Posted on 08/01/2023 9:18:00 PM PDT by definitelynotaliberal
In a decade and a half of punditry, I’ve had to eat my share of crow for incorrectly predicting voter behavior. I was notably wrong about Brexit and wrong about the 2016 U.S. presidential election, calling them for Remain and Hillary, respectively. The opinion writer’s weakness for wishcasting is partly to blame. But voter preferences can also change quite rapidly. What polls suggest today can be completely upended tomorrow, let alone in several weeks or months.
Having said all that—deep breath—I think Donald Trump is poised to sweep next year’s GOP primary. Or as The New York Times put it in a headline summarizing the paper’s own recent polling, the forty-fifth president is “crushing” his primary rivals. Along the way, Trump is also crushing the dream of many conservative professionals: to find a more “responsible” Trump, someone who could channel the same populist energies, but in a more “disciplined” manner.
Ron DeSantis became the locus of such dreams, and it isn’t hard to see why. The Florida governor has boldly confronted the right’s bogeys: from mask and vaccine scolds to the professors, and from woke corporations to the 1619 Project. In the Sunshine State, he whips the media and the opposition (I repeat myself), but he can also reach across the aisle to get things done. And he does it all with bureaucratic competence and mastery over a pliant legislature.
And yet that Times poll finds DeSantis trailing Trump by a huge (37-point) margin among likely Republican voters. The RealClearPolitics poll of polls shows Trump trouncing DeSantis by similarly huge margins nationally and in early primary states. The DeSantis campaign is shedding staff and reportedly fielding nervous calls from donors. Right-wing influencers speak of “RDS” in what-might-have-been tones and past-tense sentences.
So the question is: Which part of the DeSantis formula isn’t working—the populist mojo or the competence-discipline-palatability factor? The answer, I’m afraid, is both.
On the populist front, DeSantis has rendered himself vulnerable on earned benefits and foreign interventionism. Those happen to be two major flash-points between the GOP’s donor class and the party’s increasingly downscale base. As the recent Times poll found, nearly two-thirds of likely Republican voters want their Social Security and Medicare to stay just the way they are, and a majority are done with arming and funding Ukraine.
In 2016, Trump smashed his conventional Republican rivals precisely by bucking the party’s orthodoxy on these two issues: He vowed to protect earned benefits, and he described the foreign adventurism of the post-9/11 years as a “disaster.” There is no reason to believe that the working-class Americans who increasingly rally to the Republican Party, and whose votes are crucial to winning the general in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, have shifted on either issue. Advertisement
Matching Trump on both is the bare minimum for any who would take him on. DeSantis was vulnerable on earned benefits going back to his time in Congress, when he backed “entitlement reform” and even privatization. It was of the utmost urgency for him to make clear that he now stands with the party’s populist base on these issues, lest he lend credence to Trump-aligned PACs’ brutal ads framing him as a benefit-slasher and -raider. DeSantis failed to do so. Instead, as recently as June, he took to Fox News to clarify that he would only slash benefits for workers in their 30s or 40s. Imagine how genial that idea sounds to the 48-year-old American who has been active in the labor market since age 16 or 17.
On foreign policy, meanwhile, DeSantis needlessly hurt himself by equivocating. No doubt impelled in part by Trump’s dovish message on Ukraine, DeSantis submitted a refreshingly restraint-oriented response to Tucker Carlson’s foreign-policy questionnaire to the candidates. But then, a few days later, he walked it back and sounded more conventionally Republican notes. The New York Times reported that hedge-fund honcho Ken Griffin lodged complaints about DeSantis’s remarks, but I’ve also been told by Republican operatives that donor influence is a far less important factor than the candidate’s own unshakably Reaganite instincts.
In the event, the impression took hold that DeSantis is slippery on restraint—a situation not helped by his tendency to rechannel such questions into safer anti-woke grooves. On the day he launched the DeSantis campaign, a Fox host gently pressed him on his Day One plans for Ukraine, which set the governor on a two-minute-long digression about the scourge of wokeness and gender ideology in the military. “Populism,” for the governor, seems to involve only such cultural issues. To be clear, working Americans are also alarmed by racialized propaganda and gender ideology in the armed forces. It’s just that “woke” and “anti-woke” aren’t the sum of all issues for voters—though they too often appear to be for DeSantis.
Which brings us to the operation’s vaunted discipline. Here, the problem is quite simple. If the substance doesn’t resonate, then no amount of discipline and responsibility can elevate it among voters. At a time when ordinary Americans are worried about health and wage precarity, retirement safety, and the prospect of accidentally stumbling into nuclear war, it doesn’t bespeak discipline to endlessly discuss crypto, “reconstitutionalizing the executive branch,” and similar e-right obsessions.
So the question is: Which part of the DeSantis formula isn’t working—the populist mojo or the competence-discipline-palatability factor? The answer, I’m afraid, is both …Wrong. More like the deliberate association with RINOs and ignoring the fraud factor.
Bragg was told to give the nomination to Trump, so he did.
We’ll win or lose with him. I’m fine with that.
It’s because the voters like Trump.
Because America HATES Washington DC and we are angry about the stolen election. And we are coming. We are going to ram Trump right back down DC’s dirty corrupt throats.
With each indictment Trumps poll numbers go up in the Republican primary. To the horror of the Democrats his numbers also go up against Biden. He is well ahead of Biden now.
The Dems must take Trump out via the courts, which is unlikely. Biden is not a viable candidate and Kamala is worse but Jill Biden wants to cling to the power of the presidency of her husband. We do not really know who is president. I think it is Obamas advisors and Jill Biden and there is a power struggle there. Joe’s staff is mostly Obama’s staff of past.
I hope Biden is the democrat nominee as he will be easily defeated. He will not be the nominee.
*I hope Biden is the democrat nominee as he will be easily defeated. He will not be the nominee.*
Then pray for his health and no impeachment.
We’re still going to have to win without stooping as low as the rats do. Just remember the Kenyan was taken care of by those that did his dirty work for him. He could then ridicule a stiff like Romney wanting the 80’s back.
What are the plans of the CIA?
They must have 10 scenarios.
I don't think the power is centralized in the White House. I think it's a free for all.
Tech and media oligarchs, financiers, intelligence community leaders, top generals and admirals, the FBI and DOJ -- all of them sort of on the same page, but not entirely. All doing their own thing, pulling in sort of the same direction, but sometimes going in opposite directions.
We have no Chief Executive. No one entity is in charge. Putin and Xi are firmly in control of their countries, for good or ill. Ours is led by no one in particular, so its actions are unpredictable and often destructive to others and ourselves.
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A big one he overlooked. Trump is against so-called “free” trade deals and is specifically against the TPP which DeSantis is for as is every other Donor Class candidate. Trump specifically aims to bring manufacturing back to America with specific policies such as placing tariffs on China rather than just wish for it and do nothing to make it happen.
It’s because Trump voters, even the ones who don’t like him, trust him.
It’s that simple.
“The Dems must take Trump out via the courts”
That’s not their only option, and they’re not above using “any means necessary”.
“that donor influence is a far less important factor than the candidate’s own unshakably Reaganite instincts.”
LOL, Reagan didn’t start wars with the Russians, or the Soviets...but nice try by the DeSantis bunch to wriggle out of him stepping in it on Ukraine.
“Bragg was told to give the nomination to Trump, so he did.”
Link please.
lmbo
Candidates arrayed against Trump ALL avoid the issue of fraud, hoping that it will just go away, but by avoiding talking about the Media-Dem Party voter fraud operation, they provide oxygen to the fraud schemes. If by chance one of them actually defeats Trump they will fall victim to the very thing they have avoided talking or even thinking about.
Trump voters love America, Freedom, Faith and Family.and Donald Trump does too.
Todays local news….
Study: Florida no longer the best state to retire, not even in Top 5 The analysis was based on statistics including public health and, especially, costs of living.
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