DeSantis’ Problem Isn’t Trump, It’s That Dems Rigged the Last Election

You might have noticed a media narrative taking shape the last few days about how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign has “stalled.” A Politico Playbook item over the weekend described it as a “failure to launch,” noting that polling for DeSantis peaked in January at 40.5 percent and has since settled in the low 20s amid a barrage of attacks from former President Donald Trump.

Playbook also cited other news outlets recently casting doubt on the DeSantis operation, from fundraising struggles to lack of endorsements to difficulties distinguishing himself from Trump on policy. DeSantis super PAC official Steve Cortes added fuel to the narrative fire in an interview Sunday night, bemoaning the polls and admitting, “clearly Donald Trump is the runaway frontrunner.”

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But maybe there’s something else going on here. If enthusiasm for DeSantis seems lacking, maybe it has little or nothing to do with DeSantis or his campaign. Perhaps what we’re seeing is less about him and still less about 2024 or the upcoming GOP primary scrum, and more about what happened in 2020. Put bluntly, maybe what we’re seeing now is an early sign that what Democrats, Big Tech, and corporate media did in 2020 was inject poison into our political system, and the 2024 election cycle is going to show us just how deadly that poison is.

Recall that 2020 was unlike any election in American history. One need not declare that it was “stolen” to admit that it was obviously rigged. After all, the people and institutions that rigged it have freely admitted what they did. They suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, censored what Americans could say on social media, introduced unprecedented changes to our voting system under the pretext of pandemic precautions, and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into putatively nonpartisan local election offices through Mark Zuckerberg-connected nonprofits for the sole purpose of turning out Democrat voters in swing states.

Nothing like that has ever happened in American history. And it was all done for the singular purpose of ensuring that Trump would not serve a second term. What’s more, all of that came after four years of the permanent regime in Washington discarding every political norm, bending every rule, and breaking more than a few laws in a failed effort to oust Trump from office during his first term.

Now, maybe you think that’s all nonsense, or just water under the bridge. What’s done is done, we can’t go back, and even if the 2020 election wasn’t on the level we all just need to move on and go about the 2024 primary season like it’s business as usual. {snip}

Sorry, but that’s not going to happen. {snip} Many millions more believe, with even more reason, that it was rigged unfairly against Trump and that the same forces are at work now to rig it against whomever the GOP nominee turns out to be.

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To win over GOP primary voters who supported Trump in the past two cycles, these candidates have to speak to the injustice that was done in 2020, they have to admit what happened, name who did it, and affirm that we cannot have a self-governing republic if that’s how our elections are going to be.

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