Preliminary evidence suggests that Ron DeSantis helped himself overall during last night’s first Republican 2024 primary debate, although he could have helped himself much more.

As a staunch DeSantis supporter who thinks we desperately need him to be the nominee in order to prevent electoral disaster, I was not particularly impressed by his performance. His answers were mostly fine as far as they went, but they didn’t go much beyond the basics: this is what I think, this is what I’ve done, this is what I’ll do as president. He didn’t connect most of it to Donald Trump’s record despite several openings, or impress upon voters that Democrats will win unless Republicans nominate DeSantis. It was the performance one would expect in a normal primary, with normal candidates, and everyone who mattered present on stage—not in a crisis situation where getting this wrong could very well lead to political Armageddon.   

The good news is, his performance seems to have been effective enough to make the evening a net positive. DeSantis was a hit with Fox News’s post-debate focus group, and a FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found his performance got the highest average grade and the largest share of viewers who thought he did the best, with the share of viewers considering him jumping from 63% (which was already the second highest in the field) to 67.5%—while cowardly no-show Trump’s share dropped from 66.2% to 61.4%. His overall favorability also jumped from 67.5% to 72.4%, while Trump’s dipped from 64.7% to 59.8%. (Nikki Haley, Doug Burgum, and fake candidate/Trump cabinet auditioner Vivek Ramaswamy all enjoyed larger rises in potential support, but all were starting from a much lower place than DeSantis.)

All of this—assuming it’s accurate and translates to actual primary votes when the time comes—is encouraging. It suggests that, as long as viewership is reasonably reflective of the general GOP electorate, Trump’s current support isn’t at all the locked-in inevitability he and his goon squad insist, and DeSantis is well positioned to win a majority of Republicans over by the time they reach voting booth.

Still, given the stakes it’s worth identifying some of the ways DeSantis can strengthen his messaging further still. The pre-debate advice I offered Tuesday still holds, and there were a few instances last night where not following it hurt him:

Delayed Hand-Raising—On the merits, it shouldn’t matter that he glanced around the room before raising his hand to affirm he would support Trump in the general even if convicted of a crime. He’s already on the record as committed to support the eventual nominee no matter who it is, and Trump himself refuses to make the same commitment without the conviction qualifier. But the optics were terrible. The apparent hesitation is easy to spin as indecision because that’s exactly what it looked like, and on a vital topic—the need to unite for the greater good of protecting America from the Democrats—that is one of Trump’s most potent vulnerabilities among Republican outside the MAGA cult. DeSantis needs to make sure it’s an unmistakable contrast between the two of them.

Federal Preborn Protection—DeSantis’s reluctance to say he would sign a federal abortion ban has been a recurring problem in the primary, and one he and his team don’t yet recognize the need to address. He signed a heartbeat law in Florida, and has a 100% pro-life voting record from his time in Congress indicating that of course he’d sign the same kinds of things as president. But apparently he’s been convinced that, in our current post-Roe, post-midterms climate, a straight “yes” is politically risky. Which is nonsense—his own senior adviser Ryan Tyson has already recognized that Democrats will do what they’ve always done and treat any GOP foe as an extremist no matter what their actual position is, and that the only pro-life candidates harmed in the midterms were ones who were also “piss-poor” for other reasons. Evasiveness is recognizable even to the non-politically astute. Anything that can be perceived as weakness on the gravest moral issue the conservative coalition is potentially lethal in a GOP primary; the last time DeSantis made this mistake, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America pounced on it. Yes, SBA was wildly hypocritical for doing that after giving Trump a pass on shirking their own ultimatum—but again, merits and optics are two different things. And as far as not alienating squishier voters for the general, all that’s needed to thread the needle is saying “I will sign any new protection for the preborn that Congress sends me, but you the voters will ultimately decide what to send me by who you send to Congress in the future.” (Look for this point to be expanded upon in a future article.)

Take a Page from…Nikki?—DeSantis had a great moment when he was the only guy on stage to point out that turning the election into a January 6 referendum would be a gift to Democrats. This is part of the broader theme of how nominating DeSantis is the alternative to the electoral disaster nominating Trump would bring, which I’ve wanted him to emphasize and expand on for a long time. And one of the best examples of how to do that surprisingly came from a Fox appearance by Haley this week: “[Trump’s] gonna spend more time in a courtroom than he’s gonna spend on the campaign trail…we have to win that general election, and you can’t do that when literally three-fourths of the American people don’t want to see Biden and Trump run again, and to the majority of Americans, he is the most disliked politician in all of America. That’s a reality, and that person can’t win a general election, and we can’t afford” a Democrat victory. That is exactly what one of DeSantis’s core themes needs to be, hammered in every single debate, interview, and speech. Convince people not only that you’re the best man for the job, but the only way to ensure a Republican wins to do the job.