Not enough Republican voters were ready to move on from Trump, and that left no room for DeSantis.
By dropping out of the Republican presidential race, Governor Ron DeSantis made official what everybody who follows politics even tangentially could see coming for months. There have been, and there will continue to be, plenty of detailed reported pieces about the various campaign mistakes that caused his fall from an initial, competitive standing in early polls to a distant second-place finisher in Iowa that forced him out of the race before the New Hampshire primary. But the most basic explanation of what happened to DeSantis is that, by the time his campaign got going in earnest, there was simply not much demand for the product he was selling.
I am reminded of the story of Peloton. During the pandemic, the stationary-bike and fitness-app company was flooded with customers who were eager to stay in shape when gyms were closed, and it could not keep up with demand. But once Covid receded and life returned to normal, people wanted to get back into gyms. As a result, demand crashed, leaving the company with excess inventory, forcing them into several rounds of cost-cutting and restructuring to try and reassure investors. The stock, which peaked at nearly $163 per share in December 2020, is now trading at less than $6.
Similarly, the political stock of DeSantis rose considerably during the pandemic. He benefited from having recognized earlier than most that the massive restrictions imposed on society in the name of fighting Covid did more harm than good. His very public battles against Covid restrictions drew the ire of the Left and the media and made him one of the most popular Republicans in the country among conservatives. Add this to his legislative wins on traditional conservative issues (taxes, school choice, gun rights, and life), his demonstrated competence during hurricanes, and landslide reelection, and there was reason to believe that he was somebody who could cobble together a winning coalition in a Republican presidential primary.
Trump’s entrance into the race in November 2022 obviously complicated DeSantis’s plans. But he postulated that there were enough Republican voters out there who liked Trump but were open to moving on from him — mainly conservatives who felt that Trump was too distracted to deliver policy victories. Running as an explicitly anti-Trump candidate, so the theory went, would doom him to failure and destroy his career — as it had already done to a long list of Republicans. So his idea was that he would attack Trump but only from the right. To succeed, there would need to be a large number of Republicans who were disappointed that Trump had caved to woke corporations and Big Tech; that he had let Anthony Fauci dictate Covid policy and Kim Kardashian influence criminal-justice policy; that he wasn’t pro-life enough and that he didn’t actually build the border wall. The hope was that if he locked down these voters and demonstrated he was capable of beating Trump, the more deeply anti-Trump Republicans would suck up whatever differences they had with him and rally around DeSantis.
While polling early last year suggested there might be something to this thesis, over time, it appeared that was not the case. It turns out that the sort of people who care about Section 230 reform don’t exist much beyond social media and that the Covid wars didn’t motivate voters who were years removed from lockdowns. And ultimately, the number of Republican voters who were ready to move on from Trump dwindled with each of Trump’s successive indictments.
Once it became clear that the demand for what DeSantis was offering wasn’t there, no amount of campaign reshuffles or message retoolings were going to make a difference. And once he no longer seemed like he could realistically beat Trump, there was less reason for other, more traditional Republicans to suck up their disagreements with DeSantis (his pandering to RFK Jr. supporters, muddled answers on Ukraine, opposition to entitlement reform, equivocations about Trump, etc.). This is what allowed Nikki Haley to gain on him.
There are many people who will conclude from DeSantis’s failure that it was a big mistake for him to run this year rather than wait until 2028. But political timing is a funny thing. In 2006, many people said Barack Obama should wait to run rather than to do so barely two years into his first Senate term, but the timing proved ideal — a more seasoned Obama with a more extensive voting record might not have been able to win on the same “hope and change” message. On the flip side, there are those who still argue that if Chris Christie had run in 2011 (fresh off his battles with teachers’ unions), in a weak field that ended with a Mitt Romney nomination, he would have fared better than he did four years later — having embraced Obama during Hurricane Sandy and endured the bridgegate scandal — when he was stuck in a massive field with Trump.
There’s no real knowing that DeSantis would have done better had he waited another four years. Coming off his gubernatorial-reelection victory, DeSantis’s star was probably as high as it would be. If his Covid record didn’t resonate during this election cycle, just a few years removed from the pandemic, it’s hard to imagine who would care four years from now — or what other issues and conservative leaders would gain traction in the intervening period.
So, while we could speculate about these various what-ifs, we can only comment knowingly on what we have in fact observed. And the bottom line is that not enough Republican voters were ready to move on from Trump, and that left no room for DeSantis.