Ross Douthat fears we are replaying the primaries of 2016, with Ron DeSantis playing the role of Ted Cruz. Is he right?
Let’s break that proposition into two parts. During the process in 2016, Trump was the front-runner in the polls and was running in his own lane. He had plurality, but not majority, support in the GOP. A reasonable person could (just barely) believe at the time that he was a brilliant businessman operating outside the system who could improve America by making deals. Today, little of that is true. Trump is still the front-runner, but he has an extensive record, he is no longer running in his own lane, and nobody thinks he is any kind of a moderate pragmatist. This time around, his voters want to burn it down. The structure of the race, therefore, is very different.
As to the Cruz/DeSantis analogy, Cruz was running as the champion of pious evangelicals, whom he believed (not without reason) to be a majority of GOP voters. It turned out that he was wrong; the voters wanted an uncouth, amoral man who would make a display of fighting for them. DeSantis is running as an electable version of Trump, with all of the man on golf cart’s ideological and identity prejudices. That isn’t the same thing, either; if 2016 Cruz has an analogy, it is Mike Pence, not DeSantis.