The top Republican presidential primary candidates who, so help me fake white man in the sky, are somehow Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis (followed by a distant Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie), are now starting their campaigning in New Hampshire and Iowa in earnest. And while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis once seemed poised to pick up an early lead as the most evil person in government—ahem, I mean the Republican presidential candidate—his recent foibles in the “live free or die” state have reportedly knocked him down a few pegs in the polls.
According to the latest NBC News polling from Sunday, from April to June, DeSantis dropped nine points to commanding just 22 percent of Republican voters, while Trump gained five points to move up to 51 percent, despite the 37 felony charges he is currently facing. (And that’s just in Florida.)
DeSantis’s first campaign visit to New Hampshire in late May drew grumbles because he didn’t take any questions from the crowd at events. That’s just bad public relations because how is he supposed to seem like a real folksy, down-home kind of guy if he isn’t nationally broadcast while shooting the shit with some hometown local about granite production or whatever? Duh, he’s not.
He also made waves when his team scheduled a stump speech in an entirely different part of the state on the same day alleged felon Trump had been scheduled to address the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women during their annual fundraising event called the “Lilac Luncheon” (blech). Daring to piss off these conservative white women is simply not done, according to the statement the group released via Twitter on Thursday.
“Other Republican presidential primary candidates coming to the state next week recognize the longstanding tradition of this special event and have graciously scheduled around it,” said Secretary Emily Tomasi. While the group’s events director Christine Peters, said, “It has always been a New Hampshire hallmark to be considerate when scheduling events, to have a candidate come in and distract from the most special event [the women’s group] holds in the year is unprecedented.”
This seems like as good a time as any to bring up that the way these presidential primaries are set up gives unnecessary and unfairly weighted power to low-populated states like New Hampshire and Iowa, and also arguably too much national attention to small special interest groups and events like the damn Lilac Luncheon—who are clearly favoring Trump, which makes them gross. But to be fair, if they favored DeSantis, I’d also call them gross.
Also, regardless of the extremely splashy and dramatic news about polls and fundraising and general ups and downs of the early campaigning, we are still about a year away from the official Republican presidential nomination of 2024, and pretty much anything could still happen. Like, to put things in perspective, around this time in 2015, Ben Carson was predicted to be a frontrunner in the GOP primary. Yes, Ben Carson. So a lot is undoubtedly going to change between now and next year’s elections.
(featured image: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
