Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: More on the steep slide of Ron DeSantis, homophobe and slavery apologist

New York Times:

The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis’s Vaccine Turnabout

Once a vaccine advocate, the Florida governor lost his enthusiasm for the shot before the Delta wave sent Covid hospitalizations and deaths soaring. It’s a grim chapter he now leaves out of his rosy retelling of his pandemic response.

Mr. DeSantis was going his own way on Covid.

Nearly three years later, the governor now presents his Covid strategy not only as his biggest accomplishment, but as the foundation for his presidential campaign. Mr. DeSantis argues that “Florida got it right” because he was willing to stand up for the rights of individuals despite pressure from health “bureaucrats.” On the campaign trail, he says liberal bastions like New York and California needlessly traded away freedoms while Florida preserved jobs, in-person schooling and quality of life.

But a close review by The New York Times of Florida’s pandemic response, including a new analysis of the data on deaths, hospitalizations and vaccination rates in the state, suggests that Mr. DeSantis’s account of his record leaves much out.

New York Times:

A ‘Leaner-Meaner’ DeSantis Campaign Faces a Reboot and a Reckoning

The campaign’s missteps and swelling costs have made donors and allies anxious. One person close to the Florida governor said he had experienced a “challenging learning curve.”

One recent move that drew intense blowback, including from Republicans, was the campaign’s sharing of a bizarre video on Twitter that attacked Mr. Trump as too friendly to L.G.B.T.Q. people and showed Mr. DeSantis with lasers coming out of his eyes. The video drew a range of denunciations, with some calling it homophobic and others homoerotic before it was deleted.

But it turns out to be more of a self-inflicted wound than was previously known: A DeSantis campaign aide had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently, according to a person with knowledge of the incident.

That’s a reference to an earlier DeSantis video from early July that has since been deleted. 

Harry Enten/CNN:

Why Tim Scott may be one to watch in the GOP presidential race

Can the nice guy finish first?

That’s the question a lot of analysts are asking about the Republican race for president, with headlines such as “Tim Scott is turning heads with donors and early-state voters” and “Tim Scott’s formidable charm meets a tough Republican electorate.”

While the South Carolina senator remains well behind front-runner Donald Trump in the national horserace polls, a number of key indicators – from favorability ratings to early-state polling to fundraising – suggest Scott may be the GOP candidate to watch besides the former president or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

And to follow up Harry’s point about Tim Scott, here is John Couvellon with some insight into the GOP national primary:

JMC Analytics and Polling conducted a poll of likely national Republican voters. Major takeaways are as follows:

(1) Former President Trump retains the strong residual support of Republican voters,

(2) Only Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott have similar strong favorable ratings, and,

(3) Republican voters are not as monolithically conservative as narrative would have it.

The poll writeup can be found here (.pdf)

A trio from the Washington Post, all with gift links:

Jennifer Rubin/Washington Post:

Trump’s made-for-MAGA arguments keep losing in court

The twice-indicted Donald Trump has a perfect record: He has lost every important challenge in the multiple, major legal cases swirling around him.

Sometimes, this has happened at the trial court level; sometimes, it’s been on appeal. But eventually, he has lost on every significant issue, civil or criminal, to come up. That ought to tell us something about the former president’s ability to navigate the rough legal waters ahead of him — and how dramatically the excuses his team serves up for the right-wing media zombies fall short in courts of law.

Greg Sargent/Washington Post:

Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back.

“The Biden administration is asserting its authority over the border, and rightly so,” immigration attorney David Leopold told me. “Texas has no business taking over federal immigration law, which is what they’re doing.”

In its letter, the Justice Department flatly states that the barrier obscures navigation of the Rio Grande in violation of federal law and that the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t authorize the move.

“Texas does not have authorization from the Corps to install the floating barrier and did not seek such authorization before doing so,” the letter states.

Michael Scherer/Washington Post:

Inside Biden’s hidden campaign

The president is gambling that using Democratic and outside groups will work better than a big, centralized effort

President Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, has spent her first months on the job planning a sweeping national reelection effort by squatting in a borrowed office overlooking an Amtrak commuter line on Capitol Hill.

With just three other paid staffers, her entire operation cost $1.4 million from April through June — about an eighth of what President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign spent in the same period in 2011, when it operated out of an imposing office suite in Chicago nearly the size of a football field.

Biden aides say that skeletal quality is not a weakness but the plan.

Beyond the official campaign, much of the machinery that aims to reelect Biden has quietly been churning at full blast, as hundreds of staffers in the national Democratic Party, state affiliates, outside groups and the White House chip in on a broad strategy designed to exploit changes in campaign finance rules — even while the main campaign office itself has yet to be established.