Trump’s hold on GOP presidential race squeezes out DeSantis, even in Florida

Gov. Ron DeSantis is facing some of his worst polling of the year against Donald Trump both nationally and in key states, with the former president seemingly comfortable enough to criticize Florida’s abortion laws in an early pivot to the general election.

Even more ominous for the governor was Trump’s victory over DeSantis at the GOP meeting in Orlando on Sept. 15, in which his advocates were overwhelmingly successful in rescinding a loyalty pledge that Trump refused to sign.

DeSantis’ hold over the party in Florida, once almost absolute, could be weakening as he continues to struggle to cut into Trump’s massive lead, a political operative said.

“He remains extremely powerful,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from St. Petersburg and co-founder of the Forward Party. “But his grip on the party is loosening, and fairly soon I think he’ll be seen as a lame-duck governor. And I think that the dynamic in Tallahassee will shift dramatically when he loses to Trump.”

A Morning Consult poll conducted Sept. 15 to 17 gave Trump a 59% to 13% lead over DeSantis nationally, one of his biggest margins so far. Polls in key primary and caucus states are no better for DeSantis, with the two most recent polls in Iowa showing Trump with 35- and 37-point leads and a CNN-University of New Hampshire poll putting him in fifth place.

“Trump has solidified his support in the state of Iowa,” said Dave Peterson, a professor of political science at Iowa State University. “DeSantis doesn’t seem to be able to do much to cause a major shakeup. If anything, he’s losing ground to the candidates behind him.”

The campaign insists its Iowa push is continuing. David Polyansky, DeSantis’ deputy campaign manager, told the New York Times, “Winning an Iowa caucus is very difficult. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and organization, traditionally. So much so that even in his heyday, Donald Trump couldn’t win it in 2016.”

But despite that stated optimism, Peterson said it appears that DeSantis’ campaign is starting to scale back operations in Iowa.

“He’s now talking about how a strong second finish would do well [for him],” Peterson said. “And when you’re already playing sort of that expectation game this far out, I think that’s a sign that things are not going your way.”

Abortion positioning

Trump’s comfortable lead in Iowa, with its large evangelical base in the GOP primary, may have led to his telling NBC’s Meet the Press that the six-week abortion ban DeSantis signed “is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” Trump said he’d “sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something” without committing to signing a 15-week federal ban.

Trump is uniquely positioned to be able to straddle the lines when it comes to abortion, Jolly said.

“He has the ability to move into general election mode, not just because of his lead, but because he delivered the Dobbs decision,” Jolly said of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year overturning abortion protections in Roe v. Wade, made possible by his three appointments to the bench.

The DeSantis camp immediately jumped on Trump’s comments, with the DeSantis War Room writing that “Conservative leaders in Iowa — and across the country — are blasting Trump for calling Heartbeat laws a ‘terrible thing” and pledging to appease Democrats.”

Trump also started to pull back slightly, posting on social media, “I was able to do something that nobody thought was possible, end Roe v. Wade.” But, he added, “Republicans must learn how to talk about abortion. This issue cost us unnecessarily, but dearly, in the midterms.”

Peterson said there ultimately may not be much strategizing behind Trump’s comments at all.

“Trump has not always been able to clearly articulate his policy on abortion,” Peterson said. “… I’m not sure if this is necessarily a conscious decision to moderate as much as it is a conscious decision to criticize DeSantis.”

But his equivocation on the issue may only help him in many states, including delegate-rich Michigan, where voters approved a measure protecting abortion rights last year.

“Abortion is a hot potato for Republicans,” said Jenna Bednar, a professor of public policy and political science at the University of Michigan. “… Governors like DeSantis are in a tough spot, pinned to a position that is a loser on the national stage.”

Fading chances

DeSantis has attempted to go back to some of his oldest political beliefs during a recent Florida press conference, seizing on increased COVID restrictions in some states to again oppose vaccine and mask mandates.

He and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo went further this time in telling those under 65 not to get the new COVID booster, a stance at odds with most public health experts.

While the message would seem to appeal to libertarian-leaning New Hampshire Republicans, Danta Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, said the issue was fading in relevance there.

“It’s not as if his position on the issue is wrong for the state,” Scala said. “But I do think the salience of that issue to New Hampshire voters has dwindled.”

In a CNN-UNH poll released Wednesday, DeSantis was at just 10% support among likely primary voters in the state, trailing not just Trump but businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former N.J. Gov. Chris Christie.

“It’s no longer credible here to call it a two-man race,” Scala said. “Arguably, you could call it a one-man race. It’s Donald Trump’s race to lose.”

DeSantis has also started to be more critical of Trump’s legal woes, despite his repeated attacks on the prosecutors who have brought 91 criminal counts against Trump in four separate cases.

DeSantis told CBS News this month that “the chance of getting elected president after being convicted of a felony is as close to zero as you can get.”

Gregory Koger, a professor of political science at the University of Miami, said DeSantis probably got into the race in May assuming that the expected charges would knock out Trump by the time the primaries came around.

“But despite Donald Trump’s immense legal problems, he has not been disqualified in the minds of many Republican voters,” Koger said. “If DeSantis was waiting for Donald Trump to be disqualified by some external actor, it has yet to happen. And time is running out for it to happen.”

Florida’s future

DeSantis’ defeat on the loyalty pledge was also emblematic of where DeSantis stood in his home state.

The pledge, originally introduced in May, required that anyone on the ballot in the March GOP primary must promise to support the eventual nominee. Trump would not sign it.

Former state GOP chair Joe Gruters forced a vote to rescind the requirement, leading to a closed-door meeting in which at least 36 of the 39 executive board members of the party voted to scrap the rule.

“It’s a real lesson they sent us about the way the wind is blowing,” Koger said of the state party’s decision. “The whole sway [DeSantis] has had over Florida Republicans for five years now ought to have carried over into this particular decision, but it clearly hasn’t.”

Now, instead of Trump potentially being kept off the Florida primary ballot, it is DeSantis who is in danger of either losing to Trump in the state he leads or potentially dropping out before his home state’s primary to avoid such an embarrassment.

DeSantis trailed Trump by 36 points in Florida in a Victory Insights poll in late August that included all candidates, and trailed by 28 points in a one-on-one matchup.

“If current trends continue and he doesn’t do well in the first few contests, I would imagine DeSantis would step out as gracefully as possible” before the Florida primary, Koger said. “At that point, his calculation is more about the future, maybe future presidential runs. Being the anti-Trump candidate is not in his long-term interests.”

Jolly agreed that DeSantis’ path forward politically “is a treacherous one with the Florida GOP.”

“He’s running out of places to land that will allow him to keep his grip on the party,” he said.

One potential choice DeSantis could make, Jolly said, is to take on another Florida Republican and challenge U.S. Sen. Rick Scott next year, a decision he would have until June to make.

“Vanity is a perverse motivation for a lot of people and Ron DeSantis, like many other politicians, will have to wrestle with a bit of vanity,” Jolly said. “And so if the [choice] is to lose a presidential primary and be a lame-duck governor, or be the next U.S. senator from Florida by beating Rick Scott? We’ll see where his vanity and his ambition takes him.”