A year ago, Ron DeSantis was being touted as the next potential Republican president.

He was Donald Trump without the “chaos”, as he put it. Deftly waging, and winning, America’s culture wars without the dysfunction and drama that had plagued Mr Trump’s presidency.

On paper, the self-styled “anti-woke” governor of Florida appeared to have found a magic formula to turn around the string of electoral losses the GOP has suffered in the last few years.

He offered a less polarising – and younger – iteration of Mr Trump.

His landslide re-election in Florida in 2022 turned the purple swing state into a ruby-red bastion.

Replicating that success nationally, Mr DeSantis and his wealthy donors reasoned, could power him on the road to the White House.

But there was a fatal flaw in the plan. Mr DeSantis had reckoned on a Republican Party that had tired of the 77-year-old, criminally indicted Mr Trump.

Staked all on Iowa

It took just one state to vote in the party’s nomination contest to shatter that illusion.

The 45-year-old Mr DeSantis had staked all on Iowa, a state where evangelical Christians decide its victors.

He championed family values with his central casting wife and children in tow, and a dedication to service as he stressed his military career.

But the conservative Right, which had rejected the thrice-married Mr Trump here in 2016, now flocked to him. He won Iowa by more than all his rivals put together.

Mr DeSantis, as he admitted in his Sunday night address, had no remaining “path to victory”.

He is polling in the single digits in the wealthier, and more moderate, New Hampshire, which votes next on Tuesday.

Mr Trump holds a commanding lead in the next few states, and Mr DeSantis’s backers, who frittered away tens of millions of dollars in Iowa, have run out of cash.

His embarrassingly early withdrawal offers a number of lessons, from staffing to financial management.

Most important, of all, though, it is a reminder of just how much personality matters in presidential races.

Mr DeSantis’s declining polls have shown that the more voters get to see of him, the less they seem to like him.