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Lets count off a few of them. First, theres the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. This is my colleague Nate Cohns main point in his assessment of DeSantiss recent struggles, and its a good one: DeSantis has spent the year to date accumulating legislative victories that match up with official right-wing orthodoxy, but we already saw in Ted Cruzs 2016 campaign the limits of ideological correctness. There are Republican primary voters who cast ballots with a matrix of conservative positions in their heads, but not enough to overcome the appeal of the Trump persona, and a campaign against him wont prosper if its main selling point is just True Conservatism 2.0.

Second, theres the mismatch between cultural conservatism and the anti-Trump donor class. Part of DeSantiss advantage now, compared with Cruzs situation in 2016, is that he has seemed more congenial to the partys bigger-money donors. But many of those donors dont really like the culture war; theyll go along with a generic anti-wokeness, but they hate the Disney battles and theyre usually pro-choice. So socially conservative moves that DeSantis cant refuse, like signing Floridas six-week abortion ban, yield instant stories about how his potential donors are thinking about closing up their checkbooks, with a palpable undercurrent of: Why cant we have Nikki Haley or even Glenn Youngkin instead?

This leads to the third dynamic that could repeat itself: The G.O.P coordination problem, a.k.a. the South Carolina pileup. Remember how smoothly all of Joe Bidens rivals suddenly exited the presidential race when it was time to stop Bernie Sanders? Remember how nothing remotely like that happened among Republicans in 2016? Well, if you have an anti-Trump donor base dissatisfied with DeSantis and willing to sustain long-shot rivals, and if two of those rivals, Haley and Senator Tim Scott, hail from the early primary state of South Carolina, its easy enough to see how they talk themselves into hanging around long enough to hand Trump exactly the sort of narrow wins that eventually gave him unstoppable momentum in 2016.

But then again, a certain cast of mind has declared Trump to have unstoppable momentum already. This reflects another tendency that helped elect him the first time, the weird fatalism of professional Republicans. In 2016 many of them passed from he cant win to he cant be stopped with barely a way station in between. A rough month for DeSantis has already surfaced the same spirit as in a piece by Politicos Jonathan Martin, which quoted one strategist saying resignedly, Were just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when its over to rebuild the neighborhood.

Influencing this perspective, again as in 2016, is the assumption that Trump cant win the general election, so if the G.O.P. just lets him lose it will finally be rid of him. Of course that assumption was completely wrong before, it could be wrong again; and even if its not, how do you know he wont be back in 2028?

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Opinion | It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Like 2016 Again - The New York Times