In dropping out of the Republican presidential race, Governor Ron DeSantis made official what everybody who followed politics even tangentially could see coming for months. There have been, and there will continue to be, plenty of detailed reported pieces about the various mistakes of his campaign that saw his standing fall from being competitive with Donald Trump in early polls to a distant second in Iowa that forced him out of the race before the New Hampshire primary. But the most basic explanation of what happened to DeSantis is that by the time his campaign got going in earnest, there was simply not much demand for the product he was selling.

I am reminded of the story of Peloton. During the pandemic, the stationary bike and fitness app company was flooded with customers who were eager to stay in shape with gyms closed and they could not keep up with demand. But once Covid receded and life returned to normal, people wanted to get back into gyms as they had done before. As a result, demand crashed, leaving the company with excess inventory, forcing them into several rounds of cost cutting and restructuring to try and reassure investors. The stock, which peaked at nearly $163 per share in December 2020, is now trading at under $6.

Likewise, the political stock of DeSantis rose considerably during the pandemic. He benefited from recognizing earlier than most that the massive restrictions imposed on society in the name of fighting Covid did more harm than good. His very public battles against Covid restrictions drew the ire of the Left and the media and made him one of the most popular Republicans in the country among conservatives. Add this to his legislative wins on traditional conservative issues (taxes, school choice, gun rights, and life), his demonstrated competence during hurricanes, and landslide reelection, there was reason to believe he was somebody who could cobble together a winning coalition in a Republican primary. 

Trump’s entrance into the race in November 2022 obviously complicated DeSantis’s plans. But he postulated that there were enough Republican voters out there who liked Trump but were open to moving on from him – mainly conservatives who felt that he was too distracted to deliver actual policy victories. Running as an explicitly anti-Trump candidate, so the theory went, would doom him to failure and destroy his career – as it had already done with a long list of Republicans. So his idea was that he would be willing to attack Trump, but only from the right. To succeed, there would need to be a large number of Republicans out there who were disappointed that Trump caved to woke corporations and Big Tech; who were angered that he let Anthony Fauci dictate Covid policy and Kim Kardashian influence criminal justice policy; that he wasn’t pro-life enough and that he didn’t actually build the border wall. The hope was that if he locked down these voters and demonstrated he was capable of beating Trump, that the more deeply anti-Trump Republicans would suck up whatever differences they had with him and rally around DeSantis. 

While initial polling early last year suggested there might be something to this thesis, over time, that was not the case. It turns out that the sort of people who care about Section 230 reform don’t exist much out of social media and that the Covid wars didn’t motivate voters who were years removed from lockdowns. And ultimately, the number of Republican voters who were ready to move on from Trump dwindled with each successive indictment. 

Once it became clear that the demand for what DeSantis was offering wasn’t there, no amount of campaign reshuffles or messaging retoolings were going to make a difference. And once he no longer seemed like he could realistically beat Trump, there was less reason for other more traditional Republicans to suck up their disagreements with him (his pandering to RFK Jr. supporters, muddled answers on Ukraine, opposition to entitlement reform, equivocations about Trump, etc.). So this is what allowed Nikki Haley to gain on him. 

There are many people who will take DeSantis’s failure and conclude that it was a big mistake for him to run this year rather than wait until 2028. But political timing is a funny thing. In 2006, many people said Barack Obama should wait to run rather than to do so barely two years into his first Senate term, but in the end, the timing was ideal – a more seasoned Obama with a more extensive voting record would not have been able to win on the same “hope and change” message. On the flip side, there are those who still argue that if Chris Christie had run in 2011 (fresh off battles with teacher’s unions) in a weak field that ended with a Mitt Romney nomination, that he would have fared better than he did four years later – having embraced Obama during Hurricane Sandy and endured the Bridgegate scandal – and stuck in a massive field with Trump. There’s no real knowing that DeSantis would have done better had he waited. four years from now. Coming off reelection victory, DeSantis’s star was probably as high as it If running on his Covid record didn’t resonate in this election cycle, just a few years removed from the pandemic, it’s hard to see who would have cared four years from now – or what other issues and conservative leaders would gain traction in the intervening time period. 

So, while we could speculate about these various what-ifs, we can only comment knowingly on what we have in fact observed. And the bottom line is that not enough Republican voters who like Trump are ready to move on from him, and that left no room for DeSantis.