Anti-vaxx nut polling around 20%, and so is RFK. Jr.

A whiny-voiced dork picking authoritarian fights with broadly popular companies while refusing to attack Donald Trump is working out about as well as you’d expect:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the past few months running to the right ahead of his expected entry into the 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign. From signing into law a six-week abortion ban to fighting with Disney, the governor has focused on satisfying his party’s conservative base.

So far at least, those efforts have not paid off in Republican primary polling, with DeSantis falling further behind the current front-runner, former President Donald Trump.

Things have gotten so bad for DeSantis that a recent Fox News poll shows him at 21% – comparable with the 19% that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed debunked conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, is receiving on the Democratic side.

Even granting that most of Talent Sees The Next Generation And Flees And Terror’s paper support will vanish like the Florida coastline soon enough, LOL.

And it’s not just polling — as Julia Azari observes, for the theoretical preferred alternative of Republican elites, falling well behind in obtaining endorsements suggests a death spiral:

Once seen as a promising – or frightening – Republican alternative to Trump, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ candidacy seems to be tanking. The main indicators are his failure to secure party endorsements and his decline in polls among Republican potential primary voters. There are lots of theories, and as Seth Masket points out, a lot of them rely on candidate characteristics – including the same ones that were recently cited as DeSantis strengths.

For me, what DeSantis calls to mind is a specific category of presidential hopeful: the one that seems perfect, even obvious on paper, and yet never achieves lift off once the contest starts in earnest. Other recent candidates in this category are vice president Kamala Harris on the Democratic side and, on the Republican side, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. They’re interesting candidates, seemingly emblematic of their respective parties, and yet unable, thus far, to come close to winning the presidential nomination.

Walker, at least, and one clear thing going for him in theory: strong electoral performance in an actual swing state. As I’ve said before, DeSantis somehow got the reputation as some kind of extraordinary political SUPERTALENT putting up the same kind of statewide performances as such Republican primary legends as Jeb! Bush and Marco Rubio. He’s just an imitation Trump and Republican voters seem overwhelmingly likely to prefer the real thing.