Trump Didn’t Doom the G.O.P. Neither Would DeSantis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/opinion/trump-desantis-republicans.html

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My Sunday column made the argument, once taken for granted but now somewhat contested, that Ron DeSantis absolutely must run in 2024 if he wants to seize his best shot at being president. The contestations I addressed were mostly focused on the potency of Donald Trump as an obstacle to DeSantis’s ambitions and the advantages of waiting for 2028 instead. But there’s a secondary argument floating around that’s worth discussing: the idea that DeSantis’s right-wing record will doom him as a general election candidate, whether because of his war with Disney or his past support for curbing entitlement spending or his recent signature on Florida’s six-week abortion ban.

I don’t think this argument is all that germane to the question of whether the Florida governor ought to run in 2024 as opposed to 2028: If heartbeat laws, Disney wars and past Medicare and Social Security votes are general election kryptonite, then it’s not like four years of hanging out and waiting for his turn will somehow make them more marketable to swing voters.

But the downgrading of DeSantis’s chances is connected to an idea with a lot of purchase in current debates: the idea that the Republican Party is in some sense barely hanging on to national competitiveness, that it’s intensely vulnerable to ideological blunders and demographic changes and that it’s easy for a Republican politician to simply cut himself off from the path to a majority.

You see this implied in different ways and different places. For instance, in Richard Hanania’s recent suggestion that the unpopularity of the pro-life cause could “destroy” the G.O.P. Or James Surowiecki’s suggestion that “The only reason the current GOP is viable as a national party is because of the structure of the Electoral College/Senate, combined with Southern white college-ed voters continuing to vote Republican.” Or Jonathan Chait’s argument that DeSantis could easily end up a meaningfully weaker general election candidate than Trump, not just fall to Trump’s level. Or the overwrought and disbelieving reactions from Twitter liberals to Michael Brendan Dougherty’s recent argument that there could be voters who went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 but might swing to DeSantis in ’24.

There’s a mild version of this belief in G.O.P. weakness that’s entirely defensible. The Republican Party is hardly a juggernaut. It struggles mightily to win presidential-level popular vote majorities. It finds some of its strongest support among declining demographics. It’s tied to a variety of unpopular positions, and it’s often incompetent at policymaking. It is definitely not optimized to win the thumping majorities of the Nixon or Reagan eras.

But prophecies about the demise of the Republican Party as a viable force outside the South, its relegation to the status of near-permanent minority, were plausible only in the very early Obama era, following the genuine landslide defeats the G.O.P. suffered in 2006 and 2008. Since then, the story has been one of G.O.P. resilience across multiple different incarnations, whether in rabble-rousing libertarian or cautious-establishment or Trumpian-populist form. The Republican Party has championed unpopular causes, it has picked widely hated nominees, it has pioneered new forms of self-sabotage and political malpractice. Yet it has won unexpected victories and rebounded swiftly from its defeats, and it looks as competitive today as at any point since 2008.

There is no perfect way to assess a party’s strength as a party, as opposed to whatever a given presidential candidate or Senate map might make of it. But looking at the two-party vote for the House of Representatives is probably the best proxy we have. By that standard, the G.O.P. in 2008 seemed headed deep into the political wilderness: It lost the House popular vote by over 10 points, a showing comparable to the losses it regularly suffered in the days when the New Deal coalition dominated American politics, and even in the years before Newt Gingrich’s revolution in 1994.

But there have been seven House elections since 2008, and the G.O.P. has won the popular vote in four of them. In the other three contests, it’s suffered one actual drubbing (in 2018) and two narrow defeats (2012 and 2020). Its best showings were in 2010 and 2014, but it managed a clear majority just last year, notwithstanding pro-choice backlash against the Dobbs decision, the political anchor of the Stop the Steal candidates and the memory of Jan. 6, 2021.

These aren’t the numbers of a fatally regionalized party, or a party that can’t hope to win power absent gerrymandering and Electoral College advantages, or a party with no appeal to independents and swing voters. Indeed, you could argue that they indicate how lucky the Democrats have been that the G.O.P. is so prone to self-sabotage — that with just a little more normalcy, a little less ideological and Trumpish folly and a policy agenda slightly more attuned to the median voter, the Republicans could have been America’s clear majority party over the last decade or so.

So far, there’s no good reason to think that abortion radically changes this dynamic. The issue is clearly good for Democrats on the margins. It’s a bigger liability for Republicans in places that are more secular and where the party has already multiplied its liabilities — like Michigan, where the state G.O.P. is especially captive to incompetence and extremism. It appears to be less of a liability in places like Georgia and Ohio, where popular Republican governors have signed six-week abortion bans without paying any notable political price.

Where DeSantis is concerned, a six-week ban is out of step with both the Floridian electorate and the national one, it doesn’t help him politically outside the primaries and it could conceivably cost him a close national election. But it’s much more likely to be one more issue among the many preventing the Republican Party from reaching its full potential than the straw that finally breaks the G.O.P.’s back.

And that general potential seems as strong as ever going into 2024. At present, since he’s still undefined for many voters, you can think of DeSantis as a stand-in for a generic Republican in head-to-head polls against Joe Biden. In that role, he’s leading in seven of the last 10 polls compiled by RealClearPolitics, including a new Wall Street Journal survey released this week, as well as recent swing-state polls of Arizona and Pennsylvania. (In other words, potential Clinton-DeSantis voters are out there, at least for now.)

It’s fine and reasonable, against this backdrop, to look at DeSantis’s weaknesses and now his potential abortion liability and ask whether, as the nominee, he would find his own way down to something more like Trump’s position — as a competitive candidate, but one who probably can’t win without an Electoral College boost, another real-life Republican nominee who loses lots of votes that a generic Republican might win.

But we should still be clear on what this analysis describes: not a Republican Party that’s barely viable, on the ropes and just hanging on, but a Republican Party that consistently has majorities within its reach, and where it fails to win them does so less out of inherent political weakness than out of squandered strength.

Dominic Cummings on the paths to victory for Trump and DeSantis.

Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth on the resilience of American power.

Dan Hitchens on the third crisis of Christianity.

Eleonore Stump on God’s love and hell.

David Merritt Johns on the great ice cream cover-up.

Ari Aster’s alienating cinema.

Peter Hitchens on the last book of Narnia.

“The nonprofit World Mosquito Program (W.M.P.) has announced that it will release modified mosquitoes in many of Brazil’s urban areas over the next 10 years, with the aim of protecting up to 70 million people from diseases such as dengue. Researchers have tested the release of this type of mosquito — which carries a Wolbachia bacterium that stops the insect from transmitting viruses — in select cities in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Vietnam. But this will be the first time that the technology is dispersed nationwide.

“… The bacterium Wolbachia pipientis naturally infects about half of all insect species. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit dengue, Zika, chikungunya and other viruses, don’t normally carry the bacterium, however. O’Neill and his colleagues developed the W.M.P. mosquitoes after discovering that A. aegypti infected with Wolbachia are much less likely to spread disease. The bacterium outcompetes the viruses that the insect is carrying.

“When the modified mosquitoes are released into areas infested with wild A. aegypti, they slowly spread the bacteria to the wild mosquito population.

“Several studies have demonstrated the insects’ success. The most comprehensive one, a randomized, controlled trial in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, showed that the technology could reduce the incidence of dengue by 77 percent, and was met with enthusiasm by epidemiologists.

“… In Brazil, where the modified mosquitoes have so far been tested in five cities, results have been more modest. In Niterói, the intervention was associated with a 69 percent decrease of dengue cases. In Rio de Janeiro, the reduction was 38 percent.”

— Mariana Lenharo, “Massive mosquito factory in Brazil aims to halt dengue,” Nature (April 14)