The obituaries are almost too easy to write.
What killed the presidential candidacy of Ron DeSantis, suspended on the Sunday before New Hampshire? Let us count the causes.
There was, of course, his shambolic super PAC; campaign infighting; his reckless spending on private jets; his disastrous rollout with Elon Musk; his serial strategic and tactical blunders. His campaign operation was both incompetent and tone-deaf, totally misreading the dynamics of GOP primary politics.
His campaign operation was both incompetent and tone-deaf, totally misreading the dynamics of GOP primary politics.
But the proximate cause of his demise was pretty obvious: DeSantis was a bad candidate with a lousy message, as unlikeable in person as he was on television. He was, in the memorable words of GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, “Ted Cruz without the personality.”
And he refused to actually run against the man he had to beat.
The Florida governor was not, of course, the first fantastic-on-paper presidential contender who failed to flourish in the spotlight. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida’s Jeb Bush (!) blundered and floundered their way to presidential asterisk status over the past few decades. Indeed, political history is full of could-have-beens who imploded in the heat of a presidential contest: Democrat Ed Muskie in 1972; Gary Hart in 1984; Rudy Giuliani in 2008; and who could forget the hopes dashed by the collapse of the Fred Thompson boomlet that same year?
Even so, there is something rather extraordinary about DeSantis’ defenestration.
Amid an otherwise bleak midterms for the GOP, he won re-election in a landslide in one of the nation’s biggest and most crucial states.
The timing could hardly have been more propitious: Trump had been defeated, disgraced, and was facing serious legal peril, and the GOP looked poised to finally move on. The smart kids in the anti-anti-Trump wing of party — including much of Conservatism Inc. and its media allies — moved quickly to embrace DeSantis’ candidacy.
DeSantis eagerly tried to seize the mantle of Trumpism without Trump, picking fights with “woke” corporations, banning books and abortion, bullying and insulting critics, and using migrants as pawns. In his performative aggression, DeSantis imagined that he was checking all the right boxes, even if it meant using the power of government. He may have abandoned the notion of “small government” and “free markets,” but he was making the right enemies, and that was what MAGA really wanted, he thought.
In his performative aggression, DeSantis imagined that he was checking all the right boxes, even if it meant using the power of government.
He lined up as many right-wing influencers as he could, including anti-CRT activists like Chris Rufo and writers like Nate Hochman (whom he had to later fire after Hochman tweeted Nazi imagery). Last year, The Daily Beast reported on what it called DeSantis’ “Secret Twitter Army of Far-Right Influencers,” a decidedly deplorable group that included a self-described “alpha-male giga chad,” an unregistered arms dealer and an ex-Trump digital strategist who has said some very, very racist things.
But in the end, none of it worked. MAGA wanted what MAGA wanted. And that was Donald Trump.
This was DeSantis’ most fundamental miscalculation, and one that he alluded to in the video announcing the end of his campaign. Rather than go for soft Trumpers, or Republicans who were skeptical of the former president, DeSantis went hard for the hardcore base. That meant continually moving to the right, embracing a reactionary pugilism and draconian reactionary policies that he thought would wean MAGA loyalists from their orange Messiah.
But the MAGA faithful didn’t care about the policies or the legislation. They wanted the show.
Trump gave them the show. DeSantis was stiff, shrill, unlikeable and, worst of all, boring.
Perhaps Team DeSantis expected Trump’s criminal indictments would ultimately push GOP voters to search for a plausible Trumpian alternative. But since DeSantis was basing his entire candidacy on inheriting the MAGA base, he refused to attack Trump, even as the charges piled up. He dodged, weaseled, offered rationalizations and attacked prosecutors. With the presidential nomination hanging in the balance, he refused to make any moral case against renominating the front-runner.
Instead, he pledged to pardon Trump if he was elected.
Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference; maybe the GOP is so thoroughly Trumpified that nothing would have mattered. But DeSantis never tried to take on the giant elephant in the room.
And now it’s all over, his campaign and his brand in tatters. He was the “fighter” who caved. The GOP alpha was a thorough beta when it mattered.
DeSantis was left to complain that his one great regret was the fact that Trump had been indicted. The indictments “distorted the primary” and “crowded out, I think, so much other stuff.”
“It’s sucked out a lot of oxygen,” he said, as if he had no agency at all in how it played out.
As his campaign limped toward its finish, DeSantis was asked by NBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard, “If Trump is found guilty and wins the nomination, would you stand by him at the convention?”
DeSantis turned and walked away without answering.
It was the twilight of his presidential bid, but the beginning of what promises to be a long year of humiliation.