Trump puts DeSantis in a bind on 2020: Can he bring himself to say Trump lost?

Donald Trump falsely insisting that the 2020 election was “rigged” last week was nothing new for the Republican Party’s presidential frontrunner.

But by elevating the issue in his CNN town hall, he was also putting enormous pressure on his chief rival in the primary, Ron DeSantis.

The Florida governor — who caught a break in Iowa over the weekend when severe weather kept Trump away from counter-programming his trip to the state — is seeking to persuade Republicans he’s their only hope of defeating President Joe Biden. But implicit in DeSantis’ argument that he is a more electable alternative to Trump is the idea that Trump actually lost.

The fundamental problem for DeSantis — underscored even by blunter messaging from the super PAC supporting him — is that he can’t bring himself to say it.

“First question at first debate: Raise your hand if you think Trump won the 2020 election,” said Republican consultant Alex Conant, who worked on Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential race and is unaffiliated in the 2024 campaign. “If a candidate can’t dispose of a fake issue like who won the election, how can voters expect them to handle the real issues?”

He added, “You need to respect Trump’s voters, but that doesn’t mean lying to them.”

In private dinners recently, DeSantis has told fundraisers he stands a better chance than Trump of winning key states like Georgia and Arizona that Trump lost in 2020, according to one person who was briefed on the private meetings and was granted anonymity to share the details. Both states became hotbeds of Trump’s election conspiracy claims, and in Georgia, Trump’s baseless accusations about rigged elections were widely viewed as depressing GOP turnout in two critical Senate runoff elections, contributing to Republicans’ loss of their Senate majority.

For a Republican Party still agonizing over the loss of the White House in 2020 and a less-than-red-wave midterm, DeSantis in Iowa on Saturday cast himself — without naming Trump — as a more viable standard-bearer.

“As Republicans, we’ve underperformed in elections for many, many years now. So there is a reason to be pessimistic,” he told a crowd at an event in Sioux Center, where he reminded first-in-the-nation caucus goers of his landslide victory last year in what was once a swing state. “But I’ll tell ya: Iowa and Florida should be a source for hope.”

Yet DeSantis himself has refused to say whether he thinks the 2020 election was rigged, dodging or deflecting questions about the outcome or complaining that he’s been asked about it “a hundred different times.” He campaigned in the midterms for candidates who disputed the results of the race, including Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake — two leading election deniers who lost gubernatorial races in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively.

When asked about Trump’s voter fraud claims, he has pivoted to touting his support for election law reforms in Florida.

For DeSantis, it’s a high-wire act: Keep Trump diehards happy enough to consider supporting him, while convincing Republicans who are desperate to move on from Trump that he will not perpetuate the ex-president’s fixation on the past.

But it’s unlikely he will be able to avoid the subject for long, with primary debates on the horizon and Trump not only relitigating 2020, but also refusing to pledge to accept the results of the 2024 election. DeSantis will join the contest lagging behind Trump in the polls and in a bind of his opponent’s making — competing in a primary in which survey after survey shows a majority of Republicans still believe, falsely, that the 2020 election was rigged.

“He’s going to be boxed in by the fact that he’s basically making an electability pitch,” said Sarah Longwell, the Republican political strategist and Bulwark publisher who became a vocal supporter of Biden in 2020 and regularly conducts focus groups of Republicans. “And the trouble with the electability pitch is you’ve got to say, ‘Donald Trump lost and I can win.’”

That’s a calculation DeSantis’ biggest, well-funded allies — if not the candidate-in-waiting himself — appear to have made. The super PAC Never Back Down — founded by former Trump official Ken Cuccinelli, and operating alongside DeSantis’ team — has declared Trump’s 2020 election loss in messages to supporters.

“We need a proven leader with a proven record against the Woke Agenda. We need a candidate who can beat Joe Biden, not one who failed to do so already,” the PAC wrote in a blast text message last month.

A DeSantis spokesperson declined to comment on his position on the issue.

DeSantis is well aware of the risk of alienating Trump supporters. In prep sessions for debates during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, he grappled with a question about whether he disagrees with Trump on any issue, saying “obviously there is” but that he has to “frame it in a way that’s not going to piss off all his voters,” according to footage obtained by ABC News.

Many Republicans who publicly disavowed Trump’s election lies were punished in last year’s primaries, and few GOP strategists see upside in focusing on the issue.

“Beyond the fact that he’s not going to say something he doesn’t believe, he wants to remain open to the maybe Trump voters who recognize that the election was not stolen,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said.

Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican Party chair who is neutral in the race but spoke positively about DeSantis, called it “one of those inconvenient circumstances that's going to force you to respond to something that most people don’t think is an important issue.”

But he wasn’t betting on DeSantis ever answering the question directly.

“Any good candidate knows how to pivot from a lousy question,” Anuzis said. “And that will be DeSantis’ strategy, as well as everybody else’s.”