The Republican Primary Is Over

How Ron DeSantis blew a lead and built a campaign bound for failure.

Just 8 months ago, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was leading Trump in head-to-head polling for the 2024 primary. Today, the primary is effectively over and the only race left is the veepstakes.

This is how Ron missed his chance to blow.

Campaign Structure

Ron DeSantis chose a campaign structure that was, to put it mildly, atypical. To put it more bluntly, the structure he chose was strategically illiterate. Core campaign functions, like fieldwork (door-knocking, phone-banking, etc), were effectively pimped out to his Super PAC. The actual DeSantis campaign seems to exist as a clearinghouse for increasingly strained press relations and as Semafor revealed, Nazi memes.

While super PACs have done field (paying door-knockers, phone-bankers, and supplying them with call lists and literature) in the past, the traditional role for a super PAC in a presidential race is picking up the tab on big spending projects, usually ad buys. This practice makes sense since ad spending is a blunt force tool that usually does one of two things: raise positive awareness of a candidate and their priorities, and trash opponents.

Field is a political practice that is supposed to be precise and reactive, in contrast with brutish, non-digital ad placement. Since field organizers are on the ground hearing from and informing voters daily, their interactions double as slow-rolling focus groups - extremely valuable data for a campaign given how much focus groups tend to cost. These interactions are usually logged and turned into data (as a Dem, I used NGP Van software) that should inform how campaigns and candidates communicate with voters.

The DeSantis campaign cannot use that data since they are legally barred from coordinating with the super PAC. All of that data, which is a valuable input for how candidates address the issues of the election, is out of reach.

Put simply, the DeSantis campaign structure is effectively pushing the candidate further out of touch with voters.

The Debate Papers

Today, the New York Times reported about a series of documents made public by a strategy firm linked to the DeSantis Super PAC.

The first question that probably isn’t obvious to lay observers is, why were strategy documents made public in the first place? The answer is a strategy used to end around the PAC-campaign coordination ban called red-boxing.

Red-boxing is conceptually simple - campaigns will publicly post media (talking points, photos, and even, quite embarrassingly in the case of the Cruz 2016 campaign, raw video footage) that they wish PACs to use. Since the information is made public, it does not count as coordination under the law.

Most of the documents posted were simple research compilations about DeSantis’ opponents for the upcoming debate. For the research documents, there wasn’t much to note, but the broader structure spoke volumes of who DeSantis sees as his greatest short-term threats - Vivek Ramaswamy (named as a necessary target in a separate memo), and Nikki Haley (her research document weighed in at a whopping 19.9 MB).

The Iowa Analytics deck, apparently Team DeSantis’ strategic roadmap for the first primary contest (you can find here an archived copy of Axiom’s website), seems wildly optimistic and tailored to telling a noble lie of viability to donors.

The first “key insight” projects caucus turnout to be 216,561, most likely an overestimate. An estimated 170,000 Republicans turned out in 2016, the last seriously contested Iowa caucus, meaning the DeSantis camp is banking on an extra 46,000 participants this year.

Secondly, it assumes the existences of “Core Action Universes” of voters in neatly cataloged and numerous categories of varying levels of persuadability and loyalty to Trump.

Below, you can see what they think the Republican electorate looks like.

I think these are all nonsense numbers, reverse-engineered to keep the gravy train of deluded GOP donors moving with a rosy picture. Public opinion and voters simply can’t be categorized in such a static and numerous way.

In reality, there are four groups of GOP voters. They are Trump zealots, hard-right strategic voters, normie conservatives, and NeverTrumpers. I would submit that the first two and last two have some blurred lines of distinction between them, but ultimately are distinct voters with different perceived interests.

Ben Shapiro posted a similar concept layout for GOP sects, but I think he’s very wrong about the size of each (likely suffering from the same pro-Desantis bias as Axiom).

The sizes, by my estimation, look closer to this:

Trump Zealots - 55%

Hard-Right Strategic Voters - 20%

Normie Conservatives - 20%

NeverTrumpers - 5%

So, the question becomes, which candidates belong to which set? For purposes of this question, I will only be considering candidates that currently are polling above 2% in the RCP polling average (accessed 08.29.2023).

Trump Zealots - as implied by the name, these are Trump ride-or-die voters. Barring Trump being unable to run for legal or health circumstances, there is no use for anyone trying to convince them.

Hard-Right Strategic Voters - This is Desantis’ natural base. None of these people have issues with the policy of the Trump administration other than it didn’t go far enough. This policy affinity means that they can be persuaded to vote for Trump, but they started the race as Desantis’ to lose (and he seems to have lost quite a few to Ramaswamy).

Normie Conservatives - These voters would like to move on from Trump but liked some of his policies and wouldn’t oppose him in the general election. These are ultimately the voters who like Pence and Haley, but are mostly undecided and willing to hear out DeSantis, even if he is doing himself no favors by acting increasingly erratic and like Trump in public.

NeverTrumpers - By far the smallest portion of the GOP electorate, and to the extent they still consider themselves Republican, they hate Trump, increasingly dislike DeSantis and want anyone besides those two.

So what does the Iowa deck get wrong? Put simply, it treats too many Trump zealots as persuadable. This is the central flaw of the DeSantis campaign thus far: By overexerting himself in pursuit of the Trump zealots, he has run out of runway in the other constituencies, all of which he would need to cobble together in a single coalition to present a viable challenge to Trump.

And, as Ramaswamy solidifies support among what should be DeSantis's core group, hard-right strategic voters, he is rapidly losing purpose and standing the reliable second place campaign. And DeSantis will continue to lose touch with the base as the frail shell of his campaign committee isolates itself from the public.