Although presidential primaries are designed to be contentious, there is not too much daylight between the remaining presidential candidates to grace the Republican debate stage, at least concerning policy. At the end of the day, plenty of conservatives looking to turn the page past 2020 would probably be about as thrilled to vote for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) over former President Donald Trump as they would for former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy, and certainly any of the three over the cataclysmic failure of President Joe Biden.
And yet, Republican voters are engaging in a baffling game of scorched-earth tribalism. As high-profile endorsements roll out and the field begins to concentrate, DeSantis supporters are increasingly starting to sound like the same Trump supporters they claim to loathe.
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The Florida governor scored two crucial Iowa endorsements in a row, first from Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) and then from social activist Bob Vander Plaats, who boasts a perfect track record of endorsing the eventual victor of the state caucuses since 2008. Trump blasted Reynolds's endorsement as marking "the end of her political career" and the Iowa and Florida governors as "disloyal." Trump then branded Vander Plaats, "the former High School accountant," as a scammer "using Disinformation from the Champions of that Art, the Democrats." The Trump train followed suit.
Team DeSantis correctly laughed at the meltdown, but this week, some in the Floridian's camp have mimicked it.
Haley, who has recently overtaken DeSantis in New Hampshire and now rivals him in Iowa, finally won the endorsement of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity. While the prominent grassroots organization did offer its "thanks and appreciation" to DeSantis, the group insinuated it is Haley, not DeSantis, who can unite the field the way Trump's challengers failed to do in 2016. It was a crucial endorsement for the former South Carolina governor but hardly a scathing one for DeSantis.
And yet, DeSantis's campaign responded with the same hysteria Trump leveled at DeSantis's backers just earlier this month.
"Congratulations to Donald Trump on securing the Koch endorsement," DeSantis's communications director said. "Like clockwork, the pro-open borders, pro-jail break bill establishment is lining up behind a moderate who has no mathematical pathway of defeating the former president. Every dollar spent on Nikki Haley's candidacy should be reported as an in-kind to the Trump campaign. No one has a stronger record of beating the establishment than Ron DeSantis, and this time will be no different."
The X, formerly Twitter, feeds of top DeSantis brass are simply a series of retweets blasting Haley as a Trump stooge and a corporate welfare maven and AFP as anti-liberty. In the same breath, Team DeSantis continues (correctly) to make fun of Trump's ire over Reynolds and Vander Plaats.
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If I may offer an unsolicited reminder to all of these campaigns: We reach Super Tuesday in fewer than 100 days, and if the GOP primary isn't locked up before then, it will be shortly after, by when the party will be pivoting to a general. At that point, will Republicans have made the party stronger by blasting Reynolds and Vander Plaats and AFP as disloyal, unpopular, anti-liberty RINOs, or weaker? Consider the possibility that not everyone who refuses to back your guy is an immoral, dishonest hack and that, instead, primaries are supposed to be contests, not bloodbaths.
If either DeSantis or Haley were to make it to the general, both the party and the country ought to consider themselves extremely lucky, and rhetoric that forgets that does the GOP no favors.