The Hard Realities Facing Ron DeSantis

On the menu today: The cover piece in the newest issue of National Review has Ron DeSantis fans grumbling that it’s far too early for such a gloomy assessment of his campaign because not a single vote has been cast yet. Fine, but to believe that DeSantis has a shot of winning Iowa, we need to believe that his support is at least 15 percentage points higher than his highest numbers in recent polling and that Donald Trump’s support is at least 15 percentage points lower than his lowest numbers in recent polling. (If you simply take DeSantis’s best number in a poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers since summer and Trump’s worst number, Trump wins by 17 percentage points.) Optimism also requires us to ignore just about everything that’s happened with the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down in recent weeks.