There Is No Distance Left to Run for Ron DeSantis

You may not have realized it because of the gimlet-eyed tone of my coverage of the Republican primary over the last year, but I am a Ron DeSantis supporter. (That’s fine — I am regularly accused of being everything from “in the bag for Trump” to a guaranteed Biden vote.) DeSantis has been a superb governor for the State of Florida. He managed one of the most life-changing crises of modern history — the pandemic — in a way that should be treated as a case study in leadership by future generations. His “culture warring” (with Disney, with transgender content in elementary-school curriculums, etc.) may offend some fainter hearts but is exactly the sort of lawful fightback I believe is welcome against a series of American institutions rotten to their core with progressive derangement.

DeSantis had my vote and never seriously threatened to lose it; I didn’t even mind when he said or did cringeworthy things on the campaign trail (his answers on Social Security in particular were gagworthy to any honest man); certainly not when the other primary options on offer are Nikki Haley and (no, thanks, ever) Donald Trump. Having laid my cards out on the table like this, however, it’s time to turn the tarot over and give the DeSantis campaign its reading: the Death card.

There’s no other way to put it: It’s over for the DeSantis presidential campaign after going “all in” in Iowa and getting thumped by 30 points, with Trump reaching a majority in the state. Yesterday, after narrowly edging out Haley for a distant second place, DeSantis put on a brave face in his concession speech and said that “in spite of all of that that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.” I guess you can’t go out and deliver a speech saying, “We staked it all on winning and we lost it all, hard,” so I won’t hold it against the campaign for remaining quiet for a decent interval of mourning. But given the catastrophic failure of its primary strategy and well-known money problems, it’s hard to see how the DeSantis campaign makes it to New Hampshire, much less South Carolina or beyond, unless as a purely rhetorical exercise.

There is another article to be written about how Haley’s own chances against Donald Trump are entirely illusory — it is impossible not to see her hitting a wall in South Carolina for the exact inverse of the reasons why she potentially challenges Trump in New Hampshire — but by the arcane internal logic of campaigns, her ticket out of Iowa is punched in a much clearer way, with a roughly equivalent performance to DeSantis in a state she had invested little time or money prior to a few weeks ago. She comes out ahead of DeSantis in terms of narrative and momentum in this logic, even with an anemic third-place win, because she never staked everything on winning Iowa or even performing well there. (While nebulous and dubiously influential concepts such as “narrative” and “political momentum” may seem peripheral to you, they are not to donors and thus must be considered.)

By contrast, DeSantis’s campaign was utterly dependent on a good showing, if not an outright win, in Iowa. His entire theory of the nomination — even back when Trump seemed far more vulnerable than he did after his first indictment — was that it was Iowa that would be his springboard into the race as a serious national contender to take down Trump. The calendar dictated it: Given his lack of appeal to the New Hampshire primary electorate, and the fact that both Haley and Tim Scott were running in South Carolina (a state likely to be extremely strong for Trump regardless), his play had to be in Iowa if he was to have any hope of gathering momentum himself, particularly as Trump began to pull away during the summer of 2023. Iowa was what would vault him to contention as the Only Real Trump Alternative in redder, more traditionally Republican states, where Trump’s support was at its strongest on paper but thought to be “gettable”: composed of people who wanted to “own the libs” but more competently, and who would thus defect to DeSantis.

Perhaps that theory of the case was nonsense all along, or perhaps no theory of the case would have availed a challenger to Trump after his indictments caused the Republican base to rally around him to the tune of 60 percent in national support. I am less interested in criticizing the DeSantis campaign’s strategy or management — many of those pieces have been written; many more are coming — than in simply noting that it didn’t work. DeSantis’s investment in Iowa was complete: He did the famed “full Grassley” tour of all 99 of Iowa’s counties, secured endorsements from a majority of the state’s Republican lawmakers as well as those of Governor Kim Reynolds and Evangelical Christian leader Bob Vander Plaats, and . . . he lost by 30 points to a man who barely bothered to show up in the state to campaign. All of the time and money DeSantis spent in the state, all of the high-level endorsements he garnered, failed to move the needle: He was polling at around 21 percent in Iowa at the time Reynolds and Vander Plaats endorsed him in November 2023. He finished with . . . 21 percent of the vote. Where to from here? Super Tuesday?

There’s nothing more to add, despite how glum the failure of the DeSantis campaign — and this entire farce of a primary season — makes me, because I deliver coroner’s reports better than I do eulogies. When presidential candidates deliver concession speeches (and, remember, almost all seekers of a presidential nomination are necessarily losing ones), they typically refer to there “no longer being a path” forward; it’s a graceful way to bow to the inevitable loss. There is no plausible path forward remaining for Ron DeSantis, who I am convinced would have made the best Republican president of the United States on offer during the 2024 cycle. There is no distance left to run.