On the eve of the first indictment, the night before the former president flew to Manhattan to be fingerprinted and arraigned, Donald Trump’s pollster told RealClearPolitics a paradox: Historic legal trouble would “really help us in the primary.” At least, the pollster added, “in the short term.”
Allies of Ron DeSantis expected as much.
Top officials with a group supporting the Florida governor’s campaign, a super PAC called Never Back Down, started a real-time experiment to quantify the fallout from the indictment while testing their ability to conserve DeSantis’ support, maintain his positive image, and reach new voters.
Among those who will actually end up voting next year, they believe their messaging surge worked. An internal poll of a head-to-head race in Iowa, conducted at the end of May, shows Trump and DeSantis running roughly even at 45 percent and 43 percent among likely voters.
Never Back Down used Georgia, where the governor’s support may be strongest, as a control case, running no new ads in that market and then comparing the Peach State to the first four primary and caucus states where they surged resources. RealClearPolitics obtained the results comparing Georgia and Iowa the group used as metrics to measure their approach.
In Georgia, DeSantis experienced a net loss of nine points. In Iowa, where Never Back Down surged political ads, he experienced a net gain of four points. In a head-to-head matchup between the governor and the former president between March 13 and May 8, Trump’s margin over DeSantis in Georgia grew to 18 points. In Iowa, at the same time, it widened to only 10 points.
“The difference between these tells us that the ad treatment had an eight-point impact on the difference between DeSantis and Trump,” an internal polling memo prepared by pollster Chris Wilson announced. Or, as a person familiar with that work told RCP, the experiment led to a sort of “no shit, Sherlock takeaway from all of this.” Namely, the source said that “political advertising still does work.”
The results inform the strategy of the group at a moment when Trump has again reprised his role as martyr, arguing to the primary electorate that his legal troubles and perceived persecution make him their inevitable nominee.
As the closest competition to Trump, DeSantis finds himself in the middle of the melee. Six other candidates have entered the GOP field since Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump in April. Those contenders attack him from far back in the field, hoping to wrest away his position. The former president and his allies, meanwhile, continue to spend more going after his chief competitor than he did to support Republicans in the previous midterms.
The leaders of Never Back Down expected all of this. They anticipated that the first indictment would stir up outrage and bring out support for Trump among those sympathetic to his cause – even the liberal editorial board of the Washington Post panned the Manhattan charges as “a poor test case for prosecuting a former president.”
They also braced for a sort of DeSantis vs. the World scenario where Republicans and Democrats trained their fire on him. By their count, in Iowa alone since May 10, organizations affiliated with Trump and Democrats ran 9,705 cable spots attacking DeSantis on broadcast and cable television.
That apparently isn’t all bad. Despite those broadsides, and perhaps partly because of them, Never Back Down metrics show their candidate enjoys near-universal name recognition in Iowa. By their numbers, three-quarters of likely caucus-goers consistently view DeSantis in favorable terms, while just 17% hold an unfavorable view of him. This includes 69 percent of college-educated men who report having a favorable view of the candidate.
Their conclusions: DeSantis has weathered the attacks; the primary has truly become a two-person race; and Florida’s governor “still stands as the only one who can beat Trump.” They expect DeSantis to capitalize on his name recognition and attract new support as voters learn more about him. The words they found that the electorate used most to describe DeSantis are “Florida governor.” The word most used to describe Trump: “indicted.”
The leadership of Never Back Down sees the charges against Trump, not unlike the Trump pollster, as “a positive for him in the moment.” Where they differ: Beyond the next couple of months, DeSantis allies believe those legal woes will become “a weakness long term” as Republicans begin to question whether Trump can win a rematch with President Biden.
As of now, though, Trump is riding high. He leads DeSantis by more than 30 points in the RealClearPolitics national average, enjoying commanding 20+ point leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire. GOP leaders can’t help but notice. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy criticized Trump before quickly backtracking and publicly appeasing him.
On Tuesday, McCarthy suggested during a CNBC interview that Trump might not be the “strongest” candidate in a general election. By Wednesday, the highest-ranking Republican was sending fundraising emails, telling supporters, “Trump is the STRONGEST opponent to Biden!”
Despite the public polling that GOP leadership and pundits read, the Never Back Down team has taken a more granular detailed approach, focusing on the four early states they say they “need to keep close.”
Never Back Down has built itself into a political machine, taking on the ground game responsibilities usually reserved for campaigns. The group has plans to knock on the door of every DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. In Iowa, as the New York Times previously reported, its volunteers will knock five times.
The pollster guiding that effort is Chris Wilson, an alum of the 2016 Ted Cruz campaign that won Iowa and who was credited by the Associated Press as having “helped the campaign read voter minds.” His polling firm estimates that in the four early states, there will be 5.5 million voters. They built a contact profile for each individual. In Iowa alone, they peg the number of caucus-goers at 217,000.
The Never Back Down surge in the first four states tested what mix of outreach worked best – television, radio, direct contact, and often a mix of the three. In some markets, the group even ran tests to determine whether seven or four text messages worked better.
That kind of granular outreach led the group to conclude that voters see a qualitative difference between the Manhattan and federal indictments of Trump. Conservatives panned the first indictment, charges stemming from hush payments Trump allegedly made to porn star Stormy Daniels, and rallied around the former president. The second indictment, the federal case that led Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, to conclude that his old boss could be “toast,” has contributed to the feeling among some voters that Trump would enter the general election significantly weakened.
The rest of the field, meanwhile, struggles to gain traction. The DeSantis allies note how competitors, such as South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a billionaire, have spent millions but still publicly poll in the single digits.
In the months ahead, Never Back Down argues that DeSantis is well-positioned to continue tapping into the anti-elitist energy that catapulted Trump to the nomination. Both are well-known for antagonizing elites in politics and media. But DeSantis, they maintain, has the credibility to confront “wokeness” in the corporate world and culture arena, competing for social conservatives in areas Trump would find unnatural.
To flesh out that contrast, the group pointed RCP to reports that Trump welcomed and even praised the inclusion of transgender individuals in the Miss Universe pageant, while DeSantis has made confronting the perceived excess of the sexual revolution, particularly when minors are involved, a main theme of his campaign.
In socially conservative Iowa, the group’s May polling shows that in an immediate contest, a plurality of Christians (46 percent) would caucus for DeSantis compared to 45 percent for Trump. A majority of “traditional Republicans,” 60 percent, would also caucus for DeSantis over Trump.
Drawing from that data, the group believes DeSantis is well positioned to win. It remains to be seen whether the two will ever find themselves crossways on stage. The former president has signaled that he may skip the primary debates altogether. The pro-DeSantis super PAC, which does not (and cannot legally) coordinate with the candidate, expects that if Trump skips that contest, the governor won’t participate either.
It is after all, in their estimation, a two-man contest.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire
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