Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis poured millions upon millions of dollars into his effort to win the Iowa caucuses. But since he announced his presidential campaign on May 24, 2023, the governor has been in endless free fall in the polls. Whereas he at one point held an average of 27.7 percent support in Iowa, he ultimately captured only 21.2 percent of the vote. Furthermore, while he at one point registered a national polling average of 34.5 percent support, he has now fallen to a national polling average of 11.6 percent. DeSantis’ only recompense in the Hawkeye State has been that he has beaten former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has been rising in the polls and is strongly positioned in New Hampshire. Alas, given former President Donald Trump’s historically giant 51.1 percent victory in Iowa, that’s a small pittance for DeSantis.
Rather embarrassingly, DeSantis’ comms team spent Monday setting the expectation that he would not drop out of the race were he to lose to Nikki Haley. Then, it had to deal with the sense of defeat that pervaded Iowa for DeSantis. That was especially the case because news outlets started declaring Trump the winner while Iowans were still caucusing. DeSantis’ campaign spokesman, Andrew Romeo, complained, “It is absolutely outrageous that the media would participate in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote.”
DeSantis began his post-Iowa speech, which followed the news that he had beaten Haley and been brutally crushed by Trump, by declaring that he had been attacked on all fronts. “They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us. They spent almost $50 million attacking us.” He also criticized the networks’ early announcements that Trump had won the race, saying, “They even called the election before people even got a chance to vote.”
DeSantis claimed of the media, “They were writing our obituary months ago.” But, with the extent to which Trump utterly crushed DeSantis — and with Nikki Haley’s advantages in New Hampshire and South Carolina — his obituary is really being written again following the caucuses. The Washington Examiner’s coverage of DeSantis’ fate in Iowa was headlined, “DeSantis rejects pressure to drop out of GOP primary, heads to New Hampshire.” Likewise, “Will Gov. DeSantis drop out of the presidential race?” was the headline Monday night from First Coast News, the NBC affiliate in Jacksonville, Florida.
In his post-caucuses speech, DeSantis maintained his weak approach toward the former president. He simply said, “People want to have hope for this country’s future, and that’s what we represent.”
Haley, on the other hand, maintained good spirits given the recent polling that has shown her with 31 percent support in New Hampshire, which will go to the polls Tuesday. She used the opportunity of her post-caucuses speech to go after Trump more extensively than she has at any other time during her candidacy. She spoke of herself as “the last best hope of stopping the Trump–Biden nightmare” and said of Trump and Biden, “They have more in common than you think.” She explained, “Trump and Biden both lack a vision for our country’s future because both are consumed by the past by investigations, by vendettas, by grievances. America deserves better.”
Haley also aggressively made the case that she, and not Ron DeSantis, is the conservative alternative to Trump. “Iowa,” she said, “made this Republican primary a two-person race.” She skipped over the fact that DeSantis had just beaten her in Iowa and jumped to explaining her polling advantages in the upcoming primaries. Haley’s declarations that this race is now between her and Trump projected a greater degree of confidence than DeSantis’ “[W]e’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.”
DeSantis and Haley’s battle against one another risks becoming a total sideshow in Trump’s steamroll to victory. That they will likely split the second-place prizes in the first two states of the Republican primary will only hasten that outcome.