https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/team-desantis-were-about-action-not-beltway-chatter
There’s no doubt Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has fallen far behind former President Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican nomination polls. In the last days of February, Trump had a 12.8 percentage point lead over DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, with all the other Republican challengers and likely challengers way, way back. Now, Trump’s lead over DeSantis is 29.2 points, with all the other GOP candidates still farther behind. DeSantis is actually closer to the bottom of the field than he is to Trump.
That has led to a lot of criticism of the DeSantis campaign and talk that they’re just not up to the job. “The DeSantis people are rookies,” one veteran of New Hampshire Republican politics, Fergus Cullen, told Politico recently. Reams have been written about DeSantis himself not being particularly skilled at the kind of schmoozing and glad-handing required of presidential candidates dealing with the public and donors alike.
The loudest critical voice, of course, comes from Trump, whose ratings have soared amid a politicized indictment in New York and a politicized rape lawsuit in New York. Trump has used the increased support to launch a relentless series of attacks on DeSantis. The latest comes this week from top Trump campaign officials Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who released a memo titled “DeSantis is Burning Through Cash Just to Slide Further In the Polls.”
LaCivita and Wiles accuse the DeSantis campaign of wasting millions of dollars on ineffective advertising to “fill the vacuum of leadership the governor left in Florida while campaigning (horribly) overseas in Europe.” Doing so amounts to defrauding donors, the Trump team says: “What you are witnessing is a fleecing on an epic scale. Tens of millions of donor dollars spent, while poll numbers … drop.”
Such concern trolling is obviously an irritant for the DeSantis camp. But they have a simple response: While Trump is campaigning (and fighting off legal actions), DeSantis is … governing. And DeSantis is governing in a distinctly conservative way, a way that embeds conservative principles in the laws of the nation’s third-largest state.