Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has run into a surprising buzz saw in his bid to sell himself as the Republican Party’s most electable standard-bearer in 2024 — and it has more to do with President Joe Biden than it does with Donald J. Trump.

For months, Republican voters have consumed such a steady diet of clips of Biden stumbling, over words and sandbags, that they now see the 80-year-old Democratic incumbent as so frail that he would be beatable by practically any Republican — even a four-times-indicted former President who lost the last election.

As Trump’s rivals take the stage for the first debate of the 2024 primaries on Wednesday, the perceived weaknesses of Biden have undercut one of the core arguments that DeSantis and others have made from the start: that the party must turn the page on the past and move beyond Trump in order to win in 2024.

The focus on “electability” — the basic notion of which candidate has the best shot of winning a general election — was most intense in the aftermath of the disappointing 2022 midterms. Republicans were stung by losses of Trump-backed candidates in key swing states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And the issue offered a way to convince a Republican electorate still very much in the thrall of Trump to consider throwing its lot in with a fresh face in 2022. It was a permission slip to move on.

But nine months later, interviews with pollsters, strategists, elected officials and Republican voters in early-voting states show that the dim Republican opinion of Biden’s mental faculties and political skills has complicated that case in deep and unexpected ways.

“I mean, I would hope anybody could beat Joe Biden at this point,” said Heather Hora, 52, as she waited in line for a photo with Trump at an Iowa Republican Party dinner, echoing a sentiment expressed in more than 30 interviews with Iowa Republicans in recent weeks.

Trump’s rivals are still pushing an electability case against the former President, but even their advisers and other strategists acknowledge that the diminished views of Biden have sapped the pressure voters once felt about the need to nominate someone new. When Republican primary voters in a recent New York Times/ Siena College poll were asked which candidate was better able to beat Biden, 58 per cent picked Trump, while 28 per cent selected DeSantis.

“The perception that Biden is the weakest possible candidate has lowered the electability question in the calculus of primary voters,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and a longtime adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader.

Though the urgency of electability has plainly waned, it remains one of the most powerful tools Trump’s rivals believe they have to peel the party away from him — and some privately hope that Trump’s growing legal jeopardy will eventually make the issue feel pressing again. For now, the fact that many polls show a razor-thin Biden-Trump contest has made it a tougher sell.

Conservative media, led by Fox News, has played a role in shaping GOP (Republican) views. Fox has often elevated DeSantis as the future of the Republican Party, coverage that has frustrated the former President. But the network’s persistent harping on Biden’s frailties may have inadvertently undercut any effort to build up DeSantis’s campaign.

More than two-thirds of Republicans who described Fox News or another conservative outlet as the single source they most often turned to for news thought Trump was better able to beat Biden in the Times/Siena College poll, a 40-point advantage over DeSantis. Those who cited mainstream news outlets also said Trump was the stronger candidate to beat Biden, though by less than half the margin.

There is little question that Biden has visibly aged. The President’s slip onstage at an Air Force graduation ceremony in June — his staff subsequently blamed a stray sandbag — is seen as a moment that particularly resonated for Republicans, cementing Biden’s image as frail, politically and otherwise.

Google records show search interest for “Biden old” peaking three times in 2023 — during his State of the Union address in February, when he announced his 2024 run in late April and when he fell onstage in June. The number of searches just for “Biden” was higher after his fall than it was around the time of his re-election kickoff.

Interviews with Republican voters in Iowa in recent weeks have revealed a consistent impression of Biden as weak and deteriorating.

“It’s just one gaffe after another,” Joanie Pellett, 55, a retiree in Decatur County, said of Biden as she settled into her seat in a beer hall at the Iowa State Fair four hours before Trump was set to speak.

“What strength as a candidate? Does he have any?” Rick Danowsky, a financial consultant who lives in Sigourney, Iowa, asked of Biden as he waited for DeSantis at a bar in downtown Des Moines earlier this month.

“He’s a train wreck,” said Jack Seward, 67, a county supervisor in Washington County, Iowa, who is considering whether to vote for Trump or DeSantis.

Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesman for Biden, said Republican depictions of Biden as old were “recycled attacks” that had “repeatedly failed”.

“Put simply, it’s a losing strategy and they know it,” he said. “Republicans can argue with each other all they want about electability, but every one of them has embraced the losing MAGA agenda.”

Some Republicans worry that their voters have been lulled into a false sense of complacency about the challenge of beating a Democratic incumbent President. The last one to lose was Jimmy Carter more than four decades ago.

“Electability is more than just beating Biden — Republicans need to choose a candidate who can build a majority coalition, especially with Independents, to win both the House and Senate,” said Dave Winston, a Republican pollster.

There were always structural challenges to running a primary campaign centred on electability. For more than a decade, Republican voters have tended to care little about which candidate political insiders have deemed to have the best shot at winning — and have tended to revolt against the preferences of the reviled party establishment.

Then there are the hurdles specific to Trump, who was portrayed as unelectable before he won in 2016, and whose 2020 loss has not been accepted by many in the party.

In a sign of how far electability has diminished, Republican voters today say they are more likely to support a candidate who agrees with them most on the issues over someone with the best chance to beat Biden, according to the Times/ Siena College poll. They are prioritising, in other words, policy positions over electability.

New York Times News Service