When Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) won reelection by a whopping 20 percentage points, he cemented his status as the dominant challenger to former President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. Just eight months later, DeSantis's polling has tumbled from nearly 40% of the total primary vote share to just 15%, according to FiveThirthyEight's polling average.
The culprit? Perhaps the fact that DeSantis has established virtually no economic message in his two months of a frankly baffling campaign, while the economy remains the single greatest priority to the GOP electorate.
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In a Fox Business poll, 41% of Iowa caucus-goers prioritized the economy as the most important issue in the election. By contrast, just 15% of Iowans listed social issues, such as abortion or transgender topics, as the most important, and populist issues, such as corruption and corporate activism, came in at the bottom of the list, with a mere 9% of Iowans listing them as their priority.
The first-in-the-nation caucuses feature some of the most conservative and evangelical voters in the national electorate, and even so, ruinous inflation, the looming threat of government spending, and impending entitlement insolvency still take precedence over pronouns and six-week abortion bans. On a national level, the economy tops the list of voter priorities in both Gallup and Harvard/Harris polling, and in the case of the latter, a full majority of those polled prioritized inflation and the economy.
The tragedy of DeSantis's unforced error is that his economic record is nothing short of spectacular. Florida's labor force participation rate among adults aged 20 to 65 is 76%, on par with New York. During COVID — another DeSantis success story inextricably linked to the economy as a greater issue — Florida's 2020 economic contraction was smaller than that of the national average, and its rebound has been consistently greater than the national average.
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It's not that social issues don't matter. But when the value of your dollar has collapsed by 16% since President Joe Biden took office, the economy is an issue only the most privileged have the luxury of ignoring. And although equities have been on a tear since the start of the year, the Dow is only up 11% since the start of Biden's presidency, and the Nasdaq is up just 3%. Compare that to 30 months into Donald Trump's presidency, when the Dow was up 35% and the Nasdaq had more than doubled. While Trump is hardly the most disciplined messenger, voters across the country remember that despite the tweets, their 401k accounts boomed.
All of the contenders campaigning to run the free world must remember that also includes the planet's greatest economic engine. If you're a candidate not named Trump, you literally cannot afford not to.