Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and New Hampshire aren’t exactly made for each other.
The “Live Free or Die” state that elected an abortion rights-supporting Republican governor four times doesn’t seem like a good fit for a fierce culture warrior who signed a six-week abortion ban.
Complicating matters even more, DeSantis’ early efforts to break through in the state that will hold the nation’s first GOP presidential primary has been a mixed bag.
Gone is an early polling lead over former President Donald Trump. His supportive super PAC has spent a small fraction of what it’s spending on ads in other early states and hasn’t been on the airwaves since early May. His first visit as an official candidate drew questions for his reluctance to take questions from voters.
And DeSantis’ scheduled return to the state Tuesday yielded yet another hiccup: a clash with a women’s group angry that he scheduled an event on the same day as a luncheon headlined by Trump.
But there have been bright spots, like DeSantis selling out a Republican dinner earlier this year.
New Hampshire will be an important state for DeSantis to show he can take on Trump, who won the primary there convincingly in 2016. If he wins in the first caucuses in Iowa but then loses in New Hampshire, it will put a significant road bump in his momentum. And if he loses both states, it will raise serious questions about his ability to win the GOP nomination.
New Hampshire observers nevertheless see a path for DeSantis. They point to a Republican electorate showing signs of interest in some of the cultural issues DeSantis built his campaign around. Republican voters there also have a history of embracing a candidate who takes a hard line on immigration, like Trump. Meanwhile, the governor’s messaging in the state has focused on his résumé, military background and Covid-era policies, and stayed away from social issues like abortion.
“It’s wide open,” said Dave Carney, a longtime New Hampshire-based Republican strategist and veteran of presidential campaigns who is not affiliated with any 2024 candidate. “I mean, he can definitely recover and get back to where he was and make it a two-man race.”
The DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down super PAC has spent big across the early state ad landscape, with New Hampshire as a notable exception.
Out of the $14.6 million it’s spent on ads so far, $2.7 million were spent in Iowa, $1.8 million in South Carolina, $600,000 in Nevada — and just $74,000 in New Hampshire, a state where the super PAC has been off the air for more than a month, according to data from the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
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Never Back Down insists it’s not for a lack of interest in New Hampshire, saying it plans to pour resources into on-the-ground organization and voter outreach. And a top super PAC official told NBC News that the group is ahead of its targets there, reaching them at a faster pace than in the other three early states.
“By mid-July, we would have talked to every single one of our primary targets,” said Kristin Davison, chief operating officer at Never Back Down.
The PAC has eight staffers in the state, and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on its ground game as well as in other modes of voter contact, including 10 mail pieces, digital advertising, a texting operation and door-to-door outreach, Davison said.
“That’s a lot of people, that’s a lot of money,” she added. “It’s a very targeted and data-driven effort.”
Trump’s campaign declined to respond on the record for this article.
Still, Trump has led by more than 20 points in New Hampshire since April. And the DeSantis team has been trying to put up some feisty fights in the Granite State, at times needling Trump on the trail.
Last week, not to be outdone by Trump’s sellout luncheon for the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women, DeSantis’ campaign scheduled a rival event elsewhere in the state. All of that caught the ire of the women’s group. The organization publicly complained, expressing “disappointment” in DeSantis. But after that, several women resigned, expressing their own disappointment in the group for failing to remain impartial.
Kate Day, who once served as a Trump delegate, resigned her position on the advisory board after the group criticized DeSantis for scheduling his event at the same time as its Lilac Luncheon. Day supports DeSantis but said she resigned because she thought the group’s actions went against its commitment to remain impartial as an organization.
She said she was not contacted by anyone in DeSantis’ orbit before making her decision.
“Trump was great for his time. We’re ready to move on. A lot of people have Trump fatigue,” Day said.
“It shows that this is absolutely intensifying,” said Matthew Bartlett, a New Hampshire native and longtime Republican political operative in the state, of the dispute that arose between the two campaigns this week.
Bartlett said he suspected that Trump’s team was behind the group’s criticism of DeSantis and that it was absurd to expect a presidential candidate not to compete in one of the most competitive presidential states. “This is game on. This is presidential politics. This is smash-mouth. You better bring your A game; it’s not amateur hour.”
New Hampshire is expected to hold the GOP’s first presidential primary following the party’s caucuses in Iowa. The two early states have different voter profiles, with evangelicals accounting for a large share of Iowa caucusgoers and New Hampshire’s primary electorate leaning more independent or libertarian.
Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who finished second to Trump in New Hampshire’s 2016 GOP primary, cautioned DeSantis against campaigning with one message to win Iowa and another in New Hampshire.
“I’ve never thought that all this social issue stuff was really a winner, anyway, but if that’s who he is, that’s what he’s got to do,” said Kasich, an NBC News contributor who has become known as a strident anti-Trump voice in the party. “Your message will probably resonate someplace better than in others. But if you’re trying to figure out, ‘Well, how do I take the message, and change this one, and try to use that one?’ — to me, it’s not worth it.”
Carney, the longtime New Hampshire strategist, said DeSantis’ focus on cultural and social issues — gender-affirming care and school curriculum, for example — are best framed to voters there as matters of parental rights.
“We don’t do a lot of church events like they do in Iowa,” Carney said. “I don’t know that there’s a huge gaping lane for some of the folks who are [out for] the evangelical vote. Probably a third or something of the primary vote. But I don’t think a third of it is available. Trump’s got a bunch of that.”
Bill O’Brien, a GOP operative who headed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s bid in the state and now represents the state on the Republican National Committee, said he’s seeing culture war issues gain traction.
“I think there’s a great deal of concern about what’s going on nationally. Certainly we don’t come at it with the same intense religious approach as other states, but there’s a great deal of concern with parental rights among primary voters here,” O’Brien said.
But there’s still the factor of how Trump’s legal troubles will play into the primary. A new NBC News national poll found that the former president’s lead in the GOP primary field actually grew after his latest indictment.
O’Brien noted that he’s seeing “profound irritation” spreading across the state party over the federal government’s actions and that people who said they wouldn’t vote for Trump again are now vowing they will, just to spite the government.
“We didn’t understand the intensity of it,” he said of Cruz’s team in 2016 and the support for Trump. “It’s kind of similar this time.”
So far, the battle on the airwaves in New Hampshire hasn’t exactly kicked into gear. The top ad spender by a significant margin is businessman Perry Johnson, according to AdImpact, while the only candidates to spend at least six-figures on ads are South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
Trump, at the moment, is the clear front-runner. Carney questioned why DeSantis waited so long to enter the race officially, rather than jumping in back in January, when he could have capitalized on his “red hot” status. At the time, DeSantis had a 12-point lead over Trump, according to a University of New Hampshire survey.
But DeSantis’ numbers in the state have since plummeted. Several recent polls have shown him trailing Trump by more than 20 points in the state.
“Right now,” Carney said, “the other candidates are not saying, ‘Oooo, man, Ron DeSantis is at 16%, we’re going to back down.'”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
