Ron DeSantis in Iowa. AP.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the 2024 GOP presidential race and has endorsed rival Donald Trump. AP. DeSantis said that the GOP base clearly wanted Donald Trump and blasted the only other major candidate in the race, Nikki Haley. DeSantis got 2nd place in the Iowa Caucus but he was not polling well in other early states like New Hampshire and South Carolina. Though he got 2nd in Iowa he did not deal a killing blow to Nikki Haley who was only a few percentage points behind him. Despite strong buzz before his run, DeSantis did not have a good campaign with a buggy and glitched opening.
My Comment:
I have been thinking about writing this post for a long time as it was clear that not only was Ron DeSantis going to lose, he was going to lose in spectacular fashion. That has come to pass and it's now time to detail exactly why DeSantis went from a promising governor to essentially a joke.
Ron DeSantis never should have run in the first place. I know some people thought that he could take down Donald Trump but that was never in the cards. Trump was essentially an incumbent and is the most popular Republican in generations. Taking him down was never going to be easy in the first place, but even by those standards DeSantis did poorly.
So why did DeSantis fail? Well for one thing he turned a lot of people off by running in the first place. A lot of people, including myself, defended DeSantis when he was doing his pre-campaign world tour. I honestly though that he wouldn't run and everyone was worried for nothing. But then he announced his campaign and everyone had to eat crow.
DeSantis also had a lot of problems with the opening of his campaign. Instead of announcing it in a crowd in his home state of Florida, he did it on X and it didn't work out at all. The announcement was glitched out and buggy and widely mocked by just about everyone. Had he done a more traditional campaign announcement he would have started his campaign on the right foot.
DeSantis also angered a lot of people by his flip-flopping on the Ukraine issue. At times he was very critical of the war but then he would go right back to criticizing Vladimir Putin. It was very clear what DeSantis was doing, he was trying to peel off Trump voters who were a lot more skeptical of the war but also wanted to appeal to the neocons in the party that supported the war. This backfired on him as nobody really knew where he actually stood on the issue.
The biggest problem had to have been his army of online "influencers". These folks, like Bill Mitchell and Christina Pushaw were absolutely insufferable. I have blocked and muted a lot of people on X but Bill Mitchell remains the only one I have muted that has never directly contacted me, his posts were that bad. I did briefly look at his account today just to see the meltdown, but it was the behavior of these folks, more than anything else, that turned a lot of people away from the DeSantis campaign.
So what did those influencers do that was so bad? They picked a fight with anyone pro-Trump and, eventually, pro-Haley and did it in the most annoying way. Indeed, if it wasn't for the gator emoji that many of them would have passed for the most obvious Democrat shills. Indeed, I saw these accounts spouting the exact same debunked crap that the Democrats were spouting and it was terrible.
I am sure that the DeSantis supporters would say that there were pro-Trump accounts that acted like jerks as well. I would agree with that, there are bad actors in every political movement. The problem is that there were plenty of more reasonable people on the Trump side, but the only people that got any attention at all from the DeSantis side were the bad actors. They even drowned out DeSantis himself to the point where I rarely heard about anything he did, just what his supporters were doing.
DeSantis also went all in on Iowa, which appears to have been a mistake. He did manage to get 2nd place, but it was not a convincing win against Haley. When go go all in, you risk losing everything and that is what happened. Contrast to Haley's campaign. Though I don't like Haley, she didn't go all in on one state. She will still lose but she will hang on longer than DeSantis did.
The DeSantis base was also pretty small. From what I could tell DeSantis supporters fell into one of two camps. The first group was people that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but thought he was too damaged to win in 2024. This group appears to be on board with supporting Trump, albeit reluctantly, now that DeSantis dropped out.
The 2nd group was hardcore antivaxxers that blamed Trump for everything that happened with the Coronavirus vaccines. Though Trump was responsible for the early rollout of the vaccine, these folks blamed him for things that happened after he was out of office. They are also single issue voters and will probably jump to RFK Jr. I honestly don't think this group is particularly large but they do make up a large number of very noisy people on social media.
I don't think that Ron DeSantis has much of a future. Though I am sure people are appreciating the fact that he endorsed Trump, the timing of this withdrawal was suspicious. Though he was doing extremely poorly in New Hampshire, I suspected he would drop out after. DeSantis was never going to get more than single digits but dividing the anti-Trump vote would have been helpful. Though given that DeSantis and Haley fans do not like each other all, I think most of DeSantis supporters will vote for Trump instead.
As for 2028, I don't see how DeSantis can do well. People don't like failure and that's what DeSantis and his 2024 race was. If he hadn't ran and spent the rest of his governorship supporting Trump and then served again as a congressman, he would have been a shoe-in for 2028. But he has shown himself to not be ready for the main stage. And his army of "influencers" has turned a lot of people off.
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