Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, our daily politics compendium of the news and murmurs that matter in Washington, from the White House to Langley, and K Street to the Hill. In today’s edition, my conversation with New Hampshire G.O.P. insider Matt Mowers about Trump’s edge, DeSantis’s media problem, Biden’s primary dilemma, and more.

But first…

• Diva Ron: This morning the Florida state legislature passed a bill allowing Ron DeSantis to run for president without resigning as governor. Nestled in that bill, as Florida whisperer Peter Schorsch points out, is a line item adding $3.8 million in the budget for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Operation Services aka the governor’s security to protect him while he’s traipsing around the country winning over hearts and minds.
• Trump’s DeSantis Hit-and-Run: Last week, the Trump campaign went live with one of its first ads letting DeSantis supporters know that their boy owes his whole career to the former president. Notably, a random advertising firm out of Park City, Utah called 360 Touch Advertising was hired to actually buy the ad time. In fact, a rival D.C. firm pointed out to me that the Utah outfit used stock footage for one of their beautiful blonde executives named “Heather Snow,” a supposed graphics designer. (They recognized the photo.) When you click on one of the “Meet the Team” pages it actually connects you to a temp agency called Premiertemp. Many of the links are all dead. This random company was likely used to avoid scrutiny on a public F.E.C. filing.

Undeterred, Mowers recently set up Valcour LLC, which is strategically based in both D.C. and the G.O.P.’s first primary state, his home turf of the Granite State. Valcour’s clients are mostly corporations or nonprofits; he doesn’t advise any federal political clients, at least for now. Mowers and I discussed the latest in the still first-in-the-nation G.O.P. primary state and the 2024 election. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Matt Mowers: People are shopping. You saw Donald Trump up in New Hampshire the other day. His team is trying to show strength, and clearly the polling suggests that, right now, there’s a lot more movement beneath the surface. But you still have a lot of folks who are shopping right now, even some of the Trump loyalists.

Like who?

Some of them are public, like state reps Fred Doucette, who was a Trump co-chair, and Peter Varney. They were some of the original Trump endorsers in New Hampshire, who are now shopping, showing that there’s clearly some movement.

Do you sense that the party poobahs prefer Trump over Ron DeSantis?

Donald Trump has people like my neighbor in Gilford who has been wearing her “Trump 2024” hat every single day for the past three years. She has a sign on the front of her house, stapled to the front of her house. You don’t see that for any other candidate right now. I still believe that just means he has a high floor, and potentially a low ceiling.

As for DeSantis, people are interested—they respect what he’s done in Florida. His remarks in New Hampshire last month were described to me as kind of workmanlike. He wasn’t overly engaging in small group settings. But people respect what he did and you have a lot of Republicans who are trying to think with their head and not with their heart this year. I think it’s more challenging that he’s got the Dr. Kevorkian of Republican politics working with him these days.

Pray tell?

Jeff Roe. They both take money from their clients and lead them to a sudden death. So we’ll see how it turns out.

[Roe, who ran the campaign of Karoline Leavitt, who beat Mowers in the 2022 congressional primary, but lost in the general, responded through Axiom spokesperson Aaron Baker: “Since Mr. Mowers’ political career was ended by the kiss of death it sounds like he hasn’t quite recovered. He had a 30 point lead and lost by 10. We wish him well in his early retirement. He tried to hire Axiom for his campaign in 2022, instead we put him to sleep peacefully while he was outspending us 10-1.”]

Realistically, DeSantis’s message should appeal to people in New Hampshire. Right? He’s known for pushing back against Covid mandates, against the big nanny state. I wonder if his message is gonna get muddied, though, when he’s now talking about interfering with private businesses down in Florida and with the fight with Disney not going well. Republicans in New Hampshire are “Live Free or Die” Republicans. We think individuals and businesses should be able to run the way they want. So I think they’re shopping for other candidates and that’s the reason you’re seeing interest in, say, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Nikki Haley, who is getting good crowds. Chris Christie was up there getting good crowds recently.

What is going on with DeSantis? I watched that video of his press conference in Japan, where he was asked what he thought about Trump leading him in the polls. He responded so awkwardly that I thought it was some deep-fake A.I. creation. What is happening to him?

The challenge he’s always had from day one is that politics is so much about having reality exceed expectations. Ron DeSantis has the opposite problem. His expectations were sky-high getting into this race. They’ve been built with a carefully crafted public relations campaign over the course of years. But at some point, as David Axelrod likes to say, ‘These presidential campaigns are M.R.I.s of the soul.’ You can’t be a Madison Avenue-crafted candidate like in the past, even just a few decades ago in American politics; you gotta eventually show who you are. And that’s gonna make him come out of his comfort zone.

The real question is: When is the media going to get bored of picking him apart? Do they feel like they’ve killed him enough to revive him at some point, and build him back up and make the race between Trump and DeSantis? Or do they feel like they’ve shown him enough and they’re gonna leave him for dead?

That’s another reason why you see other candidates looking at this race, unlike three or four months ago. They’re seeing room for a Trump alternative, and there may not have been if DeSantis had not been picked apart by the media. There’s now room for a third person in this race, whether it’s a Haley or Scott or Christie or Ramaswamy.

Who are the big G.O.P. influencers in New Hampshire this cycle?

The biggest change from last time is the role of Chris Sununu. The last time we had an open race was eight years ago and we hadn’t had a Republican governor in about 15 years until that point. He has very high favorable ratings, both in the Republican Party but also among the general electorate. His numbers with independents are stratospheric, and so the influence that he has, whether he runs himself or chooses to endorse someone else, is very different than it was eight years ago. I would not be shocked if, at the end of the day, you’re gonna have it be Trump versus whomever Sununu supports, duking it out in New Hampshire come January and February of next year.

Do you think Sununu has a shot, himself?

Sure. I mean, polling shows that he’d be strong in New Hampshire. He’s got to decide if he really wants to do it. I’m not sure he pulls the trigger at the end of the day. He certainly has a message he wants to get out there. I think he’d much rather help someone else become the standard bearer than become President of the United States. But one thing we’ve learned about Chris, watching his decision-making process for the U.S. Senate race, is that he’ll make up his mind and it’ll be on his timeline and then he’ll let the rest of us know.

Where’s Tim Scott in the mix?

A Winthrop University poll came out last week that shows Trump at 41 percent, DeSantis at 20 percent and Haley at 18 percent. I think everyone else is down to single digits. You are seeing a lot of interesting strength in individual states. That’s why I don’t pay attention to these national polls at the moment. They kind of become an oddity of averages. You really need to look at the individual states because that’s what’s going to matter both in the short run and the long term as you’re gaming it out.

To me that suggests that not everyone is with Trump, despite the surge of popularity that he experienced following his arrest.

Trump had a bit of an increase in momentum—the rally around the flag effect—because of the Alvin Bragg indictment. It’s a perfect foil for Trump, right? A liberal prosecutor from New York. You couldn’t have handed Donald Trump a better foil, you couldn’t have made one in a lab.

But it’s gonna take a unique candidate in order to actually beat Trump. And all these candidates are running conventional campaigns—that’s not how you beat Donald Trump. Before I worked for him, in 2016, I worked on Chris Christie’s primary campaign, when you had 17 candidates. Everyone made the calculation that Trump would eventually fall under the weight of his own drama and it never happened. So, for all these campaigns out there to think that they’re going to change the trajectory just by, you know, letting Trump kinda get saddled over time, whether it’s by Bragg or Jack Smith or any of these other prosecutors, they haven’t been watching politics for the last decade.

That’s why I keep an eye out on the candidates that are really saying something different and interesting. It could be a Christie, who’s out there making news, who’s taking a very different path than the rest of the Republican candidates or, or even someone like Ramaswamy, who at the very least is mixing it up, saying things that are outside the box. It’s a very unconventional campaign.

You seem to be high on Ramaswamy.

I think the world of Nikki Haley. Tim Scott seems like a really nice guy, Chris Christie is a personal friend. But Ramaswamy, I think, has been very interesting in the way he’s gone about it. Three months ago, everyone kind of said, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ And by the weight of the resources that he’s willing to put into the race and the fact that he has a different message, he’s capturing some attention in the early states. I don’t know how far he’ll go but I wouldn’t totally sleep on the guy either.

What is your view of Glen Youngkin?

Here’s the thing that basically everyone has told me—Youngkin wants to get through his midterm elections first in Virginia. So he’s raising all this money, but we’ve seen that story where someone gets in late thinking they can circumvent the early state process and get on the ballot in the later states. But that is really, really challenging to do. And there’s a reason we haven’t seen it done in recent history. Otherwise, we’d have had President Mike Bloomberg or President Rick Perry.

The problem with that is that in some of these states, it’s very challenging to get on the ballot. If you want to get through Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada at some point, you have to start looking at Illinois and Indiana and certainly, of course, Florida and states like that—and it’s hard to get on some of these ballots. Virginia in particular, Illinois in particular, are very hard.

How’s Kevin McCarthy doing? I know you two are close.

I got to know him really well by running for Congress two times. This is a guy who’s very hands on, who really understands each member in granular detail. In my race, he would call every single day during the last two weeks of the race to check in, get the latest update, find out which members were being supportive, which ones weren’t, which ones he could make personal phone calls to in order to get to endorse. This is a guy who rolls up his sleeves and does the hard work necessary to manage and lead a caucus that’s big and diverse, and you’re seeing the fruits of that labor. Kevin McCarthy’s approval ratings are one of the highest approval ratings for a speaker that we’ve seen in almost a generation now. They’re playing their cards right.

Are you gonna run for Congress again?

No, no, I’m good. I’m happy to let others go and do that. I’ll spend more time being Jack’s dad, which is good for me.