Analysts Weigh in on DeSantis’s Failed Campaign

CONCORD, N.H.—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis led the presidential polls one year ago, yet his bid for the White House came to an end on Jan. 21, just six days after the Iowa caucuses handed him a tepid second-place finish.

Even before the governor suspended his campaign, pundits weighed in on the cause of its demise. It was the lack of a coherent strategy, some said. Others pointed to the messaging of the campaign, its timing, or the demeanor of the candidate himself.

Mr. DeSantis, too, has opined on the matter, saying his principal opponent was aided by overwhelmingly favorable treatment from conservative media outlets and by the spate of criminal charges filed against him, which only increased his popularity.

There may certainly be many reasons for that, but the most salient, according to some observers, is that Mr. DeSantis—along with the dozen other Republicans who have abandoned the race—did not face a political opponent but a national movement whose champion is Donald Trump.

Not Done with Trump

Mr. DeSantis identified the heart of the problem when announcing the suspension of his campaign.

“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance. They watched his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance and they see Democrats using lawfare to this day to attack him,” he said in a video message on Jan. 20.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich weighed in on the issue of President Trump’s following.

“None of us fully understood—Trump may have, but none of the rest of us did—is that Trump is the champion of a national movement, not a candidate,” said Mr. Gingrich, a contributor to The Epoch Times, said.

As such, President Trump proved nearly immune to attack, as most candidates soon learned.

“They knew from focus groups and from polling that to attack Trump was to be crushed,” Mr. Gingrich said, which made this campaign unlike any other. Most candidates aimed their attacks at one another. President Trump, the true opponent, was treated gingerly.

Mr. DeSantis gained some traction with voters disenchanted with President Trump. But most Republican voters were not. So Mr. DeSantis lost not because he was a poor candidate or had an ill-thought strategy but because most Republican primary voters were not dissatisfied with the former president.

Not His Time

Some analysts, including Mr. Gingrich, advised Mr. DeSantis or his associates to delay his bid for the White House until 2028 due to the continued dominance of President Trump in the Republican Party.

Mr. DeSantis’s inability to defeat President Trump perhaps masks the degree to which Republicans think favorably of him.

Mr. DeSantis was the second choice candidate for 43 percent of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, the highest percentage of any candidate according to a Jan. 19 poll by CNN/University of New Hampshire.

Republican voters, when asked about Mr. DeSantis on the campaign trail, frequently told The Epoch Times that he would make a good president “in four years.” Voters often commented on his record of governance in Florida, particularly in response to COVID-19, hurricane relief, and parental rights in education.

Many Republicans seemed favorable to a DeSantis presidency, just not yet.

Mr. DeSantis was asked whether, in hindsight, he should have waited until the next presidential cycle to enter the race. His answer was an unequivocal no.

“You’ve got to run,” he said in a Jan. 22 interview with New Hampshire Today. “The country is at a crossroads … It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, yeah, just try to bide your time and do what’s best for you individually,’ but that’s not leadership. Leadership is if there’s a need, you step up and you and you feel the need.”

“I stepped up,” he said, “and it was the right thing to do.”

Missteps

There were missteps in the DeSantis campaign, as the candidate himself has admitted.

“I came in not really doing as much media” in Iowa, he told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Jan. 18. “I should have just been blanketing. I should have gone on all the corporate shows. I should have gone on everything. I started doing that as we got into the end of the summer, and we did it. But we had an opportunity, I think, to come out of the gate and do that.”

Others have pointed to strategic errors in the campaign, beginning with its ill-fated launch on Twitter, now called X, which was plagued by technical problems.

“I think his consultants greatly misled him,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I think they tried to be clever, and this was not a business where being clever at that level works.”

The candidate himself has been critiqued for what has been perceived as a difficulty relating to people.

Gary Leffler of West Des Moines, Iowa, described Mr. DeSantis as a “policy wonk” after hearing him speak at a campaign event in July, noting that his speech evoked a “golf clap” from the crowd.

Though Mr. DeSantis appeared relaxed and comfortable during the later stages of his campaign and engaged audiences with humor, the awkward label, deserved or not, seemed to have stuck.

Other pundits have noted that Mr. DeSantis defined himself on social issues early in the race rather than majoring on his governing achievements in disaster relief and education. Later speeches reversed that priority, but the switch was too late to recapture momentum.

Mr. DeSantis’s polling average was within 9 percentage points of President Trump in January 2023 but declined steadily through the year, tabling in the low teens by early fall. The early momentum never returned.

No Pathway, No Money

The DeSantis campaign raised some $31 million and spent more than $18 million by the end of Oct. 2023, according to campaign finance reports. Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting the campaign spent more than $100 million.

Mr. DeSantis insisted as late as Jan. 18 that he had the funds to continue the campaign through the end of March. However, Never Back Down executed layoffs just days after the Iowa caucuses.

“The reason most presidential campaigns fold is that they run out of money,” Whit Ayers, a leading political consultant and campaign strategist, told NTD, sister media to The Epoch Times. “And when you don’t have a reasonable path to the nomination, you can’t raise any more money. So I think that’s what led to the imminent withdrawal,” he added.

Mr. DeSantis said as much when suspending his campaign. “I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory,” he said.

The opponent, the moment, the mistakes, and the money all may have played a part in the end of the DeSantis campaign. Yet, in the end, the DeSantis campaign ended for the same reason all campaigns do.

More voters picked the other guy.