Five days after a disappointing midterm election result and two days before Donald Trump is expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid, Republicans are grappling with an almost existential quandary: Who can lead the party to a post-Trump future?
Many donors and operatives are already raving over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis , who has fashioned himself as a Trump-lite Republican and cruised to a nearly 20-point victory over Democrat Charlie Crist on Tuesday night, flipping Miami-Dade County — a heavily Hispanic, densely populated county that has not been won by a Republican gubernatorial candidate in two decades.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, says the party’s electorate can be divided into three key buckets. A small group, roughly 10 percent, are “Never Trumpers,” Republicans who have long and vocally opposed Trump. A far larger group, about 40 percent, are “Always Trumpers,” his hardcore base that will never abandon him.
And Youngkin — whose 2021 victory in a state Biden had won by 10 points the year before put him on the radar of donors — spent the midterms traveling the country campaigning for Republicans and growing his base of support. At the end of September, he hostedfor donors at a luxury resort outside Charlottesville, which was widely seen as a prelude to Youngkin’s announcing a presidential campaign.
Several Trump advisers said the former president viewed DeSantis and Youngkin — both of whom he has publicly lashed out at in recent days — as among his most formidable political rivals, and has smarted for more than a year at what he sees as Youngkin’s overly positive media coverage. Trump thinks his support for both of them helped propel them to victory and they have not been sufficiently grateful, one person close to Trump said.
Later this week, Christie, Sen. Ted Cruz , DeSantis, Haley, Hogan, Pence, Pompeo, Scott, and Youngkin will all address the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual meeting in Las Vegas — the first major opportunity after the midterms for them to present themselves as alternatives to Trump. “You have worked hard over the past two years, and we all appreciate the time you took away from your family to work towards victory yesterday,” Palatucci wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “But we have to face the fact that most of our candidates and the party in general underperformed by any objective measure.
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