Ron DeSantis Failed Spectacularly In Iowa, But It Didn’t Have To Be This Way

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.

Desantis NEVER had grass root support... Sure most folks like what they knew and saw of him, but he was NEVER ever connected to the base... He was bought and sold by the big money Cheney money men.. and then they tried to astroturf him as some great grassroots supported guy.. and he just wasn’t.

Yes, Desantis won re-election handily, but he did so against Crist.. a turncoat who NO ONE WANTED OR SUPPORTED... the context of that massive re-election is ALWAYS ignored... he didn’t beat a competent dynamic candidate.. he beat a turncoat who was now a Democrat, that democrats didn’t like and Republican’s despised... Desantis would never even been governor had Trump not pulled him over the finish line in his last election would have lost to a corrupt drug addict.

Desantis’ messaging out the gate was just stupid... Hey, I’m just like that other guy you really like, but I’m somehow better.... how exactly? Well, the main argument they tried to make was he was electable... so back in January of 2023, the establishment money men started trying to astroturf him... leaning heavily on the electability argument...

Of course by fall, Desantis was already in free fall in polling as folks got to see more and more of him and didn’t care much for it, and Trump’s inevitable rise in the national polling started to build. By fall Trump was performing as well if not better than Desantis against Biden, so the entire argument Desantis had been trying to make was completely undercut.

Desantis was ill advised to run this race, he took himself from an almost certain contender in 2028, maybe even the front runnter, to just another joke. THE GOP Of Florida changing laws for him to run also has horrible optics, and just looks like some of the most swampy behavior out there.

Anyway, anyone trying to argue there is anyone other than Trump who will be the nominee can clearly be put in the imbecile column. Trump didn’t just win IA, he CRUSTED IT. Won every single county... improved his numbers and support across just about every demographic they track, and even with Dems showing up and switching parties trying to push Haley at some caucuses, Trump still won, and won big.

The establishment is now going to keep trying ot push Haley in any manner they can, as repulsive as it will be to watch, hell they were trying their best to spin last night as good for her.

She will do better in NH, because of the fact its an open Primary and her campaign is openly courting democats to vote for her there, but as much as CNN keeps trying to claim she’s “closing the gap” because their one push poll laughably showed it around 8 points, when pretty much everyone else has it 13-17.. its just not happening.

If they can spin NH in any way as good news we will have to endure about a two weeks between the NH and SC primaries where they are going to just going to try with everything they have to put her over as somehow growing and going to be the Trump killer.

Personally I hope Trump takes her down by 20 or more in NH just to prevent that 2 weeks of trying to create reality by false reporting.

Sorry but you can’t rely on how bad the democrats are , you need to better yourself

That means trump needs to change and he need to bring what he brought last night during his speech

He needs to be the reconciliatory candidate to bring in the independents

He needs to bring in the people like me who are flip floppers , counting on the democrats being bad isn’t good enough

There are million of me out there , trump needs to be the candidate who shows maturity and reconciliation

"Funny you should word it that way. I've long said that one reason the political class of both parties are likely to hate Trump is that he didn't pay his party dues, get in line and wait his turn."

Trump was toying with running for President for many years before he actually stepped in. DeSantis was waiting to make sure he got re-elected so he'd have the Governor's office to run from. Don't kid yourself, DeSantis didn't decide one day last May that he was running. He knew before he got his second term, and he knew when he lied to Floridians that he'd serve his full second term.

And Ronnie wasn't very sure that he'd even get anywhere when he ran for President, otherwise, he wouldn't have had the law changed so he didn't have to resign to run. He's been getting a taxpayer-funded paycheck these past 8 months he's been flitting around the country.

And it's a damn good thing Trump didn't wait to run, or we'd be living through Hillary's second term as President. None of the other losers that ran in 2016 would have been able to beat her. It was her turn don't 'ya know?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.