![CNN Senior Political Analyst Ron Brownstein said Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' key error in his campaign is that he's trying to brand himself as former President Donald Trump. [Screenshot CNN]](https://images.dailycaller.com/image/width=960,height=411,fit=cover,f=auto/https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-02-at-4.11.36-PM-e1698955944568.png "CNN Senior Political Analyst Ron Brownstein said Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' key error in his campaign is that he's trying to brand himself as former President Donald Trump. [Screenshot CNN]")
CNN Senior Political Analyst Ron Brownstein said Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ key error in his campaign is he’s trying to brand himself as former President Donald Trump.
Brownstein argued former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is surging in the polls and can possibly do better than DeSantis.
Brownstein argued, “DeSantis is running in Iowa the way that Mike Huckabee did in ’08, Santorum in ’12, Ted Cruz in ’16, trying to consolidate Evangelical support and max out with those voters. The problem is that each of those candidates after winning Iowa immediately cratered in New Hampshire.”
Haley, on the other hand, according to Brownstein, is consolidating white collar, suburban Republican voters, which will bode well for her in New Hampshire.
Brownstein said Haley’s rise has more to do with “her and DeSantis than it yet has to do with Trump.” (RELATED: ‘She’s Gaining, You’re Not’: Fox News Host Presses DeSantis Over Haley’s Polling Surge
“She’s rising in part because she’s performed well at both debates, and she’s caught the attention of a lot of Republican voters. But DeSantis has also had problems in his performance. On paper he seems stronger than he’s been in practice, and he’s made a strategic choice that has really limited his reach. I mean, he basically has marketed himself as ‘Trump-ism without Trump.’ Turns out that the vast majority of Republican voters who want Trumpism, also want Trump,” Brownstein said.
“So Haley has had, I think, a more kind of coherent appeal to the portion of the party that’s resistant to Trump. The problem, as you’re suggesting, is that that is not a majority, and she ultimately has to find a way, if she is going to seriously challenge him, or if anybody’s going to seriously challenge him, to peel away some of those voters who now support Trump but are not irrevocably wed to him. And one question will be, whether her argument for generational change and electability will prove more appealing to those maybe-sometimes-Trump voters, than DeSantis’ version of Trumpism without Trump.”
Trump received 43% support from Iowa voters, according to a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll released Monday. Haley and DeSantis each received 16% support. Support for Haley has increased by 10 percentage points in two months, while DeSantis’ dropped by three points, and Trump gained 1 point.
The poll conducted telephone interviews from Oct. 22-26 with 404 registered voters from Iowa who say they’ll likely attend the 2024 Republican caucuses. The poll has a maximum margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.