Conservative Jonah Goldberg floated the question in a Feb. 8 piece in the Dispatch: "Is Ron DeSantis Just Scott Walker 2.0?" Goldberg is not alone in drawing a comparison between the current Florida governor and the former Wisconsin governor. The idea is that DeSantis, a presumed 2024 candidate for president, might founder as a national candidate in the same way that Walker, a fellow conservative, did. Now, in a New York Times analysis, Nate Cohn makes a case that DeSantis is a much stronger potential candidate than Walker ever was. A key stat explains why: DeSantis is at 32% in the early polls, while Walker never cracked 7%. What's more, DeSantis is in elite company with such strong support this early.
"Since 1976, only six candidates who hadn’t previously run for president or vice president have managed to consistently attract more than half of Mr. DeSantis’s support in the early polls," writes Cohn. They would be Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani (this was in the 2008 race, when he had strong support after 9/11), George W. Bush, Ted Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. If you eliminate those who benefited from family history or extraordinary events, that leaves DeSantis in the company of only Obama and Reagan, "arguably the two most impressive political figures of the last half-century." None of this means DeSantis will withstand a pummeling from Donald Trump during a televised debate, writes Cohn, but he has put himself in a much stronger position than Walker at this stage in the campaign. (Read the full analysis.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
