No Excuses: Ron DeSantis Let Us Down

He's the best American officeholder alive. But he wasn't what we needed him to be in this primary.

After voting in just one of America’s fifty states, what should have been a knock-down, drag-out brawl for the soul of the American Right has instead turned into the most anti-climactic excuse for a presidential primary we’re ever likely to experience in our lifetimes. After gambling his entire candidacy (and his party’s future) on a single-state, barnstorming-intensive strategy that completely failed, Ron DeSantis is officially out (video, transcript):

Now following our second-place finish in Iowa, we have prayed and deliberated on the way forward. If there was anything I could do to produce a favorable outcome — more campaign stops, more interviews — I would do it. But I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory. Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign.  

I am proud to have delivered on 100% of my promises and I will not stop now. It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance. They watched his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance and they see Democrats using lawfare to this day to attack him. 

While I have had disagreements with Donald Trump, such as on the coronavirus pandemic and his elevation of Anthony Fauci, Trump is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden.  That is clear.   I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee and I will honor that pledge.  

He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear -- a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism -- that Nikki Haley represents. The days of putting Americans last, of kowtowing to large corporations, of caving to woke ideology, are over.

(We’ll touch on one aspect of DeSantis’s comments about Nikki Haley later in this column, but further analysis of it as well as the Trump endorsement will be saved for other pieces this week.)

I wrote after Iowa that DeSantis would only stand a chance of turning things around if he was prepared to radically overhaul his campaign. Days later, it became clear he wasn’t; he preposterously told Neil Cavuto, “If you look at Iowa, we did it right.” So it’s just as well he not waste anyone’s time and let us get any lingering false hope out of our systems.

Following the announcement, justifiably-dejected RDS supporters bemoaned how horribly he was treated by MAGA cretins and sellout “conservative” media, and mourned the missed opportunity to elect a once-in-a-generation conservative president in favor of The Failure. Many also congratulated DeSantis for running the best campaign he could, insisting there was nothing he could’ve done to change the outcome. Such partisan devotion is to be expected in politics, but unfortunately we also got similar excuse-making from serious people who really ought to know better, including The Blaze’s two most independent voices: Daniel Horowitz and Steve Deace.

Horowitz wrote:

Every candidate makes mistakes, but the minute Trump was indicted, you were not going to beat Fox and all it's [sic] mini mes.

Moreover, when there is NOTHING Trump can do ideologically, policy-wise, personnel-wise, morally, or strategically that will even be gently tweaked by fake right leaning media, there is no way you can win.  

Campaigns are predicated on the fact that both sides will make some mistakes. But if conservative media will give one man a pass on every damn thing  and then ensure there is no public debate on the real weaknesses of the man that we all know exist, then there is no path forward.

Deace asserted that Democrats’ criminal indictments of Trump starting last March set the outcome in stone:

Correct, which is why there is no more complicated analysis needed. Doesn’t mean there’s not things the campaign could’ve done better, because there always are in every campaign, but the outcome would not have changed.

I’m grateful we have Daniel and Steve, two of a precious minority of conservative media voices who are still in this business for conservatism rather than grift. But what they’re doing here is a mirror image of the exemptions of responsibility that ensured Trump never improved throughout his presidency.

It’s simply not true that DeSantis ran a great campaign, or that he only made minor mistakes. The campaign was awful. From day one, resources were misdirected, the messaging was weak, and the strategy of ground game uber alles at the expense of traditional media and advertising was a completely foreseeable risk. I dug into those problems last week, as have excellent analyses on Twitter by Rick Shaftan, Cryptid Politics, FilmLadd, Werther Marciales, and others. I won’t repeat them here, except to emphasize that the indictments are all the more reason why DeSantis needed to have started making the case against Trump in November 2022, not May 2023 (no, he couldn’t have known the indictments were coming, but he damn sure knew Trump had just blown a slew of winnable elections and that GOP voters were more receptive to kicking him out then than they had ever been before).

Moreover, he and his team watched public opinion go in the wrong direction over a period of more than seven months. At no point during that period could they have reasonably been expected to reevaluate what they were doing instead of comforting themselves with childish fictions that the polls were all fake?

Is it possible that a majority of Republican voters would have still stuck with Trump after seeing the ugly truth about him on their TV screens for months? Sure. But nobody can say they know it wouldn’t have made a difference. The simple, unavoidable reality of the situation is that DeSantis barely even advertised the case against Trump, outside of Twitter, where just about everyone who saw his content had already made up their minds; and in-person events that only reached a fraction of voters—voters who were favorably predisposed to him enough to attend one of his events, events that he apparently hoped would somehow spread his case by word-of-mouth or something.

Nor is conservative media bias an excuse. It was clear from the start that was going to be a problem. Which meant it was the DeSantis campaign’s job to say "voters need to know about this, and nobody else is telling them, so it falls to us to inform them." But they didn’t, so they paid the price.

As for why the DeSantis campaign refused a stronger offensive against Trump, we can pretty safely rule out the possibility that his advisers duped or pressured him into it. We know from the man’s governorship that he’s a strong-willed executive who digs into details himself and doesn’t let others lead him around by the nose. So the decision must have ultimately rested with DeSantis. But why?

The simplest, and perhaps most charitable, explanation would be that he was convinced doing so would alienate Trump’s voters. If so, that was a serious miscalculation (among other reasons because Trump was filling his fans with so much hate of “DeSanctimonious” Ron would’ve had nothing to lose), and the man who examined the data to reverse course on Covid surely had more than enough time to figure out that killing ‘em with kindness wasn’t working.

The second possibility is that his personality was simply too averse to the kind of bluntness such a campaign would’ve demanded, a bit like how his lawyerly instincts kept him from being as direct and explicit as he needed to be on the subjects of pardoning Trump and the January 6 prisoners. If so, there’s not much that can be done, but it’s a weakness nonetheless.

But perhaps the most troubling answer is hinted at in this report from NBC News about the decision to drop out, and the thinking behind DeSantis’s related endorsement of Trump and blasting of Haley:

"They have had obvious huge policy differences, but he sees Nikki as a corporate sellout and globalist and, outside of Covid, philosophically agrees with Trump,” the [DeSantis] adviser said. “That decision needed to be made, as far as he is concerned.”

Now, you may be asking, “Wait a minute. How can someone ‘philosophically agree’ with a guy who doesn’t have a philosophy?” Good question. And how can Haley, who attacked DeSantis for not being a “partner” with Disney, be that much worse a “corporate sellout” than Trump, who did the same thing in calling DeSantis’s fight an “unnecessary” stunt that would lose Florida the Mouse’s investments?

It's hard to read the above quote without wondering if Ron ever really understood why it was so important to prevent Trump’s nomination—if he saw Trump not as the incompetent, destructive scumbag that he is, but merely as a guy with problems that make him less than ideal, but who can still be a basically good president and somehow still preferable to the GOP old guard.

Whatever the truth, the tragic takeaway is that Ron DeSantis’s political judgement simply did not match his excellence in governance. He’s still the best officeholder alive, but he wasn’t what we needed him to be. The Republican landscape being what it is, it may well turn out that he’s still the best we’ll have to work with in 2028...but conservatives should officially consider auditions open for someone else to step up and try to prove they’re the complete package.