By any fair measure, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign isn’t going as well as he’d like. The Florida Republican’s polling support is slipping; his finances aren’t great; he shook up his staff less than two months after launching; and his status as the obvious “not Trump” candidate is in peril as other GOP contenders gradually gain support.
It’d be an exaggeration to say DeSantis’ national ambitions are doomed, but as 2023 got underway, he looked like a possible front-runner for his party’s nomination. No one is seriously using that label now.
Complicating matters, he recently began blaming his campaign troubles on news organizations that he believes are secretly conspiring against him in the hopes of helping President Joe Biden — which was every bit as bonkers as it sounded.
Hoping to get back on track, the Floridian did something he almost never does: DeSantis, who tends to limit his media interviews to conservative outlets, sat down with an actual journalistic professional for an interview aired on an independent news outlet. That was the good news. The bad news was that CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the governor all kinds of good questions — about abortion rights, Donald Trump’s prosecution, aid to Ukraine, etc. — each of which the Republican dodged with non-answers. As New York magazine’s Jon Chait summarized:
Rather than say if he would sign a national abortion ban, he said he opposed a national law to protect abortion through birth. Rather than say whether he would send military and economic aid to Ukraine, he said he wouldn’t send troops there (which the Biden administration is also not doing). And when asked if [special counsel Jack] Smith should prosecute Trump if he has evidence of criminality, DeSantis talked about Alvin Bragg and insinuated Smith is charging Trump because he’s a Republican without directly saying either that Trump is innocent or that he should be immune from prosecution.
Or put another way, asked good questions, DeSantis decided to answer bad ones.
But what I can’t decide is whether the Republican governor’s campaign is worse than his administration’s difficulties back home.








