MANCHESTER, N.H. — Ron DeSantis knows the statistics by heart.

He ticks them off as he contrasts his sweeping reelection as Florida governor with Republican losses nationwide last fall: a flip of traditionally “very blue” Miami-Dade County; the narrowness of his 2018 victory versus his landslide in 2022; the remarkable Republican voter registration gains in the state on his watch.

“There is no substitute for victory,” DeSantis said this month during his first trip to New Hampshire in his still-undeclared presidential bid. He denounced the “culture of losing” that he said had engulfed Republicans in recent years, swiping at Donald Trump in all but name.

“If the election of 2024 is a referendum on Joe Biden and his failed policies — and we provide a fresh vision for American renewal — Republicans will win the White House, the House and the U.S. Senate,” he told the crowd. “So we cannot get distracted, and we cannot afford to lose, because freedom is hanging in the balance.”

Electability has emerged as one of the early pressure points in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.

That amorphous, ill- defined, eye-of-the- beholder intangible — the sense of whether voters believe a politician can actually win — was supposed to be one of DeSantis’ strengths, tapping into the genuine Republican frustration with years of ballot box disappointments to urge a new face for the party in 2024. Republicans lost with Trump, the argument goes, but can win with DeSantis.

But there are growing questions about DeSantis’ own ability to win over the independent and suburban voters who delivered the White House to Biden, and whether the hard-line stances the governor has taken, including on abortion, will repel the very voters he promises to win back. His feuding with Disney — including an offhand remark last week suggesting he would put a state prison next to Disney World — has raised alarms, even among would-be allies.

For years, electability has been the fool’s gold of Republican politics.

Since the rise of the tea party more than a decade ago, Republican primary voters have consistently cast ballots with their hearts, sneering at so-called experts to select uncompromising hard-liners as nominees. Even as losses in winnable races have mounted, the mere perception of running as electable has repeatedly backfired, giving off for many Republicans the stench of the reviled establishment.

“It has sounded like an excuse to get conservative voters to support somebody they don’t really want, even though the argument may very well be true,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. Citing GOP losses while Trump has defined the party — in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022 — Ayres added of the former president and GOP 2024 front-runner, “There is no education in the fifth kick of a mule, and yet it appears that’s where we’re headed.”

For Trump’s rivals, hitting him as an electoral loser is central to chiseling away at the crucial bloc of voters who liked his presidency but might be willing to move on. It also allows them to create contrast without directly crossing him; Nikki Haley, for instance, talks about the need for a “new generation” to win.

Core to DeSantis’ particular electability pitch is that he won in Florida despite not tacking to the middle: that voters, in other words, can have both a fighter and a winner.

But his recent signing of a six-week abortion ban puts him on the far right on an issue that Democrats have used to mobilize their base with great success since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And congressional Republicans, who have had a front-row seat to the party’s Trump-era struggles, have pointedly delivered far more endorsements to Trump, including from DeSantis’ home state delegation during his visit to Washington last week, in a sign of the governor’s slipping traction.

Trump’s team has pushed an electability case against DeSantis. A Trump- allied super PAC has run ads warning that DeSantis would go after Social Security and Medicare, touchstone issues that Democrats have used to defeat Republicans nationwide.

“If anyone thinks throwing seniors under the bus is a winning argument, they are seriously out of touch,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson. “There is only one electable candidate in 2024, and that is President Trump.”

The DeSantis team did not respond to a request for comment.

Sarah Longwell, a Republican who holds regular focus groups with GOP voters, said in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterm losses, many Republicans had come to view Trump as an electoral loser.

“ ‘Baggage’ is the word you’d hear,” she said.

DeSantis was the beneficiary, rising as voters looked for a less polarizing alternative. “Trump with a mute button,” one voter memorably described a dream GOP candidate, she recalled.

That trend, however, has dissipated of late, said Longwell, who is involved with several groups that oppose Trump.

“The electability pitch really only works if there is lots and lots of polling showing Trump losing by a wide margin,” she said. In a 50-50 nation, Trump remains competitive with Biden in almost every public poll, even if DeSantis often performs marginally better.

Then there are the known unknowns of 2024 for Republican voters. If Trump loses the primary, would he sabotage the winner? And what would be the impact of further potential criminal indictments?

Trump’s pundit-defying victory in 2016 has uniquely inoculated him from charges that he cannot win. And as Trump’s rivals in 2016 learned — like when Jeb Bush called him the “chaos candidate” — it can be especially hard to press a case about electability when trailing badly in the polls, as DeSantis does now.

In interviews, Trump supporters note that he only narrowly lost in 2020 despite a pandemic that crippled American life for years, circumstances that almost certainly won’t repeat.

The who-can-win debate plays out strikingly differently between the two parties. In 2020, Democratic primary voters obsessed over electability before nominating Biden, who made his strength against Trump a centerpiece of his candidacy.