I look medium height but my heels are high

This is excellent news for Ron DeSantis (TM):

Ron DeSantis has given an awful lot of love to Iowa Republicans. Back in the spring, he and his super-PAC, Never Back Down, made some pretty impressive early moves in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, setting up a big field operation, grabbing a ton of endorsements from state legislators, and attracting positive attention from big-time Iowa influencers like Governor Kim Reynolds and conservative Evangelical pooh-bah Bob Vander Plaats. DeSantis’s overall strategy of moving to Trump’s right, especially on culture-war issues, was clearly aimed at the most-likely-to-caucus Iowans, those self-identifying as “very conservative” and/or attending Evangelical churches.

More recently, as Donald Trump surged to a big national lead over the once-competitive Florida governor, DeSantis has shifted from battling Trump everywhere to focusing on Iowa in hopes of an early upset or at least a strong enough second-place showing to run off non-Trump competitors in the later contests. He committed to the so-called “full Grassley,” a time-consuming slog through all 99 Iowa counties. A mid-October assessment of the Iowa landscape by the Des Moines Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel noted that DeSantis was “quadrupling down on his all-in Iowa strategy by shifting a third of his campaign staff into the state over the coming weeks.” And he was paying the inevitable price for this Iowa-centric approach in other early states; he has been trailing Nikki Haley for a while in polls of New Hampshire and South Carolina, and his support has dropped to the low double digits nationally.

That’s why the new gold-standard Iowa Poll from Ann Selzer (co-sponsored by the Register, NBC News, and Mediacom) is really bad news for DeSantis. The last iteration of this poll in August probably triggered his all-in-on-Iowa strategy by showing him “only” 23 points behind Trump (42 percent to 19 percent) with a big lead over the rest of the field. Now, Trump leads DeSantis by 27 points (43 percent to 16 percent), and Haley is tied with him. You could imagine a couple of months ago that DeSantis was slowly creeping up on Trump in Iowa and consolidating the opposition to the 45th president. Now, the general impression that the Floridian does not wear well on voters has spread to the place where he’s spending much of his time and most of his money on attempting to wear well on voters. DeSantis ’24 isn’t quite dead, but you can see the buzzards wheeling around him in the Iowa skies.

Rough results for Puddin’ Hand Ron, but Iowa may not be the ideal state for a hardscrabble son of the Mid-Atlantic. What about the state that abuts the state where he currently resides, and in a technical if not political-spiritual sense was raised?

Former President Donald Trump currently holds majority support in the early primary state of South Carolina, where his strongest challenger is Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

Fifty-three percent of likely Republican primary voters in South Carolina call Trump their first choice for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, with 22% picking Haley and 11% backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, whose campaign is currently focused on Iowa more than his home state, follows at 6%. No other candidate saw more than 2% support.

I dunno, I’m beginning to think that Pink Floyd is probably going to beat the Tallahassee Planetarium’s Pink Floyd Laser Show.

Too bad, given the wardrobe investment:

“I’ve dealt with these politicians many times,” says Zephan Parker, the bespoke bootmaker behind Houston’s popular Parker Boot Company, which, he says, has made height-increasing cowboy boots for a number of Texan politicians. (No, he won’t reveal any names.) “I’ve helped them with their lifts. [DeSantis] is wearing lifts; there’s no doubt.”

For Parker, there are two giveaways. At a DeSantis campaign event in Tampa, a photo was taken of him from his side, showing the governor in his black cowboy boots and navy worsted suit. Traditional Western boots are typically built with an elevated heel, ranging from 1 1/2” to 1 7/8”. DeSantis’ boots have a traditional Western silhouette, but, to Parker, the heels appear shorter. When you stick inserts into cowboy boots, the combination of the height-increasing lifts and the heels can “turn them into five-inch stilettos,” Parker says. “That’s too much for the common man. So on a ready-made boot, they’ll cut down the heel about half an inch to accommodate the lifts, which looks to be what happened here.” (Shaving down the heels does negate some of the height value of having lifts in the first place.)

Sad. And by “sad,” I mean “hilarious.”