A striking new survey spells trouble for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — and confirms that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ star is on the rise.

As part of an ongoing POLITICO Magazine project called the County Line, University of Denver political science professor Seth Masket surveyed a group with both the political attentiveness of party officials and the grassroots energy of a candidate’s base: county chairs from both parties, all over the country. They’re both activists and prominent local figures, likely to influence how others view the 2024 field. From now through the beginning of the first presidential primaries, we’ll be checking in with county chairs to see how the field is breaking out. The results from the first survey are not looking great for the former reality TV star turned leader of the free world.

To be clear, it’s still anyone’s rodeo: Just about half of GOP county chairs Masket surveyed said they are uncommitted. But among the other half, DeSantis leads Trump 19 to 17 percent. When asked a somewhat softer question about what candidates the county chairs were considering to support, Trump fared far worse: 73 percent mentioned DeSantis, while only 43 percent mentioned Trump, just a bit more than Nikki Haley (36 percent) and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott (28 percent).

“Trump’s grip on the Republican Party was once legendary,” Masket writes. “The former president certainly may end up the Republican nominee again, and his attacks on DeSantis have only begun. But the fact that Trump is not the first choice of this group and that fewer than one in five county chairs is committed to him suggests some considerable reservations.”

Read the story.

“He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us.”

Can you guess who wrote this about then-President Donald Trump? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**

The Saudis’ Massive Sportswashing Fail … If the Saudi-backed LIV golf tournament was supposed to gin up some decent PR for the Gulf State — which, to be clear, the league has always denied — it’s not exactly going great. Kicking off with a high-profile legal battle against the PGA, a year of foreign agent controversies, 9/11 evocations and events at Trump properties has turned what might have been a sports story into a tale of possible foreign interference by a state that famously dismembered a Washington Post journalist. “It’s not exactly the result you’re going for if you’re spending billions of dollars to rebrand your kingdom,” writes Michael Schaffer in this week’s Capital City column.

37 percent … of Gen Z has a somewhat (18 percent) or very (19 percent) unfavorable view of author J.K. Rowling, compared to 19 percent of Millenials, 10 percent of Gen X and 9 percent of Baby Boomers.

Every week, we add a question to the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll to see what the crosstabs yield. Got any suggestions? Email us at [email protected]

Jan. 6 Committee Aide Squashes Tucker Carlson … After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News’ Tucker Carlson more than 40,000 hours of security footage related to Jan. 6, Carlson promised viewers that his reveal of the massive tranche of video would change the way we all viewed the storming of the Capitol. “It did not,” writes Tom Jocelyn, a former senior professional staff member on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6. In this insider’s account, he tears into Carlson’s cherrypicked clips, “deep state” conspiracy theories and outright misrepresentations: “It shouldn’t have been a surprise that his supposed investigation was a dud — even if you hadn’t spent countless hours poring over details of the Capitol riot like I did.”

Teddy Roosevelt Visits “Wakanda” … Former president Teddy Roosevelt brought retrograde ideas about African “savages” with him on safari in 1909, but when he reached the east African kingdom of Buganda, now known as Uganda, he encountered something he hadn’t expected: one of the most politically and socially sophisticated monarchies in the world, “a real-life kingdom that could have been a model for the fictional Wakanda,” writes historian Jonathan L. Earle. The experience had a profound effect on Roosevelt, changing his views on African countries and moving him toward a more radically progressive stance on combating racism in the U.S.

The battle over the D.C. crime bill is the rare story that was huge in both hometown Washington and company-town Washington. It ended Wednesday with a thud as the Senate voted 81-14 to overturn the long-awaited rewrite of the capital’s criminal code. Joe Biden has promised to sign off, making it the first time in 30 years that Congress has undone a duly-enacted piece of local legislation. Here’s how to sound smart about it (from POLITICO’s Michael Schaffer):

— Don’t buy the scare stories. D.C. isn’t a crime-ridden dystopia (it’s still safer than a lot of the big cities in the home states of the capital’s Congressional critics). And almost all of the just-nixed bill was non-controversial and wonky: The 450-page measure updated a century-old criminal code whose anachronisms had long bothered prosecutors and public defenders alike.

— Don’t think of the D.C. mayor’s opposition as a reason to overturn the bill. Muriel Bowser opposed the parts of the bill that reduced maximum penalties for certain crimes — but the D.C. Council overrode her veto, which is how a democracy works. If Florida or Idaho can pass laws that folks elsewhere consider boneheaded, D.C. should be free to do the same without being overruled by a Congress that doesn’t represent them.

— Have some sympathy for Biden and Congressional Democrats. The bill put them in a bind. They could defend the principle that all Americans have the right to self-government, but it left them exposed to soft-on-crime attacks. It’s not a coincidence that Biden announced his willingness to overturn the law soon after Chicago’s mayor lost an election dominated by crime concerns. Plenty of locals think the Council’s progressive bloc was naïve to push erstwhile Capitol Hill allies into such a dilemma.

— Gear up for another confrontation over a potentially dicier pair of issues: Immigration and voting. The D.C. Council late last year passed a measure to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Similar laws are in place in deep-blue towns like Montpelier, Vermont or the famously crunchy D.C. suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland. But voters there can’t be overruled on Capitol Hill, which is what looks likely in D.C. A measure to reject the bill already got 42 Democratic votes in the House.

Havana Syndrome in Moscow … There’s a reason so many diplomats and CIA operatives think Havana Syndrome is real: It’s happened before, and the Kremlin got away with it. Newly declassified documents confirmed that, beginning as early as 1953, the Soviets saturated American embassy staffers in decades of elevated microwave radiation, some of whom later developed serious illnesses, including leukemia — “and American higher-ups spent years trying to sweep the entire affair under the rug,” writes Casey Michel. “And given the recent resurgence of Cold War-era tactics — from cultivating extremists to launching election interference campaigns to creating globe-spanning propaganda outlets — there’s no reason to think that Moscow wouldn’t restart one of its most successful, and arguably its lengthiest, campaign targeting American diplomats once more.”

On January 30, 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt celebrated his 52nd birthday with a toga party — a dig at political opponents who considered him a dictator. Roosevelt was joined by a group of friends and advisers known as the Cuff Link Gang, comprised primarily of advisers from his failed 1920 bid for the vice-presidency. The name came from a gift Roosevelt gave all of the members — a set of cufflinks, one featuring the recipient’s initials and one reading “FDR.” 1934 was also the first year Roosevelt hosted his Birthday Ball, a series of parties across the country that raised funds for the Georgia Warm Spring Foundation, an organization founded by Roosevelt to provide patients with polio treatment. There were 4,376 Birthday Ball events that year, together raising over a million dollars for the foundation.

**Who Dissed answer: It was none other than Fox News star Tucker Carlson, whose contemptuous comments about Trump — a sharp contrast from his staunch on-air support of the former president — were revealed in court documents related to the ongoing Dominion lawsuit against the network.

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