Well, that was quick. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has quit the race for Republican candidate for US president 2024 after a single contest. He had been expected to drop out if he suffered too humiliating a loss in the Iowa caucus, but having outperformed expectations by scrapping into second place — still miles behind Donald Trump — he promptly quit anyway, handing over his endorsement to Trump.
“You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring he’ll say you’re wonderful,” DeSantis said a week earlier. We’ll see.
That his slogan was “Never Back Down”, and he quit via a quote incorrectly attributed to Winston Churchill, seems appropriately humiliating. It’s quite a fall for the man being talked up this time last year as the Republican most likely to supplant Trump. How did we get here?
Florida ascendant
DeSantis was elected Florida governor in 2019 and reelected in 2022 by the largest margin in the state for 40 years — a highlight of deeply disappointing midterms for the Republicans.
His tactic in establishing himself (however briefly) as the Republican most likely to beat Donald Trump to the nomination was to take on the same grievance politics as Trump and match it to a sense of calm competence. He boasted of his state as the place “woke goes to die” and of himself as the man best placed to fight the woke left elites.
This was best exemplified by his fight with Disney, a prolonged dispute started when the company, under pressure from its workforce, criticised Florida laws introduced by DeSantis that prohibited public school teachers from discussing sexuality and gender identity in the classroom. DeSantis, a great example of his party’s commitment to free speech and allowing the market to operate, threatened Disney with new regulations and taxes, attempted to wrest oversight of its land, and threatened to construct a prison nearby.
In response, Disney scrapped plans to build a new campus in central Florida and relocate 2,000 workers to the state.
What went wrong?
There is no obvious moment when DeSantis went from contender to makeweight, just a steady humiliating draining of the fuel tank.
According to both his allies and detractors, DeSantis is highly intelligent, hard-working and calculating; “Trump with a brain”. He is also quite fantastically charmless and aloof. That, it turns out, was a fatal combination. See, for example, his concession video:
He’s polished and practised, faintly uncanny and off-putting. When he talks of kids being indoctrinated or an invasion from the southern border, he comes across like Trump after a glow-up from those aliens in The Faculty. The competent, serious Trump routine was never going to pry away Trump’s supporters — they don’t just want the culture war, they want the narcotic rush of Trump’s scattergun glee. They don’t just want unachievable promises about returning industrial jobs and a border fence, they want a guy they can imagine having a big go in a truck on the White House lawn.
As Helen Lewis in The Atlantic put it in July last year, “DeSantis’ problem is that his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong. He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes.”
