2022 was a bad year for conventional wisdom [Trump/DeSantis edition]

August, 2022

 Hear Me Out: Trump Won’t Run Again by Jeremy Stahl writing for Slate.

April, 2023

 DC Insiders and GOPs Wake Up and Smell the Coffee by Josh Marshall

It seems like the whole political world is waking up to the reality that absent some dramatic and unlikely new development, the 2024 GOP primary isn’t just Donald Trump’s to lose, it’s very difficult to come up with a scenario in which he does lose. One new poll illustrates numerically what is clear enough from the news in front of us. In a head-to-head race, A Yahoo/Yougov poll showed Donald Trump jumping to a 26-point lead over Ron DeSantis (57%–31%) from a 8-point lead less than two weeks ago. As recently as February, it was a 4-point lead. In a ten-candidate field — the more real-world scenario — Trump holds 52% support while DeSantis falls to 21%. 

...

Something like this state of affairs may continue for the better part of the year, with Donald Trump dominating the race with no clear and credible challenger. Or we may see another candidate like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin rocket forth like a GOP primary memestock harnessing the same latent Trump-skeptical votes that fueled Ron DeSantis’s rise in late 2022. But those boomlets are fueled by the hope that the chosen candidate might be able to unseat Trump rather than any particular attachment to the candidate themselves. So it can crater as quickly as it rises. Once it becomes clear they can’t unseat Trump, most of the support disintegrates. 

If I have the time, I'll go back and do a deep dive into the Stahl piece, which was awful as a piece of analysis, but was pretty good as a bad example. For now though we'll just leave it up as a reminder that almost all of the mainstream press (the NYT, Slate, Politico, and who knows how many others) were fully invested in the DeSantis Ascendant/Trump in Ruins narrative. We called this out as wishful analytics at the time, making many of the same points we made in 2015 in response to the first incarnation of the "Trump won't get the nomination" narrative.

I really like Marshall's memestock analogy. It captures the bubble mentality around not ______ candidates, from Scott Walker to Ron DeSantis to whoever the press corps' next GameStop is going to be.