Gov. Ron DeSantis Campaign in Turmoil

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida woke up in Iowa with a familiar political headache. The man he is chasing in the polls, Donald J. Trump, had just been disqualified from the ballot in Colorado in yet another legal assault that Mr. Trump leveraged to cast himself as a victim. And so Mr. DeSantis trod carefully the next morning outside Des Moines when he called Mr. Trump a “high-risk” choice, alluding to “all the other issues” — 91 felony counts, four indictments, the Colorado ruling — facing the former president.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Mr. DeSantis said. “But it’s reality.”

He was talking about Mr. Trump’s predicament. But he could just as easily have been talking about his own.