My new piece on the cover of TIME takes a look at the GOP presidential primary race: why Trump has built up a massive lead, why he still looks beatable in Iowa, and how the candidates and voters are approaching the contest.
It is somehow both early and late in a Republican primary campaign of maximum consequence, the race that will determine whether next year’s election turns into the sequel that few Americans claim to want: Biden vs. Trump, once again. Too early, rival campaigns and many voters say, for people to start paying attention and making up their minds about a primary season half a year away. And yet it already feels too late for anyone to lay a finger on Trump, whose lead in polls stands at 30 or 40 points.
Here’s the state of play according to Team DeSantis:
On his recent swings through the state, DeSantis has held town halls and meet-and-greets, popped into small-town coffeehouses, and traipsed through sweaty fairgrounds. “We’ve got to run the long race, not the short race,” DeSantis’ newly installed campaign manager, James Uthmeier, tells me. “It’s back to basics, follow your gut, listen to the voters. Trump is not what’s in the eyesight, it’s the voters, the Iowans, the people that are struggling.”
DeSantis, like everyone else, wants to believe the campaign is about something else—The Issues, the current President, the price of tea in China—when it is self-evidently about one thing and one thing only, the singular, binary question that has perplexed the political system for so many years: Can Trump Be Stopped?
And here’s how things look over in Trumpworld:
The former President’s team can hardly believe how lucky they’ve been. Trump’s campaign started under the shadow of a disastrous midterm election, a dinner with a white supremacist, and a lackluster November announcement. But the revelations that Biden and Mike Pence also improperly took home classified documents, along with the ongoing legal saga involving Hunter Biden, have helped muddy the waters despite pundits’ protestations that those cases are orders of magnitude less severe than the criminal charges Trump faces in New York, Florida, Washington, and Georgia, which range from falsifying business records to conspiring to defraud the United States. And Trump’s own rivals have echoed his argument that the various prosecutions are politically motivated. “It’s a message that has a resonance with Republican voters,” Trump campaign strategist Chris LaCivita tells me. What worries the campaign most at this stage, he says, is not any other candidate or any prosecution, but complacency.
Read the piece here, with a hilarious cover illustration by the great Tim O’Brien.
Also in TIME, I scored a rare interview with DeSantis, where I asked him about his policies and tried, mostly in vain, to get him to show a more personal side:
DeSantis’s attempt to personalize these issues has limits. When I ask how he was parented, he talks about where his parents were from—Youngstown, Ohio, and Aliquippa, Penn.—but says nothing about them as people. When I ask whether his view of the primacy of family comes from his faith, he responds in generalities rather than give a window into his personal spirituality. “My marriage and family, that’s just something that I always envisioned that would happen, and that’s been something that’s been very, very positive for me as a person,” he says.
And when I ask how he’ll respond if one of his children turns out to be gay or trans, his eyes flash momentarily, and he swiftly shuts down the question. “Well, my children are my children,” DeSantis says. “We'll leave that—we’ll leave that between my wife and I.”
Read the piece here.