Laxalt, etc.
Only Vance was a winner.
AND if he couldn’t prevent it as the incumbent President, how is he going to prevent it as the challenger?
Remember, Trump signed the CARES Act, whcih enabled a lot of the fraud, into law.
Becuase we had a strong candidate in New York who almost pulled out a gubernatorial win. He was able to drag Houyse members and some legislators in behind him.
He ran on the Democrats’ failures, not on 2020 fraud.
Maybe if Nixon had, the cheating would have been nipped in the bud.
Fake news and fraud denial. Trump got more votes in 2020 than in 2016, and the election in 2020 was conducted in a deliberately fraudulent manner. Statistically impossible for 93 percent of the electorate to show up out of nowhere too, particularly when the prior 100-year average was 45 percent.
Shilling for the Uniparty isn’t worth it.
CARES Act is a Uniparty talking point (states misused the funds), and an admission that Trump won on its part.
He won't do it himself, hopefully the mods will take care of the problem.
Ron believes the election wasn’t stolen in 2020, doesn’t seem
to care that it may happen again in 2024, and certainly would
not do much to challenge it if it did happen.
**********
Whole lot of stealing going on. Who are doing the stealing and
who is getting the money to do the stealing? High paying jobs?
I’d be impressed if he were in kindergarten.
Just the opposite.
You and Stacey could be twins.
There isn't an issue more important than free and fair elections. But DeSantis his supporters and the Republican establishment is perfectly fine with the fraud that occurred in 2020. The Republican establishment was complicit in it.
Trump gained 12 million voters in 2020. He didn't lose voters.
The Daley machine pretty much openly stole Cook County, and thus Illinois, for JFK. We didn’t get results until the next morning.
You’re teh one claiming that the election was illegitimately decided. You sound like Stacey Abrams. You know, hte never-inaugurated Governor of Georgia.
Sorry Stacy, I think you’re projecting.
Do you deny massive fraud in the 2020 election??
Show me evidence.
When do they plan to release the Kraken?
I mean: why is the National Review writing a story that criticizes Ron DeSantis. That didn't make sense.
But a few paragraphs in, I understood the argument. Essentially the author is lightly slapping DeSantis on the wrist for bringing up the issue of 2020 Election Fraud -- and he argues DeSantis can win if he merely resets the time clock to today: 2023... and leaves the past to history. So the story is a net positive message for DeSantis. And that's why DeSantis' FR supporters are cheerleading this thread.
Trouble is: the author gets his premise wrong. From the beginning of his campaign, DeSantis has been AVOIDING the topic of 2020 election fraud. Even his pre-campaign book fails to address the 2020 election fraud issue adequately.
Only recently, when the curiosity of voters and the media FORCED DeSantis to clarify his stance on 2020 election fraud did we learn DeSantis believes election fraud in 2020 is NOT a serious issue -- which, of course, is the opposite of what the vast majority of MAGA voters believe.
Bottom line: DeSantis can't get elected by whistling past the 2020 election fraud graveyard. This is a crucial issue for MAGA voters. And if you can't attract MAGA voters, you can't win the Republican primary.
They just don’t get it. None of them do. Not National Review, RINOs in Congress and the many more in the state Congresses and Governors mansions. They all think that they have the answers. What they don’t realize is that no one believes their BS anymore.
Yes, someone like Kemp is re-elected. “Wins” the primary in a landslide. Ask many folks why. Because of how he handled covid. That’s all they can tell you. How is he looked at now? Now that some of his dirty deals are common knowledge? Not good.
The people that these clowns overlook and take for granted see in Pres Trump, someone that actually looked out for them. Someone that did something about making gas cheaper, securing the border, more job opportunities with better pay. Someone that didn’t speak like a crooked politician and mumble the same ol’...I want to work across the aisle and help America. People on the Right know that the Left would burn it all down for a win.
And there isn’t one other person running for the Republican nomination that can say that.
DeSantis...on another thread, someone talked about the Conservative battles that he’s won.
Can any of supporters give me an example or two of the battles that he’s won?
No.
I am asking you if you deny the massive evidence of fraud already shown on FR?
Do you actually believe there was not enough fraud to change the election?
Simple as that.
Such as?
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