The top 10 Republican presidential candidates for 2024, ranked

But commanding that loyalty and being the guy at the top of Republicans’ ballots for the third straight election aren’t quite the same thing. And for the first time, we’re giving the slight edge — and the top of our list — to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The reasons for this might not be what you think.

The search of Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago last week was momentous. Exactly how it breaks politically, though, we don’t yet know.

There is some indication this development might actually have rallied the GOP to Trump, at least temporarily. The sense of persecution, long fed by Trump, has proved an invaluable political commodity, and he’s got plenty of grist for that mill — whatever the actual legitimacy of his highly speculative claims of political targeting.

But the political impact of the Mar-a-Lago search won’t be measured in the polls conducted in the past couple of weeks. This is a long game. And the legal jeopardy Trump faces could well reinforce some of the reasons DeSantis appears to have gained on him in earlier surveys. Namely: Trump’s uncertain electability and the political baggage he totes along with him.

Those factors endangered Trump’s stranglehold on the party well before the Mar-a-Lago search. Two states likely to hold important early primaries — Michigan and New Hampshire — featured polls showing Trump and DeSantis running neck and neck. In this year’s primaries, Trump-aligned candidates almost always win, but that’s in large part because the party has overwhelmingly aligned with Trump’s values. In contested primaries, the candidates Trump himself actually endorsed have often been stuck around 30 percent of the vote.

Indeed, those primaries suggest people might be willing to go with Trumpism, and to go without Trump. And DeSantis provides that in spades. He’s constantly pushing the envelope by opening new fronts in the culture wars and pushing actual legislation or executive actions to back that up. But more than that, he does so with the kind of actual attention to detail and policy that Trump has long eschewed.

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham recently wagered that Republicans might become so “exhausted by the battle — the constant battle — that they may believe that, well, maybe it’s time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump’s policies, who’s not Trump.”

Is Donald Trump beatable in the Republican primary?

Crucially, we have yet to see Trump face a truly Trumpian opponent. In 2016, pretty much everyone was going after Trump on the assumption that they had to offer an alternative to his brand of politics — or because they were losing and needed to do something. Today, lots of Republicans are emulating Trump’s in-your-face,…