Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s chances at the 2024 Republican presidential nomination may be slipping away.
Once the favorite to take down Donald Trump, DeSantis’s poll numbers have progressively declined while the former president’s have surged, despite a performance in the first debate that many watchers rated highly. And now, he’s been forced to indefinitely leave the campaign trail in Iowa and New Hampshire to address multiple major crises in his home state, including a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville and Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall as a Category 3 storm Wednesday morning.
All of that comes at a critical moment for his campaign ahead of the August 31 fundraising deadline, where his numbers may signal his path forward in the race.
“I think a case can be made that he’s plateaued, and he’s just unable to break through the ceiling that’s required to compete with Trump,” said David Jolly, a former Florida GOP member of Congress who was in the middle of hurricane cleanup when I called him. “DeSantis’s strategy broadly remains waiting for Trump to injure himself politically and staying positioned to overtake him. But that’s a fairly bleak assessment for someone who started with such potential and all the money in the world.”
Times of crisis can sometimes provide an opportunity for candidates to show their worth. Take former President George W. Bush, who promised billions in federal aid after two successive hurricanes hit Florida in 2004 and went on to win the state and reelection a couple of months later. So, too, was former President Barack Obama able to capitalize on images of him embracing Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as he sought reelection. But it’s not clear that DeSantis is similarly seizing the moment.
“In matters of crisis, I think he has so destroyed his credibility with roughly half the state that he’s kind of overlooked,” Jolly said. “He’s not…
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