TRICKY BALANCING ACT FOR DESANTIS

Florida governor will need to pull supporters away from Donald Trump to win Republican nomination and that presents a challenge

If Ron DeSantis hopes to defeat Donald Trump and win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he will ultimately have to bring every possible anti-Trump voter he can into the fold. But even that likely will not be enough, political analysts say.

DeSantis will also have to pull some supporters away from Trump – and that could make for a tricky balancing act that DeSantis is already struggling with.

“You can’t court MAGA while courting the rest of the party,” said Chris Stirewalt, a Republican analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, referring to Trump’s diehard supporters in his Make America Great Again movement. “That’s a difficult decision he is going to have to make.”

The Florida governor planned to announce his presidential bid yesterday after months of speculation, sources said. With deep financial resources and a growing national profile, DeSantis will quickly become Trump’s top rival in the race.

But he will have much work to do: Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted this month showed Trump backed by 49 per cent of Republicans and DeSantis 19 per cent.

DeSantis’ initial challenge is that the anti-Trump field is fractured. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and Tim Scott, a US senator from South Carolina, among others, are already in the race, with more candidates such as Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, perhaps to follow.

DeSantis’ campaign will have to figure out how to appeal to mainstream Republicans turned off by Trump while also finding ways to attract conservative voters who may be unsure about supporting Trump in 2024 even if they have backed him before.

“He can’t win the nomination with only non-Trump votes,” said Sarah Isgur, a veteran of several Republican presidential campaigns. “He has to peel voters away from Trump.”

A long-time Republican pollster, Whit Ayres, argues that the Republican electorate is divided into three segments, with Trump die-hards comprising about 30-35 per cent of the party, anti-Trump voters making up about 10 per cent and the rest somewhere in between – what he calls “maybe-Trumpers”.

“It looks to me like DeSantis is going after the always-Trumpers rather than the maybe-Trumpers,” Ayres said.

That was a waste of time, Ayres said. Instead, DeSantis’ mission should be to convince “voters looking for an alternative to Trump that he’s the right guy”.

Stirewalt agrees, saying DeSantis needs to first build a strong base within the segment of the party not aligned with Trump before he can try to broaden his appeal.

“He needs a launch pad,” Stirewalt said.

DeSantis appears, however, to have chosen to court the party’s most conservative voters – and those most likely to stay with Trump – to the dismay of some potential donors and supporters.

As governor, he signed one of the most restrictive abortion bills in the nation earlier this year, and made it easier for residents to carry concealed weapons. He suggested supporting Ukraine was not in the national interest before backtracking under a fire storm of criticism.

DeSantis’ political team did not respond to a request for comment.

A DeSantis voter is more likely to want the United States to strongly support Ukraine in its war with Russia, to not believe the 2020 election was riddled by fraud, and to be strongly opposed to progressive policies such as affirmative action and the teaching in schools of so-called Critical Race Theory, the argument that the US is riven by systemic racism.

Trump’s own prospects are clouded by his ongoing legal problems, including the potential for charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Isgur said DeSantis had time to build a winning coalition, arguing that non-Trump voters were likely to forgive the Florida governor for tacking hard to the right to chase some Trump supporters if it helped him secure the nomination. But can DeSantis pull it off? Isgur has her doubts, given Trump’s strength. “I’m just not sure it’s possible,” she said.