Remember the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally?
By 
I’ll have what they’re having:
An exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds, as the former president is beleaguered by midterm losses and courtroom setbacks.
By 2-1, GOP and GOP-leaning voters now say they want Trump’s policies but a different standard-bearer to carry them. While 31% want the former president to run, 61% prefer some other Republican nominee who would continue the policies Trump has pursued.
They have a name in mind: Two-thirds of Republicans and those inclined to vote Republican want Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run for president. By double digits, 56% to 33%, they prefer DeSantis over Trump.
“Republicans and conservative independents increasingly want Trumpism without Trump,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center.
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The findings are a red flag for Trump, whose core support has held remarkably solid through firestorms over his personal behavior, his provocative rhetoric, and his most controversial actions in the White House. But he has become increasingly embattled over his role in fueling the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, his alleged mishandling of sensitive documents when he left the White House, and investigations into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Some Republican strategists blame Trump and his influence for the GOP’s failure to win control of the Senate in November. Candidates he helped recruit and support in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania lost races that independent analysts thought might have been won by more traditional candidates.
The poll of 1,000 registered voters, taken by landline and cell phone Wednesday through Sunday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The sample of 374 Republicans and independents who lean to the Republican Party has an error margin of 5.1 points.
An absolute dream scenario is a bloody nomination battle between Trump and DeSantis that DeSantis wins, and these sorts of data may just be enough to convince DeSantis to dive in. That would result in something close to a can’t-lose scenario for Democrats and, far more important, liberal democracy.
If DeSantis is the nominee, Trump will ensure that his core cult support won’t vote for the Betrayer, and there will certainly be enough of them to guarantee electoral disaster up and down the ticket for the entire GOP.
Trump winning a real nomination battle isn’t quite as rosy a scenario, but such a battle would still be very bad for Republicans, as it would turn off lots of voters — and there are apparently a lot of them — who love DeSantis’s anti-gay and anti-vax stances precisely because they’re more extreme than Trump’s, and who also have come to hate Trump because he’s a loser.
In the end if I had to bet I don’t think DeSantis will pull the trigger, but merely contemplating the possibility is like watching replays of the 2022 Michigan Ohio State football game a few dozen times, or so I’ve heard.