Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially entered the presidential race last week, but he seems further than ever from the one-on-one showdown his allies believe he needs to wrest the nomination from former President Donald J. Trump.
Former Vice President Mike Pence is reaching deeper into Iowa, crucial in his effort to dislodge leading Republican candidates even before he has announced his candidacy. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is stepping up preparations for another campaign, with an expected focus on New Hampshire. And Republican donors and leadership on Capitol Hill are showing new interest in Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who launched his campaign last week. Even candidates who have barely been mentioned are suddenly expressing interest in 2024.
The rapidly growing field, combined with Mr. Trump’s seemingly unwavering core of support, poses a serious threat to Mr. DeSantis, jeopardizing his ability to consolidate the non-Trump vote, and could reflect the dynamics that prompted Mr. Trump’s takeover of the party. in 2016.
It’s a matter of math: Each new entrant threatens to steal a small piece of DeSantis’ potential coalition, whether it’s Pence with Iowa evangelicals or Scott with college-educated suburbanites. And these new candidates are unlikely to eat Trump’s votes. The former president’s base, more than 30 percent Republican, remains very devoted to him.
“President Trump, he should go to the casino, he’s a lucky guy,” Dave Carney, a veteran New Hampshire-based Republican strategist, said of the casino’s former owner, Mr. Trump.
“It’s a gigantic problem” for Mr. DeSantis, added Mr. Carney, who has worked on previous presidential campaigns, because “whatever percentage they get, it’s hard for him to win second place because there just isn’t the vote available. ”.
Trump advisers have greeted each successive entry with near glee as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy his team has talked about since 2021. And many of the candidates seem more comfortable throwing punches at DeSantis than at Trump.
The DeSantis campaign sees the landscape differently.
“We don’t think it’s 2016 again,” Ryan Tyson, DeSantis’ senior adviser, said in an interview.
And in a private briefing for donors this week, Tyson described a Republican electorate divided into three parts: 35 percent as “Trump only” voters, 20 percent as “never Trump” and the remaining 45 percent as the DeSantis optimal point.
Tyson told donors, in audio that was leaked and posted online, that all contestants, apart from the two favorites, were isolated in the “never Trump” segment. “If his name isn’t Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump, he’s dividing this part of the electorate,” he said.
In the months leading up to his campaign launch, Mr. DeSantis and his allies framed the 2024 primary as a two-man race. But as he has stumbled in recent months, amid doubts about his personality and political prowess, rivals have emboldened themselves. And some have the money to stay relevant deep in the main calendar.
Mr. Scott entered the race with nearly $22 million available and raised an additional $2 million on his first day as a candidate. Wealthy and little-known North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum now sees an opportunity for 2024, shooting ads recently to prepare for an impending campaign, according to two people involved in the planning.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman, has invested $10 million of his own money in his campaign. Like Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Ramaswamy sells a similar anti-wake sentiment, but he does it with the charm of a natural communicator.
Mr. Trump has welcomed non-DeSantis entrants to the race. In January, when Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, called to say he was planning to run, Trump did not rant about his disloyalty, as some had expected. He seemed calm, telling her to “do what he has to do,” according to two people briefed on his conversation.
And in the days before Scott’s announcement, Trump was watching Fox News in his Mar-a-Lago office when he said: “I like it. We are only going to say nice things about Tim,” according to a person familiar with the private comments from him.
The conventional wisdom at the beginning of the year was that the field would be relatively small, perhaps as few as five people running. Anti-Trump Republican donors were working to thin the herd to avoid a repeat of the divided field that guaranteed Trump’s victory in 2016. Now, after DeSantis’ early stumbles, there are likely as many as 10 candidates vying for attention. and competing for the debate stage.
For Mr. DeSantis, the squeeze was evident the day he entered the race.
In New Hampshire, Ms Haley mocked him on Fox News as saying that he was simply “copying Trump,” right down to his mannerisms. “If it’s just going to be an echo of Trump, people will just vote for Trump,” she said.
In Iowa, Pence sat down with the kind of mainstream media DeSantis has avoided, including The Des Moines Register. Pence also met with Bob Vander Plaats, the same evangelical leader DeSantis had recently taken to Tallahassee for a private meal.
The split screen was a reminder that Mr. DeSantis is being pinched both ideologically and geographically, as the field expands.
Pence and Scott have made clear their plans to compete for influential evangelical voters in Iowa. In New Hampshire, both Christie, who targeted the state in 2016, and the state’s incumbent governor, Chris Sununu, a moderate who has left the door open to a candidacy, they threaten to steal votes from DeSantis. And in South Carolina, it will be between two home state candidates, former Gov. Haley and Scott.
Many Republicans who want to defeat Trump are horrified by the explosive field, along with DeSantis’ disappointing performance in recent months. Mr. DeSantis has slipped in the polls and now trails Trump in every state and by an average of more than 30 percentage points nationally.
“All the Republicans must be beating Donald Trump,” said Sununu, who described himself as “50-50” about entering the race. “Any Republican who isn’t hitting Donald Trump hard right now is hurting the entire party because if just one or two people are willing to go for it against Donald Trump, it seems personal. He seems mean.
So far, Christie has received the most attention for her direct attacks on Trump, which she has said would be crucial to her candidacy. But he, too, has taken delight in pestering Mr. DeSantis on occasion, an acknowledgment of the Florida governor’s position in the race.
The reluctance to go after Trump, for many Republicans, feels eerily like a repeat of 2016. Then, Trump’s rivals left him mostly alone for months, assuming he would collapse or that they were destined to beat him the moment they did. he could reduce the field to a one-on-one matchup, a situation that never occurred.
The two Florida-based candidates in that race, Sen. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, a former governor, spent millions of dollars attacking each other. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who ended up being Trump’s main rival, privately gloated to donors that he was hugging Trump while he patiently waited for the moment to strike. never arrived
Trump’s current rivals seem exasperated by their collective inability to shake his foundation: Trump’s supporters have been trained for years to come to his defense whenever he is attacked.
Trump has another asymmetric advantage: Current and potential rivals have tried to avoid criticizing him too harshly, lest they alienate Republicans who still like Trump and are automatically suspicious of anyone who attacks him. By contrast, other 2024 contenders have not hesitated to go after Mr. DeSantis.
“His team, maybe he, is great at making the appearance of courage without really delivering on the real thing,” Ramaswamy said in an interview last month. “And that can work on TV and even on social media,” he added. “But once you touch a little, it’s like a little bubble in the air: one little touch, and it bursts.”
Ramaswamy, who has criticized Trump, has directed most of his fire at DeSantis. A close friend of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Ramaswamy dined with Trump and Kushner at the former president’s New Jersey club, Bedminster, in 2021, according to two people familiar with the event.
And as the field grows, there’s the matter of the debate stage, where Trump gutted his opponents in the 2016 primary.
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said earlier this year that she did not expect to need two debate stages as the party required in 2016, with candidate tiers determined by vote.
But there could be as many as a dozen declared candidates by August, and many are already racing to collect the 40,000 donors and 1 percent voting threshold that the party has indicated will be needed to take the stage. This group includes more likely candidates like Larry Elder, the radio host who was defeated in the California recall election.
“Everyone says, ‘We have to stop people from coming in,’” Mr. Sununu said. “That’s the wrong message, the wrong mindset, and that’s not going to work.”
But he acknowledged that consolidation will eventually be necessary to defeat Trump.
“Discipline,” Mr. Sununu added, “is going out.”