If he really thinks he ever had a chance to unseat Donald Trump as the 2024 frontrunner, then he's not nearly as smart as the author of this piece thinks he is.
My favorite RDS meme of 2023 ...
Posted on 01/16/2024 11:07:58 AM PST by Signalman
The results of the Iowa caucuses surprised no one: Donald Trump ran away with it, as his 28-point lead in the polls going into Monday suggested he would. The polls were accurate this time, and most corporate media outlets called Iowa for Trump not long after 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time. The former president ended up with 51 percent of the total caucus vote, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a distant second with 21 percent, and Nikki Haley coming in third at 19 percent.
But the big news of the night isn’t Trump’s massive win, it’s DeSantis’ spectacular defeat. His campaign is now a cautionary tale about how not to go after Trump.
DeSantis had every advantage before he launched his presidential bid. He was a popular governor of a large state who won reelection in a landslide in 2022, notched major, substantive policy victories, and was adept at punching back at hostile corporate media. Yet somehow he managed to squander all this and flame out in Iowa. Recall that less than a year ago, in April 2023, before he launched his campaign for president, DeSantis was polling near 30 percent in the Hawkeye State.
Given these dismal results, it’s important to recall just how much time and money DeSantis spent in Iowa only to come in a distant second, more or less sounding the death knell of his campaign. The DeSantis camp and a trio of pro-DeSantis super PACs spent a combined $35 million in Iowa, almost as much as Haley’s campaign and allied groups spent in the state, and nearly twice what Trump and his groups did.
In addition, DeSantis himself went all-in for Iowa, crisscrossing the state and visiting all 99 counties, making countless appearances in every forum imaginable. One super PAC backing his campaign “said it recruited more than 1,600 precinct captains in Iowa” over the past nine months, according to Politico.
Why did DeSantis do all this? Because his strategy was to win Iowa to show GOP voters nationwide that he could take on Trump and win. As events have shown, that was a big mistake. But it fits within a recognizable pattern in the DeSantis campaign: Every decision was about comparing himself to Trump in the most explicit and unhelpful ways. Ever since he announced his candidacy, DeSantis has been obsessed with taking on Trump, never missing an opportunity to malign the former president or take a cheap shot, even when it was unnecessary or frankly irrelevant to whatever he was talking about.
It was a curious approach to take in a race where all the fundamentals suggested that aggressively going after Trump would alienate and anger GOP primary voters, especially as Democrats ramped up their unconstitutional schemes to imprison Trump or, failing that, keep him off the ballot in as many states as possible.
Like it or not, many Republicans have a unique bond with Trump, not just because they had to endure a lot of grief for supporting him in the past but also because they see how Democrats and the media have weaponized entire institutions against him in the most outrageous and dangerous ways. Even if these GOP voters are open to supporting other candidates this time around, the last thing they want is to be told that Trump is awful, which comes off as an indictment of them and their judgment.
It’s odd that DeSantis was never able to figure that out, or that no one in his orbit was able to persuade him to take a different approach. Instead, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky put it Monday, DeSantis “allowed Beltway vest aficionados and their friends in the donor class to steer his career off course” with endless attacks on Trump.
But of course, DeSantis didn’t need to attack Trump to make his case for the GOP nomination. He could have praised Trump’s achievements and defended him from the unfair attacks leveled at him by Democrats, as Vivek Ramaswamy has done, and simply ignored Trump’s insults. At the same time, he could have instead focused on explaining and touting his own considerable accomplishments in Florida.
Any governor running for president faces the challenge of conveying his or her popularity and accomplishments to a national audience. But DeSantis had a lot to work with in this department, given his headline-grabbing policy wins in Florida in recent years and his landslide reelection in 2022.
Yet he seemed to have no communications strategy in place to make his case on the national stage. Upon launching his campaign, DeSantis kept the national corporate press at arm’s length and simply took for granted that every Republican in the country knew him as “America’s governor” whose record would speak for itself, when that manifestly wasn’t the case. It wasn’t until much later in the campaign (too late, it turns out) that he began making appearances on corporate shows like MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and doing interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Trump, who is more or less running as an incumbent in the primary, is the one candidate who can bypass the corporate press and speak directly to his massive base. That’s a huge advantage Trump enjoys over his GOP competitors. So DeSantis needed a plan to get his message out to the rest of the country. He didn’t have one.
It didn’t have to be this way. Instead of listening to “Beltway vest aficionados” and hiring too-online campaign staff, DeSantis could have ignored Trump’s attacks, touted his own impressive accomplishments, and embraced favorable (and unfavorable) press coverage. DeSantis is actually very good at handling the press and could have used them to his advantage (as Trump did in 2016). Doing this would have drawn implicit comparisons to Trump without DeSantis himself ever having to utter Trump’s name — except to defend the former president from the real enemy, which is the Democrats and their republic-killing machinations to destroy electoral politics.
Indeed, this is where DeSantis really went astray. He mistook Trump for his main opponent when his real opponent — and the real villain in all this — is the Democrat machine that’s trying not only to take out Trump before November but also to destroy democracy and self-government in this country. The primary so far has been a target-rich environment, it’s just that Trump shouldn’t have been one of the targets, much less the main one.
DeSantis might not be a great retail politician, but he is obviously a smart guy. The redirection he could have pulled on questions about Trump would have required discipline and focus, and these are qualities DeSantis possesses — he has demonstrated them as governor, if not as a candidate. Some CNN hack might have asked about Trump’s latest insult, and DeSantis could have brushed it off and talked instead about the latest insane Trump indictment and how we can forget about the primary if this is how the left is going to engage in politics.
But he never did that, or at least didn’t do it without also taking swipes at Trump, which did nothing to hurt Trump but did much to alienate GOP primary voters, most of whom voted twice for Trump and, even if persuadable, have some affection for the former president.
Having finished a distant second in the one state where he bet the farm, it’s fair to say DeSantis is probably done. That’s a shame because he could have changed the primary race if he had better understood the underlying dynamics — that Trump wasn’t his main opponent, that he needed to use the national corporate press to make his case, and that the one mistake he could not afford to make was to insult and alienate Trump voters.
Well, we know that the DNC rigged the primaries for Hillary. What makes you think they didn’t do the same for Biden in 2020? They had to do something to drag Biden across the finish line, for he was the most likely one to select to be the front man for Obama’s 3rd term after Hillary had failed in the General Election.
If he really thinks he ever had a chance to unseat Donald Trump as the 2024 frontrunner, then he's not nearly as smart as the author of this piece thinks he is.
My favorite RDS meme of 2023 ...
He chose . . . . . Pooorly. Bye Ron.
This writer is saying what I have thought about the DeSantis campaign as I watched it collapse. Yes he had bad advice, poor consultants, but he didn’t have the gut instinct to disregard them and go his own way. That was a damaging deficiency and it cost him dearly.
wow! I honestly thought you guys were joking.
I had high hope for desantis, he blew it with his robotic performance during the first 3 debates. I and millions like me were not impressed and hence the switch to Nikki
If trump wants to win he will need to sway the independents over to him and the one way to do this is to be reconciliatory like he was in his speech last night. I was one of his better speeches. Impressive , adult like , reconciliatory like
If he can keep up the way of his speech from last night he will stand a better chance with independents
So that was how Desantis misplayed his hand.
He lost big time and may have just destroyed any future political aspirations he had
One thing good about this long torturous primary process is that it sometimes weeds out people who should never become President due to character and personality flaws. DeSantis showd that he is a small minded person when he allowed himself to be filled with visions of gradeur by the likes of Karl Rove and the Trump hting Bush family. If DeSantis had been wise and maturely tolerated Trump’s eccentrics, he would have been VP in 2024 and probably President in 2028. Instead his political career is in ruins.
No. The Dems screwed the pooch the last couple of caucuses so the DNC decided Iowa was too white and yanked the first in the nation.
Wrong
Desantis was my preference because I thought of him as an articulate version of trump
Desantis , who I admire and respect , blew it in the first 3 debates by coming across robotic and mechanical. He was never able to recuperate. Haley came across as less Mechanical and more real.
Does she have what it takes to not be destroyed by the media ? I think she does
But if trump wants to win over the independents (it takes the independents to win a general election ) then he , trump , will need to be like his speech last night. He needs to be the adult he needs to be reconciliatory he needs to less abrasive
DeSantis listened to the “experts” who wound him up like a toy soldier to go after Trump.
Instead, if he were LOYAL and ran a campaign against Biden, DeSantis would be in the #1 position for a VP shot.
Shows poor judgement. DeSantis is young, and can wait 4 more years. Instead he showed a “bite the hand” mentality.
Should have stayed in and focused on Florida. The party meat grinder would have compromised the h3ll out of him. It already started.
All the accolades during Covid went to his head.
This guy refuted Trump claim of election fraud - but is not claiming he is victim of it.
This guy refuted Trump claim of election fraud - but is *now* claiming he is victim of it.
DeSantis had one path and that was to go even more conservative, scream bloody murder about the persecution of Trump, and point to how he destroyed leftists in Florida. Instead he took the GOP coin and danced to their anti-Trump tune. He went from conservative fighter to GOPer simp, something from which Ted Cruz is still trying to recover.
As long as Trump stays focused, and election cheating ls held down, his re-election chances are good.
But, but...he visited ALL of the counties!
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