Does Anybody Want A DeSantis Presidency?

Last week at CPAC, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade attempted to find somebody — anybody — who said they wanted Ron DeSantis to be president over Donald Trump. Every person he asked said they preferred Donald Trump, until he found somebody in a Ron DeSantis shirt — who told him they she didn’t have a preference one way or the other.

When the traditional poll of who the best conservative in America is was finally held, Donald Trump won with sixty-two percent of the vote compared to Ron DeSantis’s twenty percent. Although this on its own is not all that important, it does show where the minds of the hard-core conservatives who attend CPAC currently are. CPAC — short for the Conservative Political Action Conference — has traditionally been essentially a yearly version of the Republican National Convention, with specific focus on the hardest of the right-wing allowed in mainstream politics. These are the same members of the far-right who vote in Republican primaries and are active in Republican politics — to put it another way, they are the people whose ideas trickle down to the general population during the general election.

Of course, 2023 was an odd year given how many high profile conservatives decided to not attend the event. The aforementioned Ron DeSantis did not show up, nor did Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, or Mike Pence. For so many high profile Republicans — especially ones so firmly established as hard line conservatives — to not attend an event specifically designed to allow them to say their views…