Can DeSantis upend Trump? He's got to be 'down and dirty' to win
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Ron DeSantis will have to win at least one of Iowa or New Hampshire, the first two states to vote in the Republican nomination contest, if he is to overhaul Donald Trump, according to election experts.
Mr DeSantis on Wednesday formally declared he will run for president in 2024. Mr Trump's lead has grown in polls in recent weeks, meaning the Florida governor faces a daunting, although achievable, task.
"He's got to win Iowa. Period," said Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "If he wins Iowa, and not New Hampshire, he's still got a reasonable chance to upend Trump. Winning both Iowa and New Hampshire would be an earthquake.
The current Real Clear Politics average of all national polls of Republicans shows Mr Trump on 56 per cent, and Mr DeSantis on 19 per cent. In March, Mr Trump was on 43 per cent and Mr DeSantis 31 per cent.
However, Mr DeSantis's advisers are confident he will get an immediate boost from his official declaration, and that with six months to go until Iowa votes, he can catch up. To claw his way past Mr Trump, the Florida governor has two strategic options.
'Every blow has to be returned double'
The first is to attack Mr Trump head on, as some of the more virulent Republican "never Trump" party figures are urging.
"It's got to be down and dirty. Every blow has to be returned double because Trump is the gorilla," said Mr Sabato. "There's no other way to win. In this race being nice can be interpreted as being weak."
However, Mr DeSantis is well aware that engaging in a mudslinging contest with Mr Trump has never ended well for any republican rival, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in 2016.
Instead, he intends to use the other available strategy, which will be to avoid direct conflict as much as possible, and instead stake his claim on his electability in a general election.
The message will be that if Republicans want a Republican in the White House, they must nominate Mr DeSantis.
A less alienating approach
He is less alienating than Mr Trump for independent suburban voters, and therefore has the best chance to beat Joe Biden.
Mr DeSantis will repeat to audiences across Iowa and New Hampshire that the party has developed a "culture of losing" nationally, while he surged to re-election victory in Florida last year, picking up independents along the way.
The electability argument will be similar to the one used by Mr Biden's in the Democrat primaries in 2020.
Mr Biden's core appeal then was that he was the Democrat best placed to win a general election. However, some recent policy decisions by Mr DeSantis may undermine the strategy.
On abortion he has positioned himself to the right of Mr Trump, signing a Florida law banning abortion after six weeks. Mr Trump suggested that was "too harsh".
Some donors have also raised concerns about how Mr DeSantis's culture war against Disney, and allowing people in Florida to carry concealed guns without permits. They wonder about how they will be received by female suburban voters in a general election.
However, such policies will help in the primaries, offsetting any attempt by Mr Trump to paint the governor as a moderate RINO [Republican In Name Only].
'Primary voters go with their gut'
Mr DeSantis's electability argument - that he can carry elements of Trumpism forward better than Mr Trump - is a strong one, but it depends on appealing rationally to voters' heads, rather than their hearts.
"On the Republican side primary voters almost always go with their gut, and their heart, and that's the person they nominate," said Mr Sabato.
Mr DeSantis will never touch the MAGA people in a primary. He's going to have to win over the weaker Trump Republicans. Another challenge for Mr DeSantis is going to be the growing size of the field.
Before Mr Trump strategists used to talk about what "lane" a candidate was running in - for example, the religious lane, the military hawk lane and the moderate lane.
Mr Trump has become so divisive that the others are all running in one lane - the "Non-Trump" one.
Half a dozen candidates are already squeezed into that lane including Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who Mr Trump himself has praised.
Their single digits will add up to a sizeable proportion of the non-Trump vote. Ms Haley has already begun attacking Mr DeSantis, seeking to close on second place.
"It's just like 2016. They all think the others are going to drop out and leave them a free run at Trump," said one political analyst. "They haven't learned a damn thing."
Backroom deals and plenty of money
Mr DeSantis needs to engage in some backroom dealing to ensure the others do drop out this time, and endorse him. Winning Iowa and New Hampshire could make that happen. There is precedent for overhauling the poll deficit Mr DeSantis faces.
In the 2008 election John McCain was below 20 per cent in the second half of 2007, but went on to win the nomination.
That year, on the Democrat side, Barack Obama made a similar comeback against Hillary Clinton.
Mr DeSantis can be confident that he will have the money to do it.
The Never Back Down political action committee, which is backing him, raised more than $30 million in its first month.
And Mr DeSantis still has more than $80 million left over from his gubernatorial campaign, which is expected to Never Back Down.
The committee is going all in on Iowa, organising in each of the 1,670 precincts where caucuses will be held.
David Polyansky, a Never Back Down adviser who was previously part of Ted Cruz's winning Iowa campaign in 2016, said: "When you talk about caucus organising, there are a lot of layers. But our particular layer is trying to build a ground game, build a volunteer network."
At an office in Des Moines, Iowa 30 key organisers will be trained and dispatched, and they will also make visits to New Hampshire and two other early-voting states, Nevada and South Carolina.
The committee intends to prioritise spending money on hiring staff, knocking doors and phoning voters, instead of piling it all into advertising.
However, Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist, said money and staff could only do so much, and success would ultimately be down to Mr DeSantis himself.
He said: "If you don’t have the candidate, or a strong surrogate like a spouse, to do the tour and meet people in a state [Iowa] with a culture of candidate interaction, it’s hard to have a big organic impact."
