NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE J ust wait for the debates. If you’re a Republican-primary voter concerned about the trajectory of the GOP’s nominating contest in the race’s early days, you’ve probably heard that a lot. It’s not bad advice — the debates will help voters better evaluate the candidates, and the media narratives that congeal around each candidate’s performance will matter. But it is also an argument for complacency, and Donald Trump’s critics on the right cannot be satisfied with the status quo.
Trump’s advantage in national Republican-primary polling remains “historically large” — his support is well in excess of the support all his opponents generate combined, which should concern Republicans who hope for the consolidation of the anti-Trump vote behind one alternative candidate. It is all fine and well to dismiss this phenomenon as a by-product of the former president’s legal troubles and the rallying effect they have on voters, but there are more indictments coming down the pike, and those that are already on the docket will produce enough twists and turns to keep Trump’s name above the fold for much of 2023.
Moreover, if you’re pulling for Ron DeSantis to emerge as the last, best Trump alternative in the field, you should be even more concerned because those voters disaffected with Trump aren’t defaulting to DeSantis. At least, that’s what the trends observed by Reuters/Ipsos pollsters indicate:
Reuters/Ipsos has been one of the least favorable pollsters for Trump — most other surveys of the race have found the former president has enjoyed the consistent support of a majority of Republican-primary voters nationwide since early April. But taken at face value, this poll does suggest that Trump is shedding Republican support. It’s just that those voters are defecting to the field instead of to DeSantis.
The Florida governor is not unknown to Republican voters. His name recognition is comparable to Trump’s and, indeed, his favorability ratings sometimes eclipse Trump’s, which suggests he’s marginally better liked by Republicans than the former president. So, what explains those voters’ reluctance to affirm that they will vote for the man from Tallahassee?
In the effort to untangle this knot, an analysis of the GOP electorate conducted by Republican pollster and strategist Patrick Ruffini is valuable. It provides some clues about how Republican-primary voters are thinking not just about this race but about their personal circumstances and the future of the country. The conclusion that is hard to avoid is that Ron DeSantis has already secured every benefit available to a candidate who focuses on anti-wokeness, and it’s just not enough.
Ruffini’s approach breaks the Republican electorate down into six camps. DeSantis owns the voters who are most enthused by his crusade against institutions that even wink in the direction of the campaign of revolutionary social justice that’s migrated out from American college campuses in the last decade. But that amounts to only about 13 percent of the GOP electorate. Those voters are younger and less white than the average GOP voter. They are more likely to have college degrees. They use Twitter over Facebook, and they don’t consume very much news from conventional conservative outlets such as Fox News. In other words, they don’t look or act like the vast majority of Republican voters.
To a lesser extent, Donald Trump suffers from this problem, too. The core “MAGA” voters, whom Ruffini deems “moderates” because they pair their staunch social conservatism with centrist economic policy preferences, are culturally revanchist, but they also favor a strong safety net and protectionist economic policies and are likely open to the confiscatory-taxation regime necessary to fund these proclivities. This is where the so-called nationalist Right lives. While more numerous than DeSantis’s base, they are also a minority — just 21 percent — of the Republican vote. They are younger than the average Republican, wildly disproportionately female, and less educated. And, Ruffini writes, they “don’t appear as engaged on most issues.”
This is not an ideological spectrum, with Trump voters on one end and DeSantis backers on the other. The Republican voters who make up the other 66 percent of the GOP are to the right of both these camps insofar as they are more conventionally conservative and, more importantly, conventionally Republican. The majority of Republican-primary voters are more likely to be male and over the age of 50. About 40 percent of them are degree-holders. And they are deeply “concerned” about the direction in which the nation is headed.
Those concerns are not limited to the latest inscrutable extortion racket to which the class of 2021 is subjecting America’s boardrooms. Ruffini doesn’t elaborate on what their concerns are, but it’s not hard to guess at them: crime in the streets; the persistently high cost of basic necessities and consumer goods; a geopolitical environment whose threats grow worse by the day; a historic crisis on America’s southern border; the appearance of corruption in America’s governing institutions. It’s all more resonant than which party to the Disney–DeSantis dispute has the most egg on its face.
The case for Ron DeSantis isn’t hard to make, though he himself seems to struggle to make it. DeSantis brings to the table everything Republicans like about Trump (while being vague enough about the particulars so individual Republicans can define that for themselves) without the incontinence that renders Trump himself unacceptable to a critical mass of the general electorate and weakens his ability to get things done in office. But in making this case, often implicitly, the governor has avoided the appearance of a stark contrast with Trump — at least, so far.
Instead, DeSantis has preferred to emphasize niche issues that Ruffini’s analysis suggests have narrow appeal. The goal is obvious — 50 percent plus one more Republican voter. The tactics DeSantis is applying in pursuit of it, however, limit the avenues he can take to achieve it.
If wokeness is a fad among the over-educated progressive Left, Ruffini’s analysis suggests anti-wokeness is a fixation of the over-educated cultural Right. It’s not going to be enough to oust the dominant figure in Republican politics from his prohibitive perch at the top of the polls. DeSantis has to win more voters, yes, but Trump also has to lose them. So far, DeSantis’s efforts to pick this lock aren’t working. Perhaps it’s time for a change.