If former President Donald Trump were to go up against popular Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the presidency today, Trump would still knock out DeSantis despite the the governor’s rise in popularity in important states over the last year.
That’s according to CNN political commentator and New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp, who joins host Andy Levy on this week’s episode of political podcast The New Abnormal.
Speaking about whether DeSantis is the unofficial frontrunner for 2024, Cupp predicted that this week’s backlash against Trump will eventually “deflate” and that “when you look at head-to-head matchups, theoretical matchups, Trump still crushes him in a lot of the polls.”
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“What Trump is so good at are these blunt attacks that get right to the heart. I mean that’s not smart, it’s not clever, it’s not interesting, it’s really lazy, but it was effective and I don’t think we should underestimate how effective Trump will be if he fully turns on Ron DeSantis.”
Cupp said: “I’m not sure the cult of DeSantis is strong enough to fend off Trump,” adding, “I’m just not sure I’ve never seen anything like Trump in the way he can completely decapitate a political rival.”
Elsewhere on this post election-themed episode, guest host Sam Brodey, The Daily Beast’s congressional correspondent, reflects on how we underestimated what Democrats were working with that really resonated with voters.
“It turns out for a lot of people, abortion specifically was really, really, really salient. And the polls did not reflect that. I think it should be said too that you can’t underestimate how deftly Democratic candidates messaged around this, but they also got a lot of help because on the abortion issue, Republicans just kept stepping on rakes and making this an issue in a way that was harmful to them when it didn’t need to be. Republicans kept finding a way to put this back in as an issue.”
Ari Berman, Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, echoes Brodey, reminding us that “this was the first time in U.S. history that a constitutional right had been given and taken away.”
“Abortion is pretty much an unsettled issue in most states in the country right now, unless you’re in a safely red or a safely blue state. So pretty much in every swing state it’s an unsettled issue and so it very much was on people’s minds. I think the media thought it was a sexy story in June. Then they thought it was a boring story in October. But for voters it never became any less important.”
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
