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The end of the year is obituary time. Yesterday, New York Times reporters Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman, and Nicholas Nehamas wrote the political obituary of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). The first two of these are big stars at the Times so it promised to be an interesting read. But after finishing, we think they missed the point completely, about which more later. First a summary of their take, then ours.
Early this year, DeSantis appeared to be the Great White Hope, the guy who could whittle Donald Trump down to size. It didn't happen. Not only is DeSantis not going to win the 2024 GOP nomination, but be is also not going to win the 2028 nomination, especially if he has to face Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), Nikki Haley and other heavyweights then. He's toast. How did this happen?
DeSantis clearly made a few serious strategic errors, these are what the obit focuses on. First, Trump was really on the ropes in late 2022 and early 2023. Many of the candidates he had strongly backed in the 2022 midterms went down in flames. Expectations were that the Republicans would win 30, 40, maybe 50 seats in the House and take over the Senate. Then won only nine seats in the House and lost one in the Senate, giving the Democrats an actual majority. The Republican Party was in shambles under Trump and was desperate for new leadership. DeSantis should have jumped in right then and tried to take command. Instead he waited until the end of May and then jumped in a glitch-ridden announcement on Twitter that nobody could watch. When Trump was down in January, DeSantis should have stomped all over him and finished the job. He didn't.
When DeSantis finally did get in, he created an extremely unorthodox campaign setup that was borderline illegal and staffed it mostly with loyalists who knew next to nothing about running a presidential campaign. He created a super PAC, Never Back Down, and transferred $80 million left over from his 2022 gubernatorial run to it. Individual donors could give money to his actual campaign, but they didn't. So he was in a situation where the super PAC, which wasn't legally allowed to coordinate with the campaign, had all the money and the campaign was broke. So he let the super PAC de facto run the campaign, which obviously created conflicts with his actual campaign manager, Generra Peck, who he eventually fired. There was a huge amount of infighting and backstabbing between the campaign organization and the super PAC. Recently, the super PAC's CEO and board chairman quit in disgust, three top officials were fired, and then the chief strategist packed up and left. This is no way to run a campaign, as the article points out in detail.
All of this said, and despite the obvious expertise and experience of Goldmacher and Haberman, we think they missed the point. The real problem was that the candidate was no good. Running for governor of Florida is very different from running for president. To run for governor of Florida, you assemble a half a dozen or more really rich donors who want something from the state of Florida. You get them to toss $50 million or $100 million into your campaign and allied super PACs. Then you hire top-flight ad makers who produce brilliant ads showing an upbeat candidate doing great things and carpet bomb the state with them. Meanwhile, the candidate is nowhere to be found.
To run for president you have to do retail campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire and meet the voters one at a time. Everywhere you go, you have to answer questions from voters and local reporters. They are not always polite and don't like it when you are evasive. DeSantis is a wooden candidate, does not like people, very much resents them asking pointed questions and gets angry when they demand an actual answer. He was a disaster on the campaign trail. An unknown candidate with not much of a campaign organization can do well is he is lovable and people like him. Think Bill Clinton in 1992. If DeSantis were warm and cuddly like Clinton, he could have survived, even with his campaign fighting his super PAC back in Florida. The people in Iowa don't know that and don't care. What they do know is that when a 15-year-old Iowa girl who has depression asked him if she could serve her country in the military, he mocked her. Ten million dollars in ads can't fix that. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has pointed out, candidate quality matters. DeSantis has the wrong stuff. In our view, that's what did him in, not the battles between the campaign and super PAC. (V)