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I wouldn't overplay how any candidate performs against Obama. Obama is a very talented politician. Obama crushed Biden and Romney, and I think he'd do the same to Trump and Desantis.
Biden, meanwhile, can barely get a coherent sentence out and has a long string of electoral failures until 2020. Biden's whole strength is that he's the anti-Trump. While Trump flails about, Biden can just hunker down and make word salads and be nice. People choose him because he's not Trump and doesn't have strong negatives of his own, but he also lacks positives.
I think if Desantis can dispatch Trump and Trump doesn't do too much damage to Desantis in the process, then I think Desantis pretty easily beats Biden. Desantis has shown he can pull in working class whites and hispanics by talking patriotism and freedom and anti-socialism. Romney's job was literally buying companies and streamlining them, Desantis doesn't have that baggage. Desantis also is a lot more appealing to suburbanites than Trump because he doesn't spin conspiracy theories or generally act like a lunatic. Dems will definitely try to turn him into Desatan, but I don't think that will work.
Tim Scott doesn’t inoculate them against racism charges. See Larry Elder. >

He's very good at deflecting them though, not just blunting them but using them to hurt democrats. I could see DeSantis choosing him as veep and them together winning hispanics and rich suburbanites and badly beating Biden. On the flip side, I can also see Trump turning the whole thing into such a shit show that people are exhausted and divided and just elect Biden again. We'll see! >

I don’t think DeSantis can win in the suburbs. His biggest appeal is being Trump without Trump. The only difference in choice between a DeSantis voter and a Trump voter is a matter of personality. The policy is the same. 
And given that these suburban voters took a sharp leftward swing since 2016, running on the Trump brand isn’t going to win them back. The only way the suburbs return to republicans is with a Romney-style Republican, which isn’t going to happen. If DeSantis wants any chance of winning, he has to repeat the 2016 map with a strong Rust Belt performance with working class whites (and maybe expand upon Trump’s 2020 showing with Hispanics, which would probably give him Nevada). 
His whole schtick anyway is fighting these cultural battles- “Florida is where woke goes to die” or whatever. Its more of the same that plays well with the white working class, but is a huge turnoff for upper middle class suburbanites. That’s a big takeaway from 2022 as well- the cultural battles tanked candidates in places like Arizona and the Philly suburbs. >

I think you are misreading suburbanites turning leftward- it was more about being scared by instability than a political change of heart. Trump is an unhinged demagogue that spouts conspiracy theories and loves dictators. DeSantis has none of those scary qualities. In fact, by highlighting excesses of the left he could scare suburbanites right back into the republican camp. He’ll make the election about open borders and defund the police and woke classroom curriculum and socialism. That’s how you win suburban voters- make the other side scary. >

Republicans ran on that playbook across the country in 2022. >

They underperformed in 2022 mostly due to Trump picked candidates that were 2020 election deniers and celebrities. Republicans did great in Florida, which is Desantis country, and would have taken the senate if not for the Trump effect. Trump is electoral poison for republicans, their key to winning is to move past him. >

That's the comforting justification Republicans are telling themselves. I'm not so sure. Mitt Romney was a palatable Republican in 2012, and he ran the general election on conventional northeastern Republicanism.  He was a prototypical generic Republican and even kind of looked like a Republican you'd create in a lab. His major issues were about taxes on the rich, repealing Obamacare, lowering the deficit by cutting services like social security especially for the young.
Obama dispatched Romney fairly easily.  More easily than Biden did Trump.  Joe Biden was on that ticket and faced off against Paul Ryan, so he knows how to deal with this.
Also Democrats no longer have the same apathetic attitude toward voting because they perceive that the Republicans want to stack the courts in order to take their rights away.