Editors’ Blog

As my colleague Josh Marshall notes below, today’s Times/Siena Poll gives us the clearest sign yet that, if you’re a Republican candidate and you’re not named Donald Trump, your grip on the Republican Party and the minds and hearts of GOP voters is tenuous at best and barely existent at worst.

In line with our recent theme, the Times is out today with a poll that is absolutely devastating for Ron DeSantis. But in truth it is devastating for every Republican candidate not named Donald Trump. It is only devastating for DeSantis inasmuch as he is the only candidate who appears to be in the race at all rather than running what amounts to a novelty or lifestyle campaign. According to the Times/Siena Poll, nationwide Trump has 54% of Republicans supporting him compared to 17% for DeSantis. The next five runners-up either have 2% or 3%. As I said, in practical terms, they’re not even in the race.

Is the fractured field preventing DeSantis from breaking through? Not really. If all the other candidates dropped out and gave DeSantis a clear one-on-one matchup, Trump would still be disemboweling him by a 62% to 31% margin.

I want to recommend you listen to this interview Josh Kovensky did with Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar. It’s very interesting stuff. We’re going to be doing more podcast interviews in addition to the weekly episode Kate Riga and I do. That weekly episode will continue with the same format. So I want to encourage you to check out all of these new episodes. But this is a recommendation especially about this episode. It gave me a lot of new insight into Vladimir Putin’s obsession both with the U.S. and with Ukraine and how the two intersect, long before the triangular relationship between these three countries became such a central feature of U.S. politics. Much of it I knew in a very general outline. But many details were knew to me, as was the discussion of Putin’s relationship with George W. Bush and how the collapse of Bush’s domestic support and eventual departure from the White House was a prelude to what came after. Really fascinating stuff.

If you subscribe to the podcast through whatever service you use it will be in your feed. If you don’t subscribe, please subscribe. And if podcasts aren’t your thing you can listen to it on the site right here.

We hear a lot about Joe Biden’s age. And it’s not just Republicans endlessly going to town with out of context videos or clips of Biden looking down momentarily. When I talk to civilians — by which I mean people not immersed in the daily scrum of news and politics and all the commitments that go with it — they often tell me something like, “I like Biden. But I am concerned about his age.” 

So it’s an issue. It’s certainly an issue at the level of perception. And there’s simply zero question that Biden is a much older man that he was when he was Vice President. That’s true in the obvious chronological sense, as it is for all of us. But it’s true in a more specific one as well. Nancy Pelosi is two years older than Biden. You can see some signs of age in her face. Her skin is a bit more drawn. But overall she doesn’t seem much different to me than she did a decade ago. Age affects everyone differently. That’s literally life.

But you know what? Get over it.

Just a few hours after we noted last night that Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation, very softly criticized one line of Florida’s new Black history curriculum, Team DeSantis responded with outsized fury.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss DeSantis Descending: Josh and Kate discuss the continued flailing of the Ron DeSantis campaign and some last minute chaos around Hunter Biden’s plea deal.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

In today’s episode of the ongoing collapse of the DeSantis campaign, we have a new moment which we might see as the severed segments of Dead Bounce Ron roiling and twitching around, much like a worm that has been cut into pieces but continues to wiggle and move about almost as if nothing had happened. Yesterday in response to a question about ersatz candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., DeSantis said that while he wouldn’t choose Kennedy as his vice president, he would consider him to run the FDA or CDC.

This is of course a ridiculously inane suggestion. But the key is that it was immediately attacked even by many of DeSantis’s erstwhile allies or the kinds of Republicans he needs to gain the support of to remain in the race.

There are two issues to discuss.

TPM Reader OM responds to my post on the running constitutional crisis in Israel …

One question you discuss is whether the protests are trying to block an elected gov’t from doing what it was elected to do. The campaign that Netanyahu and his far-right allies ran was focused heavily on two things: (1) soaring cost of living, and (2) rising crime, especially in the Arab sector of Israeli society. They promised to crack down on crime, return a sense of security, the usual thing right-wing parties promise. They said not a word about “judicial reform” (i.e., the anti democratic regime change). 

In his subtle critique of the curriculum, the only Black Republican member of Florida’s congressional delegation gave the DeSantis administration an out.

Let’s cut to another scene from the ongoing death rattle of the DeSantis for President campaign. Yesterday, along with firing a third of the staff because it’s running out of money, the DeSantis campaign fired a staffer who made a campaign video, laced it with far right and Nazi imagery and then farmed it out to a fan site to obscure that it was produced by the campaign. Do you remember this story? Didn’t we hear about this a few days ago? About how the crazy ad supposedly made by a fan was actually cut in-house? At first I was confused too. Actually the same thing had happened all over again. A few weeks ago there was that gay and trans-bashing ad that over the weekend we learned from the Times had actually been produced in house by the DeSantis campaign. Then, over the weekend, a now-fired staffer named Nate Hochman produced an aesthetically comparable ad and farmed it out to a DeSantis supporting Twitter account called DeSantiscams so that the campaign could then amplify it.