Has the Republican presidential nomination contest finished before it started? That narrative has gripped the traditional media of late, with constant references to stagnant national polling. Does that mean that DeSantis has utterly failed in his attempt at the nomination and that his campaign is near collapse as a result?

Even conservative media outlets have concluded that DeSantis has flopped so far and that the issue has already become existential. Daniel Flynn warns at the American Spectator that DeSantis will need a John McCain-esque comeback now:

Does Ron DeSantis want to be the nominee? From the disastrous online launch met with technical difficulties to the ill-advised ad attacking Donald Trump for basically expressing a live-and-let-live attitude toward homosexuals, Florida’s governor does not so much run as he stumbles for president.

The good news? Bill Clinton, John McCain, Joe Biden, and others struggled early before winning the presidential nomination of their parties.

Flynn based this off of DeSantis’ response to Maria Bartiromo yesterday in a very good, tough, and interesting interview. Bartiromo asked DeSantis, “what’s going on with your campaign?” DeSantis laughed out loud at the idea of collapse (via Gary Gross, around the seven-minute mark):

GOV. DESANTIS: Maria, these are narratives. The media does not want me to be the nominee. I think that’s very clear. Why? Because they know I’ll beat Biden but even more importantly, they know that I will actually deliver on all these things. We will stop the invasion at the border. We will take on the drug cartels. We will curtail the administrative state. We will get spending under control. We will do all the things that they don’t want to see done and so they are going to continue doing the type of narrative. I can tell you we understand that this is a state-by-state process.

First, let us recall what Bartiromo does at the top of the segment — we’re 44 days away from the first debate. We’re six months away from the first ballot being cast, too. The rush to declare this race over or even in crisis smells very much like a media narrative.

The fundraising numbers make this very clear. DeSantis raised $20 million in the half of the second quarter in which he was officially a candidate, a record for a non-incumbent presidential contender. His Never Back Down super-PAC officially raised $150 million in Q2 separately; $83 million was a transfer from DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign, but $67 million got raised independently in Q2. The Trump campaign raised $35 million in Q2 too, a very good result, but pro-rata about the same pace as DeSantis.

Having been around for both the McCain and Clinton mid-campaign collapses, I can say with some emphasis that this is not at all equivalent or even analogous to either situation. McCain ran out of money for a while and ran out of media interest, and cleverly engaged with conservatives bloggers (myself included) to regain relevance in 2007. Clinton’s campaign got rocked by rumors and later testimony of personal scandal, which Bill and Hillary overcame by confronting the issue in the friendly media environment.

DeSantis has plenty of money, and plenty of media attention at the moment. As he says, he’s also building a massive GOTV operation that will pay off when it comes time for voting and could do more than that, if it’s designed to do so. This is hardly a crisis situation for DeSantis.

But what about the polling? Trump is clearly dominating at the national level, but no one’s coming close to DeSantis either, despite most of the others having been in the race longer than he:

This gives a very long look at the national polling for the GOP primary, and it shows … a stable situation. DeSantis got a big boost at Trump’s expense after his landslide win in Florida’s gubernatorial race, and Trump got a big boost at DeSantis’ expense after Alvin Bragg indicted Trump in late March of this year. (Interestingly, the federal indictment from Jack Smith doesn’t appear to have had much impact on national polling.) No one in the statistical-noise realm has gained any traction at all, not even Vivek Ramaswamy, and certainly not Mike Pence and Nikki Haley despite their own high media profiles, robust political pedigrees, and the length of their official candidacies.

In fact, the RCP polling tracker shows us exactly the race we expected. When Trump jumped into the race in November of last year, we knew that Republican voters would have to decide whether to stick with Trump or go a different direction in 2024. Thus the race would have two lanes: Trump and Not Trump, both with built-in voter bases at the beginning of the process. The more candidates that entered the Not Trump lane, the more likely that even a track leader would start off well below Trump’s built-in starting point.

That’s exactly what we see here in national polling. It shows DeSantis dominating the Not Trump lane even when other national figures jump into the race, such as Chris Christie did recently. (Note that despite all of the media attention Christie got, he’s still in the MoE of national polling.) For those inclined already to choose a new direction, half are consistently sticking with DeSantis as the alternative to Trump.

Does that mean that Trump will win the nomination? Sure — if nothing changes. But that’s the point: the winnowing process hasn’t even begun yet. These alignments exist in the base on an instinctual, previous-loyalty level. When the debates start, voters will become more engaged — and likely won’t even become fully engaged until the decision point for voting comes a lot closer. After voters get a chance to take a look at several debates — and see what else emerges from candidate backgrounds — then they will make decisions that may get reflected in polling at the state level more than at the national level.

DeSantis certainly has his work cut out for him in battling against a former incumbent president for a party nomination. But his fundraising and his organizing shows that he will be a potent contender and so far the only potent contender if the party decides to change directions. DeSantis will have to make that case to those who are inclined to stick with Trump and out-hustle Trump on the hustings when the voting starts. Perhaps we should wait for a while to declare anyone in crisis or in collapse — like, say, after the first few states have gone to the polls or when the money runs out.