Former Republican strategist turned Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson scorched Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a Substack article previewing the upcoming Republican presidential debate in Miami, mocking him as someone who has already failed before any primary ballots have even been cast for 2024.
Indeed, argued Wilson, the GOP's shot at preventing former President Donald Trump from winning the nomination all but died long ago.
"I’ve talked — and talked, and talked, and talked about the pointlessness of the GOP debates this election cycle and their utter lack of substance or meaning," wrote Wilson. "The desperate, panting desire to somehow slap the paddles on the chest of the mouldering corpse of the GOP and watch some candidate rise to smite Donald Trump is a fantasy enjoyed by the media, a handful of true-believer campaign staffers (not consultants; they know better), and the handful of gentry Republicans who want to take their country club to back from the Visigoths."
But in particular, Wilson continued, the likely loser of the night will be DeSantis, who began the contest as a solid runner-up to Trump who even beat him in some polls, but after months of public scrutiny and a disastrous inability to connect with voters on the campaign trail, is headed nowhere fast, is threatening to slip behind some of his challengers like former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and is even trailing Trump by 35 points in Florida itself.
"Rumor is [Haley will] try for more distance from Trump in a bid to land more of the major donors who ran from DeSantis when it became clear his campaign is a plague ship stuck at the lazaretto," wrote Wilson. "[H]is clammy, creepy, pissy performance in the last debates would have led most candidates to consider an alternate career, perhaps as goat-herd or blacksmith ... He’s still in zombie second place in some states, but the predicate for Bootsy is fading fast."
Ultimately, Wilson concluded, DeSantis' prospects will likely be over before Floridians even get to vote: "Trump will have already likely won the California primaries (Trump is +34% in CA, see page 19 of the CA Data Viewpoint poll) and Texas primaries. *Trump is +41 in TX, per the latest YouGov survey.) ... as well as sweeping every other Super Tuesday state. This ends badly."
