OPINION:
A version of this story appeared in the On Background newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive On Background delivered directly to your inbox each Friday.
The Iowa State Fair has mercifully come and gone, and the first debate among the GOP presidential candidates will be behind us by the time this column goes to press. The good news is that the contours of the Republican presidential nominating contest are starting to become clearer.
The bad news is that the campaign is likely to get messier because there is a high degree of confidence that the race is, as it has been for a while, a contest between former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
How can you tell? For a moment, forget polling, almost all of which indicates that Mr. Trump has a substantial lead and Mr. DeSantis is ensconced in a distant second place.
Instead, pay attention to what the other campaigns are doing. In Iowa, Trump supporters and assorted liberals didn’t bother with Vivek Ramaswamy or Sen. Tim Scott. They heckled Mr. DeSantis, going so far as embarrassing themselves by making a racket while he was chatting with Gov. Kim Reynolds.
Mr. Trump attempted to counter-program Mr. DeSantis by bringing a handful of Florida’s members of Congress who have endorsed Mr. Trump to Iowa. He did not bring in members of the South Carolina or Indiana delegations.
It is not just Mr. Trump. Former Vice President Mike Pence has chipped at Mr. DeSantis (repeating, unfortunately, some of the left’s attacks on the educational curriculum), as has former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has attacked Mr. DeSantis, although, in fairness, he is mostly focused on Mr. Trump. Even Mr. Scott has gotten in on it.
The bottom line is that all of these rocks have been directed at either Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis. No one is wasting any time, effort or ammunition on Ms. Haley, Mr. Scott or any of the other munchkins in the race.
Nor should they.
Mr. Trump understands this. He spends just about all of his campaign energy attacking Mr. DeSantis, with good reason. The examples are numerous, but you can find a modest sampling here, here, here and here.
In addition to this aggressive earned media effort, Mr. DeSantis has been by far the target of more negative ads ($20 million so far) than anyone else in the campaign. For comparative purposes, Mr. Trump and President Biden have had less than $10 million spent against each of them.
That amount of cash suggests that the Trump and Biden campaigns understand which of the candidates is their actual competition.
So do the legacy media. For reasons financial and ideological, they very much want the former president to be the Republican nominee. Mr. Trump is a one-man content provider who drives news cycles and audiences.
The legacy media also know that the survey research indicates that he would probably be easier to defeat in a general election than Mr. DeSantis would.
They are not shy about tossing kerosene on the fire, either. As NBC News stated in a recent article: “But when it comes to attacks, aides and operatives in most campaigns agree the bulk of the fire is likely to be trained on DeSantis — whether Trump is there or not.”
We are obviously closer to the beginning than the end of the nominating process. That said, the race has been static — centered on the two Florida men — for a while. It will likely be that way until the end.
That means that the process will become increasingly messy as other campaigns start to run out of cash, ideas and patience, and start to flail at the front-runners.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House. He can be reached at mike@mwrstrat.com.
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