Despite all the hype he never stood any chance of dethroning Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination and it actually had little to do with him. It's because Donald Trump has had the nomination in the bag since Jan. 21, 2021. Even zombie Reagan wouldn't be able to beat him. And there was never any doubt that Trump was going to seek a rematch since he had staked his well-being and the future of the GOP on the Big Lie that the election had been stolen from him.
But DeSantis was one of the most arrogant of all these alleged superstars. And his campaign may have been the worst of all time. There have been quite a few postmortems of this disastrous campaign already, some of them even before he officially dropped out. It wasn't hard to see it coming. Despite the media continuing to take him very seriously almost until the end, it's been clear that his campaign was nose-diving since the spring of last year.
After his big re-election win in 2022, an anomaly in that otherwise disappointing year for Republicans, he was briefly seen as a rare political talent who could possibly beat Trump when the polls showed them neck and neck. But that was a very short-lived phenomenon:
Morning Consult’s daily tracker shows DeSantis was already losing altitude for months before the first indictment. His peak was January 5, 2023. This basically looks like a linear function of Republican voters forgetting about the midterms. https://t.co/6SmwFthNcN pic.twitter.com/FWniD20dMX
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) January 22, 2024
Conventional wisdom now holds that Trump rose abruptly in the polls because he was indicted. It's just as possible that when national Republicans started to get a good look at DeSantis they decided that Trump was a better choice, indictments or not. And that's because DeSantis is an extremely unlikable politician. (I once compared him to Richard Nixon and I was being unfair to Nixon!)
What DeSantis did to his own state in service of his grasping ambition was downright wicked and it should have tipped off the punditocracy to the fact that he was being unduly influenced by right-wing internet politics. We first knew he was uniquely barbarous when he made defiance of COVID mitigation measures and vaccination programs the central issue of his administration. This was a stance so irresponsible that his state, which has an older demographic than any other state in the union, ended up with a much higher death rate than it should have. And this outrageous irresponsibility continues to this day, with his quack Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, chosen specifically for his fringe anti-vaccine views, exhorting Florida residents not to get any MRNA boosters, based upon shoddy science. This is despite new studies showing that multiple vaccination shots greatly reduce the chances of contracting long COVID.
DeSantis was still flying the COVID resistance flag in his presidential campaign, often using it as his great selling point on the trail. He even brought Ladopo to campaign stops. It's not only an example of his desperately poor leadership, it's also a prime example of his desperately poor political judgment which carried through to his announcement that he was dropping out of the race on Sunday. After everything that's happened since then, DeSantis basically said that he's fine with Trump except for his COVID policy and his support for Dr. Fauci. He truly believes that his COVID policies are his greatest achievement but apparently, Republican voters weren't all that impressed. (Maybe it's because of the high COVID death rates in GOP states.)
That wasn't the only problem with his campaign, of course. There was the disastrous announcement event on X which turned out to be symbolic of his whole campaign: lots of hype and then nothing but glitches. The infighting within the campaign and his Super PAC, an experiment that was not only of dubious legality but never really worked. He avoided the mainstream press preferring to focus only on right-wing media, failing to recognize that Donald Trump owns them. And then there is his pathetic lack of personal charm and charisma. If there was ever someone who is not suited to retail politics, it is Ron DeSantis.
He's heading back to Florida now, a state that he has abused so badly in pursuit of his presidential ambitions that it's now just a smoking hulk of what's left of the latest right-wing experiment in governing by Twitter and Newsmax. If he did nothing else he proved that following the advice of the MAGA "intellectuals" like Christopher Rufo may not be the big winner everyone thought it was.
Unfortunately for Florida, they are saddled with a 15-week or 6-week abortion ban, both of which he signed, at least until the courts declare otherwise. Their public schools and higher education are in crisis, beset with controversy over banned books and "don't say gay" laws that are completely out of step with modern America. His "elections policing unit" is backfiring. His administration is riddled with corruption and he's still embroiled in a feud with the state's largest employer which he undertook because someone told him that "fighting the woke" was his ticket to the big time.
Throughout his campaign, he said over and over again that he wanted to make America Florida but the Americans he expected to embrace that vision rejected it out of hand. There's a lesson in that for the Republican Party but I doubt they are going to hear it. After all, he was just trying to be Trump and they are all knocking each other over in the rush to endorse him.
And that even includes DeSantis himself who said just last week, "You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring he'll say you're wonderful." Just six days later, without even a hint of embarrassment, he proved that to be true. He kissed the ring and Trump said "he was very gracious, and he endorsed me, so I appreciate that."
His final awkward video, suspending his campaign, was yet another gaffe:
I reached out to the @ChurchillCentre's executive director, who said that "as indicated on our website, there is no documented attribution of Churchill making this statement." https://t.co/hbRlqb2on7
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 22, 2024
It's a fitting end to one of the most humiliating presidential runs in American history.
