Is Incredible Shrinking Candidate Ron DeSantis the Kamala Harris of 2024?; DeSantis Rough Patch Tests Conservative and Donor Patience with Top Trump Alternative

Is incredible shrinking candidate Ron DeSantis the Kamala Harris of 2024?

In 2019, when then-Sen. Kamala Harris announced her campaign for president, she was immediately crowned “the one to beat” by all the political experts in Washington. She checked all the Democrats’ boxes and had all the depth, charm, gravitas and smarts to clear the field and beat then-President Donald Trump.

Looking back, the coverage of her announcement was comically absurd.

The New York Times compared her to Martin Luther King Jr.

U.S. News & World Report’s senior politics writer declared that Ms. Harris’ campaign would be “the standard” to which all future campaigns would aspire.

“Harris is clearly comfortable in her own skin, and in interview after interview, her natural charisma and ability to connect shined through with ease,” he wrote. “She’s also blessed with a[n] infectious laugh that will come in handy when the inevitable attacks against her strengthen.”

Reading those words today, it almost seems like the writer was mocking her. He wasn’t, of course. It was his very best political analysis — an analysis that was shared by nearly every other political expert in Washington at the time.

Of course, cruel reality had other ideas for Kamala Harris. So did Democratic voters. She struggled to connect with ordinary Americans.

After an initial explosion of funding by powerful party donors, the money ran dry. She came off as slippery — a shallow opportunist — in debates. Her campaign went bust before the first ballot was cast.

She failed to earn one single delegate.

In the end, all Ms. Harris had left were her checked boxes, which turned out to be her most valuable asset anyway. —>READ MORE HERE

DeSantis rough patch tests conservative and donor patience with top Trump alternative:

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) was once a darling for conservatives who wanted an alternative 2024 candidate to former President Donald Trump.

But in just two months of launching a presidential campaign, DeSantis is facing a harsh new reality where some donors are skeptical he has the stamina to last, prominent conservative voices appear to be turning on him, and national polls show him still significantly behind Trump, the undisputed front-runner to become the GOP’s next standard-bearer.

DeSantis launched his presidential campaign in May with a botched Twitter Spaces event that led to harsh headlines that were then followed by reports that he needed to increase his retail politicking skills. Now two reports from the New York Times and Rolling Stone this week suggest DeSantis may be losing support from the highly influential Rupert Murdoch family, which owns conservative-leaning outlets such as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post.

And another CNBC report that donors such as billionaire Citadel CEO Ken Griffin continue to “evaluate the field” is raising questions about DeSantis’s 2024 viability. But whether this is just a rough patch or the beginning of a death knell for DeSantis remains to be seen, especially given the first GOP nominating race in Iowa isn’t until January of next year.

Gregg Keller, a Republican consultant based in Missouri who is unaffiliated with any campaign, said the GOP primary campaign is comparable to the NCAA basketball tournament brackets. “In this particular instance, there are two brackets. There’s the Donald Trump bracket, which he, by definition, has already won,” Keller said. “The other bracket is the non-Trump candidate. And there are a handful of candidates who are going to have to duke it out in that semifinal for the opportunity to take on Trump in the final.”

Competitive presidential primaries are generally expensive, hard-fought, and come with unexpected developments. Trump faced 16 other candidates to claim the GOP mantle in 2016. But on his third presidential campaign, Trump’s team is moving in a competent manner that is helping thwart DeSantis’s presidential ambitions. “DeSantis is not dead, but he needs to write the ship fairly quickly,” Keller added.

The governor’s campaign and allies have pushed back against the reports arguing that this is a smear tactic from the “Washington elites” and not the actual will of Republican voters.

“The media is caught up in phony palace intrigue because they fear Ron DeSantis and are desperate to take him down. For the sake of the American people, it’s too bad serious reporting consistently takes a back seat to tabloid-style agenda-pushing,” said DeSantis spokesman Bryan Griffin in a statement to the Washington Examiner. —>READ MORE HERE

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