A thoughtful and on-point op-ed:
But here's the thing: Being the guy who's going to put an end to wokeism would be fine if it wins the election. Yet by all indications, it won't be.
As the highly-regarded GOP pollster Myra Miller of The Winston Group explained, an ability and willingness to fight back against wokes is a priority to the Republican base and will dominate the GOP primary—but that's where it ends. "These issues are not nearly as much of a focus beyond the Republican base to key groups like independents," says Miller.
Which means there's a mismatch between the strategy being deployed by many of the Republican candidates and the strategy that will win the nominee the presidency. Strategists working for Trump and DeSantis and the others in the GOP field seem to be advising their candidates to run a hard-edged campaign from beginning to end that stresses the importance of keeping boys out of girls' bathrooms and rails against drag queen story hours. Yet these are not the things most important to the Americans likely to vote in November 2024.
This is a major strategic problem for the GOP, the things that win a primary are things that hurt them in the general. With the current coalitions between the two parties the GOP is at a disadvantage an basically has to win a bunch of toss up states by narrow margins and relies on an electoral college advantage rather than actually getting majority support.
GOP candidates that would be good general election candidates stand little chance in their own primary.
With DeSantis in particular he is both not Trump and too much like Trump to really even win the primary. Trump stalwarts won't vote for him and people that want to vote against Trump see him as too much like Trump.
All of this leads me to believe Trump will yet again be the nominee or someone else not named DeSantis will capture the anti-Trump vote and kind of come out of nowhere sort of like Carter/Clinton/Obama did on the Democratic side in the past.