In the dead time before the South Carolina primary, postmortems for the suspended DeSantis-for-President campaign are piling up like proverbial cordwood. The month being January — for Janus, the Roman god of transitions — there is, appropriately, an abundance of looking back and forward, of recrimination and redemption, of blame and forgiveness.
Typical of after-action reports regarding events widely witnessed by the public, these assessments start from the same place (for a while there, the Florida governor looked dominant in the Republican field), mull similar pitfalls (dubious personnel choices; suspect media strategy), and arrive at homogenized conclusions, most, inevitably, having to do with the now-presumptive you-know-who.
The analysts take different tacks, as you would expect. For Fortune, brand strategist Adam Hanft describes the DeSantis campaign as “a marketing failure, pure and simple.” Ron DeSantis was locked in on the issues that resonate with the Republican base. But the candidate, Hanft says, didn’t feed voters’ limbic desire for titillation. Trump without the drama? What’s the point of that? The search, he observes, is for “an emotionally constructed candidate entity.”
Plant-based meat is failing because the absence of meat is not an appealing proposition to enough people. What DeSantis and his advisors completely missed is that voters were still infatuated with what was subtracted.
However, most Republican voters actually like and enjoy the drama. It’s what they have come to expect from someone who was a reality TV show star and intuitively knows how to keep people on the edge of their seats, waiting to see who would be fired next after the commercial break.
It would have been fascinating — not to mention rewarding and, possibly, even ennobling — to see how the primary season would have played out if prosecutors hadn’t gotten involved. But any pretense of a campaign based on issues, competency, legislative triumphs and effective use of executive power dissolved with the first indictments naming Donald J. Trump.
Once again, politics of personality surged to the top of voters’ concerns. What Franklin Roosevelt reportedly said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza — “He may be a son-of-a-b***h, but he’s our son-of-a-b***h” — would seem to describe the relationship between Trump and his army of supporters. They love him because he’s a duplicitous rascal, not in spite of it. Give ’em a ringmaster.
In that light, 2024 never was going to happen for DeSantis, more’s the pity. Will there be another attempt in a presumably Trump-cleansed 2028?
Even as Republican voters rejected him as a presidential candidate in 2024, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seemed to take solace in the fact that some encouraged him to run again in 2028.
“They were coming up to me saying, ‘We want you in 2028, we love you, man,’” DeSantis told reporters in South Carolina on the day after the Iowa Caucuses, according to the New York Times.
During an interview with NBC News that same day, DeSantis said voters told him, “I’m going to do Trump this time and do you next time.”
So he’s back in Florida, doing those DeSantis things that drive the left nutty: taking well-deserved credit for progress in the cleanup of Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades; striking sociology from the core curriculum in Florida’s public universities; and arguing on behalf of James Madison in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defense of the Southern border.
Boring, right? Wake me up when he calls Nikki Fried “goober-noggin.”
Evidently, because DeSantis’ effortless, if wonky, governing prowess in areas conservatives claim are vital to them — stewardship, individual freedom, immigration, life in the womb, woke culture — is a snooze-fest.
DeSantis’ campaign had plenty of problems. Among the biggest, in the minds of some political professionals, was his presentation.
Known for having a strong grasp of policy, DeSantis was too focused on issues and not enough on selling himself as a person, GOP pollster Frank Luntz said. …
But “the Ron DeSantis on paper did not live up to Ron DeSantis the candidate,” Luntz said. … DeSantis seemed “too often to be looking backward rather than ahead” and “was too issue-focused and not sufficiently attribute-focused.”
“In 2024, who you are matters as much as what you think,” Luntz added.
Worse, say pundits, DeSantis’ early media strategy allowed other campaigns, abetted by willing mainstream outlets, to define him as “aloof, awkward and weird,” noted GOP strategist Alex Conant. Remember PuddingFingerGate? And the juvenile absorption with DeSantis’ cowboy boots? (Just once, who wouldn’t have loved to see DeSantis arrive on stage on stilts?)
*Sigh*
What all this expert counsel boils down to is pretty much what every veteran editor has told every apprentice reporter since Gutenberg: The average reader comprehends at an eighth-grade education level. Write for them.
Plainly, DeSantis overestimated the sophistication of his audience. Once the serious Daddy Party, the GOP has become the Annoying Little Brother Coalition, fueled by drama, gossip, feuds, rivalries, envy, name-calling, targeted hysteria, bold lies, innuendo, braggadocio, and loyalty tests. Sort of like the Democratic Party, minus the drag queen caucus.
We should worry about the arc of our country’s path if, to win a national election, the nation’s most competent and effective governor must persuade the electorate he has become less “aloof, awkward and weird.”
Buckle up, y’all. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
