It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.
When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.
Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.
Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”
A year ago, DeSantis had stormed to re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points in what not so long ago was a swing state. He was beating Donald Trump in some opinion polls. He was drawing attention, donor money and headlines, such as “DeFuture” in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post newspaper.
The argument seemed compelling: DeSantis could offer the former president’s Maga (“Make America great again”) politics in purer, perfected form, unencumbered by Trump’s age, chaos or court cases. Some said he was therefore more dangerous than Trump. The comedian Trevor Noah suggested that, if Trump was the original Terminator, DeSantis was the T-1000, a smarter and slicker upgrade.
DeSantis was billed as Trump without the baggage. He turned out to be Trump without the votes.
The governor made a series of bad gambles. He bet big on May and Twitter Spaces as the right time and place to start. He bet big on a moral crusade against wokeness. He bet big on outsourcing central parts of his campaign to a Super Pac (whose boss spent significant time during the last days in Iowa working on a jigsaw puzzle). He bet big on Trump’s candidacy imploding under legal pressures. He bet big on the Iowa caucuses. None of them paid off.
Longtime political observers in Florida had doubts from the start. They knew that DeSantis had conquered the heavily populated Sunshine state with heavy TV advertising and an unusually weak Democratic opponent. They suspected that the retail politics of Iowa – shaking hands, kissing babies, holding long conversations in diners about ethanol – would expose his lack of people skills. They were right.
Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, says: “This guy was politically overpriced stock from the very beginning. He represented Diet Trump but no Trump voter wants the low sugar, low fat, no caffeine version of Trump. They want the real thing.”
But while much has been written about DeSantis’s joyless, low charisma campaign, this was a failure not only of style but of substance. The governor ran to the right of Trump on many issues and put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a “war on woke”.
His timing was off. Culture war issues had been all the rage during the coronavirus pandemic – masks, vaccines, school closures – then morphed into a parents’ rights movement around book bans, critical race theory and transgender children’s access to bathrooms and sports. If it worked for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, why not DeSantis in the US?
But by the time the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came around, the pandemic had faded and masks were rarely seen. DeSantis’s accusations that Trump palled around with Dr Anthony Fauci and forced national lockdowns, while Florida stayed open had lost their resonance.
The limitations of anti-wokeness were also exposed. Groups such as Moms for Liberty, which aim to keep race and LGBTQ+ issues out of school curricular, underperformed in last year’s elections in states such as Virginia, where Youngkin seemed to have lost his touch.
Polls show that DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban is unpopular in Florida and nationwide. His actions against the Walt Disney Co after the company spoke out against Florida legislation that limited discussion of gender and sexuality in classrooms went down badly among pro-business Republicans.
Aware of such trends, Trump is trying to be vague on abortion and talk less about culture war issues these days. At a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Saturday, it took him an hour and 15 minutes to promise a crackdown on schools “pushing” critical race theory and transgender content as well as vaccine mandates. The crowd cheered heartily, suggesting that these topics have not lost all their potency, but Trump quickly moved on.
Wilson comments: “Trump may not be smart, but he’s got a kind of feral cunning and he recognises that the culture war stuff has run out too far. That’s why he said, oh, you have to have a few exceptions [for abortion].
“A guy like DeSantis was on the very bleeding edge of six-week abortion bans and the most punitive approaches to all the culture war things – book banning and everything else – and he thought that was going to get him over the finish line. But when Trump is in the race, he still could never put it together.
DeSantis is still just 45 and aware that other candidates – Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden included – have lost primaries only to try again and win the presidency. He recently claimed that Trump voters in Iowa told him they will back him in four years’ time, telling reporters: “They were coming up to me saying: ‘We want you in 2028, we love you, man.”
The timing of his withdrawal and endorsement of Trump, which frees DeSantis’s voters to potentially back the former president against Haley in New Hampshire and South Carolina, will earn him a few points in Trump World.
The Florida congressman Matt Gaetz said on Sunday: “Welcome home Ron, welcome back to the Maga movement where you’ve always belonged.”
