There's No Sugarcoating Iowa's DeSantis Disaster
We need a miracle to save us now.
Well, we can’t say it was a surprise.
That’s perhaps the first thing that needs to be understood about Ron DeSantis’s distant second-place finish to Donald Trump sweep of every county but one in Monday’s Iowa caucuses. The outcome was entirely foreseeable from observing the polls, conservative media coverage, endorsers’ perception of the political winds, and most importantly from watching DeSantis’s own campaigning. I hate to say I told you so, but whatever slim hope remains of derailing the Trump train rests entirely on whether Ron, his team, and his supporters are prepared to take a hard look at how this happened—or, to be more accurate, how they allowed it to happen.
First, it’s time to give up the childish, MAGA-esque cope (reinforced by Ron himself) that all of the polls we didn’t want to believe were a “psyop,” which scores of fellow conservatives told themselves every day since last spring to convince themselves everything was fine and no course-correction was necessary. Enough. They weren’t “garbage.” They weren’t a conspiracy. It’s true they weren’t precise (RaceToTheWH’s Iowa trend line wrongly had Ron finishing below 20% and behind Nikki Haley), but they did accurately capture Trump and DeSantis’s rough positions relative to each other. Going forward, the polls must be taken seriously with that in mind. To quote the campaign’s own tagline, “no excuses.”
On a related note, DeSantis fans need to stop grasping at straws to convince themselves things are secretly better than they look, like the way every single time Trump went off on a Truth Social rant about “DeSanctimonious” or every time his campaign spent money in the state, it got taken as a clue that they were more afraid of DeSantis than they let on. Come on—after eight years of dealing with Donald Trump, we still haven’t internalized that his outbursts against his enemies have no correlation whatsoever to his real or perceived interests? As president the man insinuated that Joe Scarborough murdered one of his staffers, for God’s sake. What did Trump have to fear from Joe Freaking Scarborough?
Next, it can’t be overlooked that what we were told would be “the largest, most advanced grassroots and political operation in the history of presidential politics” turned out to be a crock (albeit a crock some consultants no doubt collected a nice paycheck for). An operation worth the hype does not land the candidate 30 points behind its target, and it certainly doesn’t land him a measly two points ahead of an utter joke of a candidate like Haley. Team DeSantis might as well pack it in right now if a ruthless accounting of how all that money was spent is not already underway behind the scenes.
Among the things that accounting needs to confront is the campaign’s use of advertising (you know, that technological advancement that enables messages to reach vastly more people at once than in-person interaction). It was deeply alarming to me in mid-November—by which point Trump had been running for a full year and DeSantis for more than five months—that DeSantis had only started advertising in Iowa that month, and that his first two ads were vanilla as could be, without even mentioning Trump. A month later, his campaign ran an ad that started with former Trump voters saying it was time to “move on” from the Donald—but never elaborated why. The campaign’s DeSantis War Room Twitter account frequently put out solid anti-Trump videos, but they maddeningly never seemed to make the jump from social media and onto screens non-political junkies would actually see.
This failure to widely disseminate the case and supporting facts against one’s opponent would be inexcusable enough for a normal campaign, but doubly so in a climate where the media ostensibly serving one’s own side was covering for that opponent to an unprecedented degree—a problem DeSantis recognized and eventually called out, but for God-only-knows what reason never saw fit to try to compensate for, either by getting the information out there himself or by putting pressure on the guilty parties by name. We’ll see if Ron has finally recognized the need to get confrontational with the talking heads, but early signs give off a distinct “business as usual” air, which is not encouraging.
Whenever I expressed concern about any of this throughout the campaign, I received a litany of excuses—“it’s still early,” “nobody’s paying attention yet”—even as polls (accurately, it turns out) charted Trump’s support rising and DeSantis’s falling. But the most preposterous was that GOP voters (especially those kindly, pious Iowans) didn’t want to hear “negativity,” and that anything perceived as “mudslinging” against Trump would backfire.
Well guess what: DeSantis’s diluted anti-Trump case got him 21%, and the millions Haley and groups backing her spent attacking DeSantis got her almost as much, despite her not having nearly the ground operation, coverage of the state, communication ability, basic competence, or general merit. More importantly, 51% and the crown went to the most nakedly, maliciously, grotesquely “negative” candidate ever to seek the Republican nomination in the modern era. Don’t tell us Iowans would have been turned off by bringing unflattering truths to their attention.
As a purely technical matter, the outcome need not be significant—it only netted Trump 20 delegates, which is just 11 more than DeSantis got, and there are more than a thousand left to go before someone can claim the nomination. It’s also true that Iowa hasn’t picked the eventual Republican nominee since George W. Bush in 2000. In theory, DeSantis could turn this around—taking a clear-eyed look at the data, throwing out a bad plan, and charting a new course in defiance of what he was “supposed” to do is what made him a national hero and conservative icon in the first place, after all.
But only a truly radical overhaul will suffice to find whatever glimmer of a chance remains, and his failure to break Trump’s momentum and pretense of inevitability have now stacked the odds even more heavily against him. The snowballing Trump endorsements will only accelerate (Ted Cruz gave in Tuesday night), and donors are now doubtlessly questioning their investment. And there can be no more denying that Trump’s lead in the rest of the primary polls is absolutely real, with all that entails.
Unless Ron wakes up and the stars align for a miracle, dark times are ahead for America.