Ron vs Don: the Republican battle for 2024 has already begun

After storming to re-election as Florida governor on Tuesday night, Ron DeSantis gave his supporters in Tampa an unmistakable hint about a run for the White House.

“We’ve got so much more to do,” he said, with a giant US flag towering behind him and his wife Casey. “And I have only begun to fight.”

Just over 200 miles away at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Donald Trump — DeSantis’ most high-profile constituent — was brooding.

The former president helped propel DeSantis’ political career, but the governor is now shaping up to be Trump’s chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

By the end of the week, Trump was openly railing against DeSantis, giving him the kind of bullying treatment he has reserved in the past for his biggest political opponents, including a nickname.

“Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games!“, Trump thundered. He suggested DeSantis would meet the same fate as “Low Energy Jeb Bush”, the former Florida governor who ran for president in 2016 only to be crushed by Trump in the Republican primary.

“[I] easily knocked them out, one by one. We’re in exactly the same position now,” said Trump. “They will keep coming after us, MAGA, but ultimately, we will win.”

The votes have not all been counted after Tuesday’s midterms and control of both houses of Congress has yet to be decided, but a ferocious battle for the leadership of the party has already broken out — one that could define Republicans for years to come.

Trump has been gearing up to announce his next bid for the White House next week. But after Republicans failed to win the huge number of seats in the midterms they had expected, many are now blaming Trump for spoiling their chances.

Trump backed some extreme, election-denying candidates who stumbled on Tuesday, such as Don Bolduc, a losing Senate candidate in New Hampshire, a seat the party had hoped to win. He also held a series of large rallies, including last Saturday with Mehmet Oz, the defeated Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, that may have backfired by reminding voters of the turmoil of the Trump years.

Republicans who were seen as more distant from Trump, or more moderate, performed far better — such as Brian Kemp, a Republican who was re-elected as Georgia governor. He won the wrath of hardcore Trump supporters by insisting that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 presidential election in the state.

Time for a change?

With some in the party turning on Trump and scouting around for an alternative candidate to support for 2024, DeSantis has emerged as the most potent early challenger. Not only did he win the governor’s race in Florida — a state that has seen razor-tight elections in recent decades — by almost 20 percentage points, but he even won in the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade county.

“I think below the surface, there is a sort of coming-to-Jesus moment among some Republicans that Trump is just not going to get it done in 2024, and they need to go in a new direction,” says Brad Coker, the Florida pollster and managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy. “DeSantis offers them a pretty solid choice”.

However, DeSantis’ success on Tuesday means that he is immediately in the line of fire for an angry, resentful Trump. Party leaders do not know if DeSantis will have the fortitude to weather the ferocious and personal attacks that could come his way as the former president tries to regain the initiative among Republican voters.

“He will have to deal with Trump in the coming months,” says Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican member of Congress from Florida. “There’s no question that given Trump’s ego and his vindictiveness, that he will do everything in his power to destroy DeSantis and make sure that he is buried as quickly as possible, the way Trump deals with anyone who he perceives as a competitor.”

There have been many other moments during the former president’s political career when his grip on the Republican party appeared to be weakening, only for Trump to find ways to reassert himself.

Just this year, the combination of the revelations of the congressional hearings into the January 6 attack, which showed Trump fuelling the deadly riot at the Capitol, as well as the criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents, triggered unease within some in the party.

However, the backlash over the past few days against Trump has been more widespread and deeper, because many in the party believe he spoiled what might have otherwise been a big Republican victory given the anxiety about inflation and president Biden’s low approval ratings.

“The swing voters in the suburbs cared about the cost of living and crime, but then in the final days of the campaign Trump started holding rallies and talking about running again,” says Josh Novotney, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania. “He just reminded them of why they didn’t vote Republican in 2020.”

The final outcome of the midterm elections was still undecided on Friday, with Republicans likely to win a very narrow majority in the House of Representatives and control of the Senate depending on final results in close races in Arizona, Nevada and a run-off in Georgia set for early December.

But Republicans underperformed dramatically compared to the expectations of many pollsters and strategists.

“Where Republicans faltered it often had to do with the Trump-infused character of the party. Republicans don’t have to change much, but they do have to give up on Trump and that’s not easy for the party to do”, says Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank.

George Gunning, a longtime Trump supporter since 2016 and an elected Republican official in Philadelphia, adds: “I think it would be a good idea for Republicans, regardless of what they think of the former president, to turn the page and move on . . . what we have done so far has not worked.”

Mike Lawler, a Republican who defeated incumbent Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney in New York’s Hudson Valley, told CNN: “I would like to see the party move forward. I think any time you are focused on the future, you can’t so much go to the past.”

Some prominent voices in conservative media have also been heavily critical. Karl Rove, former president George W Bush’s senior adviser, called on Republicans to “reject nuts” in a Wall Street Journal column on Thursday and “focus on improving the lives of ordinary Americans, rather than remaining mired in one man’s grievances”.

The New York Post, the rightwing, Murdoch-owned tabloid, called the former president “Trumpty Dumpty”. “Can all the GOP’s men put the party together again?” it asked.

Loyal support

Whether Trump can actually be defeated in a Republican primary is questionable: his support has dropped but remains high. According to a Morning Consult survey, 48 per cent of Republicans favour Trump for the 2024 White House race, compared to 26 per cent favouring DeSantis, and another 26 per cent backing other candidates.

Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, says that Trump’s base of support might be weaker than polls suggest, with up to a half of the party’s voters potentially open to a switch. “These are people who voted for him twice. They approved of his job performance. They would vote for him again in a heartbeat against Biden,” he says. “But they are not at all sure that they want to go back to all the drama and the divisions.”

Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state and CIA director who is considered a possible rival for the White House, took a swipe at Trump without mentioning him on Thursday in a Twitter post that criticised the party’s performance in the midterms.

“Conservatives are elected when we deliver. Not when we just rail on social media,” he said. “That’s how we can win. We fight for families and a strong America.”

For now, DeSantis is clearly the favourite to take on Trump, even though he has so far been hesitant to either declare his intention to run or criticise the former president. The governor’s office declined to comment for this article.

“He just had a seismic victory in Florida. It speaks volumes about his leadership, people are very happy with him,” says Lilian Rodriguez Baz, co-chair of Ready for Ron, a super Pac fundraising to support a possible DeSantis run in 2024.

“We don’t want to get into commentary about something Trump related, that’s not the focus [but] I think he definitely has national appeal,” says Rodriguez Baz. “I think it’s transcendent’.

But although DeSantis is known for a combative style similar to the former president, he is largely untested outside Florida politics and it is unclear how he will handle the scuffles with Trump: this week, he did not respond to the barbs from the former president.

“By no means do I think this is going to be easy or that he has got this locked up,” says Curbelo, the former member of Congress.

One former White House official who served under Trump says the former president will be hard to take on. “Trump is kind of like Teflon, he has a lot thrown at him, there’s a lot of finger-pointing, it always comes back to him, and he always maintains strong approval ratings with voters,” he says.

Some Republicans have been pushing Trump to delay his presidential announcement until after the Senate run-off race in Georgia between his preferred candidate Herschel Walker and Democrat Raphael Warnock. But so far Trump is sticking to his plan. “We had tremendous success,” he told Fox News this week. “Why would anything change?”

Whatever the final results of the midterms, Republicans know they face a fateful choice about Trump.

“We have seen moments like this before, where we thought the party was going to turn against him,” says Doug Heye, a Republican strategist. “But now for the first time with DeSantis we have another option.”