Ron DeSantis: bad campaign or bad candidate?

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday ended his bid to become the next Republican presidential nominee, he did so with an acknowledgment "that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance." That admission — followed swiftly by an endorsement — was in a peculiar way both overdue as well as ahead of schedule for the beleaguered Florida governor once hailed as the GOP's best and brightest shot at knocking the former president from his dominant primary perch. Although the DeSantis campaign had spent the past several months sliding inexorably downward in the polls, he had nevertheless managed to fend off an insurgent challenge from former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in Iowa and was eagerly telegraphing plans to challenge his chief (non-Trump) rival in her home state and beyond in the belief that this week's New Hampshire primaries would ultimately be her campaign's high water mark.  

Whether DeSantis's decision to end his candidacy so soon after a second-place finish in Iowa was prompted by electoral math, financial concerns, or some combination of the two, the abruptness of his departure has raised questions about whether he and his once-lauded campaign juggernaut were ever truly positioned to win in the first place. Did DeSantis ruin what was once a genuine shot at the Oval Office, or was he simply the last to realize he never had a chance to begin with?

'A stunning fall'

In spite of having "once held such promise," the DeSantis campaign failed because the "one man in America who could have humbled Trump just couldn't stop tripping over himself," according to Business Insider, which mused he might be the "worst presidential candidate in recent memory." In part the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of DeSantis' inner circle of advisers who "couldn't even teach Ron to smile" agreed former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan on X, calling it "one of the most embarrassing, hapless, & disastrous presidential campaigns in memory."  

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While DeSantis at one point had "seemed to have it all: money and momentum behind him, a compelling background, a generational argument and a success story to share," his departure from the race represents a "stunning fall" — one in which "every single thing that could have not gone as we had hoped or planned for went horribly wrong" one adviser admitted to CNN. Ultimately, his campaign "failed to match the hype" that had buoyed him in the aftermath of the 2022 midterms, The Dispatch reported, noting that his Never Back Down super PAC's "massive" fundraising and spending "didn't translate to momentum or votes."

Even before he announced he was suspending his campaign, DeSantis' presidential run was plagued by headlines eager for a preemptive post-mortem, including one from NBC News condemning his run as a "total failure to launch" that left him "doomed from the start" — published just hours before he ultimately confirmed as much. 

'If he hadn't been going against a former president'

No matter his campaign's final implosion this week,  there was nevertheless a "brief moment when Mr. DeSantis, or at least the idea of Mr. DeSantis" was unambiguously holding his own, or even beating Trump in head-to-head matchups last year, The New York TImes' Nate Cohn wrote. Ultimately, DeSantis' flaw may have been a failure to "capitalize" on the post-midterms momentum that saw him contrasted with Trump's (relative) failures "without needing to directly engage or attack him." Moreover, by centering his campaign around opposing the twin threats of "wokeness" and coronavirus restriction, DeSantis found himself at the head of a coalition that "crumbled" as each issue ebbed in the public zeitgeist. 

For as much as DeSantis may not have had a "well-run campaign," one adviser told The Washington Post, not even the "best-run campaign would have beaten Trump." Moreover, as DeSantis donor and bundler Dan Eberhart explained to Fox News Digital, ending the campaign  "was about 2028," and wanting to remain the GOP's de facto second choice without a "5 to 8% showing in New Hampshire on his record." 

Campaign failings or not, DeSantis is also a victim of a media that "[juices] early interest in the presidential race" by declaring preemptive frontrunners who "age more poorly than a mid-2000s sitcom," Business Insider concluded.