With news that the Florida governor is overhauling his campaign leadership, it’s worth asking if there’s a path forward for his candidacy.
The presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Tuesday that it was revamping its leadership team. While such moves do not always augur a campaign’s imminent demise, the demise of political campaigns often follow such shake-ups. In recent years, nearly every presidential candidate who has shed staff in the summer before primary voting failed to win the nomination.
Perhaps DeSantis can prove to be an exception. Perhaps this shift is what is needed to redirect his efforts, to reverse the trend. The question then becomes: is such a reversal even possible?
You will recall that the year began with DeSantis posing the most substantial challenge to the candidacy of former president Donald Trump. This was part of his perceived appeal, that he was a conservative Republican unburdened by Trump’s history and controversies. If Trump won in 2016 thanks to a splintered field, the thinking went, perhaps DeSantis could be the vehicle for consolidating opposition to the former president.
That is not how it worked out. Even before Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in late March, DeSantis’s position relative to Trump had started to collapse, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of national polls. After that indictment, related to hush money payments to a porn star, support for Trump surged.
Since that point, Trump’s position has held fairly steady.
