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.
DeSantis’ use of taxpayer funds to transport migrants outside of Florida from state to state has been widely derided as a legally dubious fiasco. His plan to re-establish the Florida State Guard is unraveling. Some of his most provocative policy goals are collapsing in the courts. Key public health positions in DeSantis’ administration have been left vacant, even as Florida confronts cases of malaria; he has approved the use of potentially dangerous mining waste to be used in road construction; and speaking of infrastructure, we learned a few weeks ago that the Republican steered leftover federal Covid funding to a controversial highway project that will benefit one of his top donors. And that’s just some of his most recent troubles — and it doesn’t include DeSantis’ Disney debacle or his highly controversial new immigration law. Trump has suggested more than once that the governor should simply give up on his White House race, but given the scope of his challenges back in the Sunshine State, maybe there’s a reason he prefers to stay on the campaign trail rather than return home.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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