Sasha Stone: Desantis/Newsome Debate: Newsome Won, or: You Can't Beat Charisma...or Can You?

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I still haven't watched the debate. The clips I've seen show DeSantis manhandling Newsome--but YouTube is probably not showing me a random selection of clips. And I'm not neutral. The poop map alone was devastating. And Newsome's most often-repeated alleged zinger ("neither one of us will be his party's nominee") just wasn't very good. DeSantis, though, came out of the blocks so hard that he seemed a little nasty. 

   Also, I'm not normally that affected by charisma...Barack Obama notwithstanding, perhaps to my shame...

   But what about the claim that charisma always wins (which Stone makes, but about a zillion others make as well)? 

   I dunno.

   So I looked back to elections since '76. I started there because I didn't know how to rate Nixon-Humphrey (though Nixon was so anti-charismatic, I'd guess HH was better. So therels that.). Anyhoo... that's where I started. Carter had a big charisma advantage over Ford, and won. Keep moving forward, and I'd say: every winning candidate since 1976 has at least tied his opponent's charisma level...until 2020. Some were ties, of course, like Bush '41-Dukakis. But in no case did the clearly less-charismatic candidate win until Biden beat Trump.

   So...there's that, for whatever it's worth.

   Of course, to quote John Hammond in Jurassic Park (there speaking of Norman Malcolm), Trump suffers from a deplorable excess of personality... Also, I'd say that it was an extremely atypical election, in which the Democrats pulled out all the stops to rig the game against their most hated rival of my lifetime. So perhaps those things matter. I don't know.