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The resurgence of Donald Trump in the 2024 primary polls, the unsurprising evidence that his supporters will stand by him through a prosecution, and the tentativeness of Ron DeSantis' pre-campaign have combined to create a buzz that maybe DeSantis shouldn't run at all. It has been whispered by nervous donors, shouted by Trump's supporters and lately raised by pundits of the left and right.
Thus the liberal Bill Scher, writing in the Washington Monthly, argues that Trump looks too strong, that there isn't a clear-enough constituency for DeSantis' promise of Trumpism without the florid drama, and that if DeSantis runs and fails, he's more likely to end up "viciously humiliated," like Trump's 2016 rivals, than to set himself up as the next in line for 2028.
Then from the right, writing for the Spectator, Daniel McCarthy channels Niccolò Machiavelli to argue that although DeSantis probably will run, he would be wiser to choose a more dogged, long-term path instead — emphasizing "virtu" rather than chasing Fortune, to use Machiavelli's language. In 2024, Trump might poison the prospects of any GOP candidate who beats him, while President Joe Biden could be a relatively potent incumbent. But if the Florida governor continues to build a record of conservative accomplishment in his home state, "2028 would offer a well-prepared DeSantis a clear shot."
I think they're both wrong, and that if DeSantis has presidential ambitions, he simply has to run right now, notwithstanding all of the obstacles that they identify. My reasoning depends both on the "Fortune" that McCarthy invokes and on an argument that Scher's piece nods to while rejecting: the idea that presidential candidates are more likely to miss their moment — as Chris Christie did when he passed on running in 2012, as Mario Cuomo did for his entire career — than they are to run too early and suffer a career-ending rebuke.
It's true that fortune doesn't always favor the bold. (As McCarthy notes, that phrase originates in Virgil's "Aeneid," where it's uttered by an Italian warlord just before he gets killed.) But the key to the don't-miss-your-moment argument is that when it comes to something as difficult as gaining the presidency, mostly fortune doesn't favor anybody. Every would-be president, no matter their virtues as a politician, is inevitably a hostage to events, depending on unusual synchronicities to open a path to the White House.
A great many successful political careers never have that path open at all. A minority have it open in the narrowest way, where you can imagine threading needles and rolling lucky sixes all the way to the White House. Only a tiny number are confronted with a situation where they seem to have a strong chance, not just a long-shot possibility, before they even announce their candidacy.
