Over the past few days multiple news reports paint a picture of GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis in massive trouble, as the January 15, 2024 “first in the nation” Iowa Caucuses quickly approach. But it’s not just the DeSantis campaign that’s appearing to crumble. It’s DeSantis’ legacy.
“Florida voters are starting to turn on Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to new polling from Progress Florida and Florida Watch,” Florida Politics reports Tuesday. The two groups, together known as the Florida Communications and Research Hub, “found Florida voters weary of the presidential candidate’s agenda.” They also “found him underwater 52%-45%. DeSantis’ favorability rating is also in the negative, 50%-45%.”
That’s a big flip from just “a year ago, when DeSantis was re-elected by nearly 20 points, the Hub’s polling shows nothing short of a nose-dive.”
Nationwide, Governor DeSantis’ attempts to beat Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, have turned into a battle for second place against former Trump UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
The latest RealClearPolitics polling average shows Donald Trump in first place by 50 points – not polling at 50%, but beating narrowly-second-placed DeSantis by 50 points. Despite facing 91 felony charges in four separate indictments, Trump’s current polling average among GOP voters is 62.9%. DeSantis comes in at just 12.1%. Haley is just half a percentage point below DeSantis, at 11.6%.
DeSantis’ polling inside his home state and nationwide are just a few of his problems.
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On Monday a watchdog group accused Gov. DeSantis of breaking the law.
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis broke campaign finance law by communicating about TV spending decisions with a big-dollar super PAC that is supporting his Republican bid for the White House, a nonpartisan government watchdog group alleged in a complaint filed Monday,” the Associated Press reported.
“The Campaign Legal Center cited recent reporting by The Associated Press and others in the complaint, which was filed with the Federal Election Commission. It alleges that the degree of coordination and communication between DeSantis’ campaign and Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting him, crossed a legal line set in place when the Supreme Court first opened the door over a decade ago to the unlimited raising and spending such groups are allowed to do.”
DeSantis’ alleged coordination with his super PAC isn’t the only crisis facing the organization.
“Internal turmoil is threatening to torpedo Ron DeSantis’s already struggling presidential campaign,” The Hill reported Tuesday, in a roundup of crises hitting the DeSantis operation. “Over the weekend, a Washington Post report detailed chaos within DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down. Hours later, a top strategist left the operation — just four weeks before voting kicks off in Iowa with what might be the most critical contest for the Florida governor.”
“When things go badly in a campaign, the wheels tend to come off,” Republican strategist Alex Conant told The Hill. “There’s a lot of finger-pointing, there’s a lot of blame, and it inevitably spills out into the public and just compounds the problems.”
The Hill adds that The Washington Post’s “story — which laid out a string of recent exits and firings at the super PAC, tensions with the campaign and allegations of ‘a troubled structure’ — ‘read like a post-mortem,’ Conant said.”
Worse, “GOP strategist Doug Heye said it’s not clear whether the reports of super PAC tumult signal the wheels coming off DeSantis’s campaign — or if the wheels actually ‘have never actually been on.'”
“This is an absolute disaster for the DeSantis campaign as we head into the final stretch,” Republican strategist Brian Seitchik told The Hill, referring to the super PAC chaos.
It’s not only GOP strategists that have the knives out for DeSantis’ campaign.
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If you’re a Republican voter debating between DeSantis and Trump, or DeSantis and Haley, a former top Fox News host might sway your vote.
Calling it “a trainwreck,” Tucker Carlson “ripped in to Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign team as the ‘nastiest, stupidest’ political operation he has ever seen,” The Independent reported Tuesday.
“You really get the sense that Ron DeSantis – who I liked as governor – the people who represent him online are the nastiest, the stupidest, and the most zero-sum people I’ve ever seen in my life,” Carlson said, according to The Independent. “And I don’t think that reflects him, but it’s like, this is kind of small ball.”
And back inside Florida, DeSantis is tied to major scandals that have become nationwide news.
DeSantis has strong ties to Bridget Ziegler, the Moms for Liberty co-founder and wife of the Florida state Republican Party chairman. Christian Ziegler was suspended over the weekend by the Party after a woman he and his wife engaged in a three-way sexual relationship with accused him of rape.
Bridget Ziegler stood right behind Gov. DeSantis when he signed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law. She has bragged she helped wrote the legislation. DeSantis placed her on the newly-formed state board overseeing what was once the Disney World special tax zone, which DeSantis eliminated after five decades, in response to the multi-billion dollar company’s mostly quiet opposition to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
“Following in the Moms For Liberty model, [Bridget] Ziegler has been a leading anti-trans activist and ‘critical race theory’ opponent who has said her aim is to bring ‘religious values’ into public schools that she claims are ‘indoctrination centers for the radical left,'” the Florida Center for Government Accountability’s Trident news reported. “’Bridget Ziegler, we should have her in every county in Florida,’ DeSantis said in one speech. ‘We have to do a better job in these school board races.'”
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte on Tuesday opined, “Florida was supposed to be the future of the GOP — now the state party is in shambles.”
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If all this weren’t bad enough for DeSantis, he is being slammed for claiming he did not understand Donald Trump’s repeated remarks over the weekend, in which he claimed immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Those comments “closely reflect those of Adolf Hitler as the German leader argued his case for Nazism,” according to People, and other news outlets.
DeSantis, who studied history at Yale and taught history at a private school, was hit with his own words by the Biden campaign Tuesday.
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