In his initial pitch for the presidency, Florida governor Ron DeSantis presented himself as Donald Trump with brains; Trump but you get two terms; Trump but he gets things done.
His strategists believed, with hundreds of millions of dollars behind him, he could easily brush the other Republican wannabes aside before taking on the Donald.
The path to the Republican nomination and the White House seemed clear. From late 2022, when the Trump-dominated Republican Party underperformed in the midterm elections, to early 2023, Republican voters appeared finally to be suffering from “Trump fatigue.” The re-elected Florida governor, Ron DeFuture, as Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post dubbed him, was ideally placed to capitalize.
But now it’s late January 2024 and Ron DeSantis looks worn out. After a huge push in Iowa, he finished a distant second in the caucuses last week. In New Hampshire this week, he’s polling at 6 or 7 percent. And the muddle of his campaign strategy now belies the competent image he wants to project.
His aim now, such as it is, is to stop Nikki Haley finishing a close second to Trump on Tuesday, wait for Trump to thump Haley in her home state of South Carolina next month, then emerge as the only Trump alternative. “He’s going to do what Ted Cruz did, which is the smart thing,” Bob Healey, a New Hampshire Republican state representative and DeSantis supporter, told me on Friday. “Just keep coming second and third because this thing will keep going.”
It’s a survival plan, not a victory one: just hang around long enough and hope that, somewhere, somehow, Trump will implode, be sentenced to prison, or something.
But it’s DeSantis’s campaign that seems to have crumbled. His Never Back Down political action committee, led by former Ted Cruz consultants, misjudged the mood of the Republican electorate — and have only proved that in 2024 the party’s voters are loyal not to conservative ideals. They are loyal, mostly, to Donald Trump. They want Trump, flaws and all.
In 2016, Ted Cruz won Iowa by playing to evangelicals. He then got 11 percent in New Hampshire and won in Oklahoma, Alaska and his home state of Texas. DeSantis now would have to pull off a political miracle to do even half as well.
From the off, and that glitched announcement with Elon Musk on Twitter, DeSantis’s candidacy seemed cursed. Never Back Down has reportedly suffered from all sorts of bickering and in-fighting. Maybe it’s a kind of Trump voodoo.
The biggest problem with Ron DeSantis is Ron DeSantis, though. In his highly successful gubernatorial re-election campaign in Florida in 2022, he was able to project an image of himself as an industrious and powerful figure. But running for the presidency requires something different. It demands a certain charismatic magic, something that often escapes poor Ron.
On Friday, he arrived an hour late for a press event in St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. He kept a small gaggle of his fans waiting in the blistering cold in order to do an interview on Fox News. When he finally emerged from his car, face like thunder, he bolshily rattled through his talking points: “Trump tweeted law and order but he did nothing to ensure law and order” and Trump “gives the Democrats their best chance at retaining power.”
He suggested, as he often has, that the polls showing Trump ahead of Biden were fixed by a Democratic establishment that knows it can defeat Trump in November. “You are probably going to see them go the other way pretty shortly.” Such talk implicitly suggests an acceptance of defeat.
DeSantis also attempted to downplay Trump’s 52 percent majority victory in Iowa, pointing towards the low turnout as evidence that voters aren’t that excited about Trump. “I think Reagan would have got over 80 percent,” he said. Given that DeSantis only got 21 percent, this all sounded bitter and off. Not only was he making it clear that he, Ron, was no Reagan, he also unconsciously elevated Trump, a president who left office with an approval rating below 35 percent, by comparing him to the most successful Republican president of the twentieth century.
It’s easy to see why DeSantis is grumpy. He could have endorsed Trump this year and positioned himself as heir apparent ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Instead, urged on by many around him, he took a gamble and now DeFuture looks considerably less bright.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.