A year ago, it looked like Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis might be on an unstoppable path to the presidency. He had just been reelected governor in a landslide and carried his party to a red wave in Florida while Republicans struggled in most of the country. Trump was poison to Republicans nationwide, but DeSantis seemed to be adrenaline for the party. It looked like the GOP would turn the page and throw its weight behind the 45-year-old Florida governor.
Today, DeSantis is out of the presidential race and backing Trump after finishing a disappointing second in the Iowa Caucuses and facing another disappointing defeat in New Hampshire. His poll numbers in Florida have dropped substantially. His party lost a state legislative seat outside Orlando last week that he won in 2022.
His spectacular collapse has left some of his most hardcore supporters in shock. What happened? How did it all go wrong for him? The answer is a mix of bad timing and a miscalculation on what Republican voters and general election voters wanted.
The Free State Of Fascism
Elected in a tight race in 2018, DeSantis rose to the national spotlight in 2020 and 2021 when he became the face of the anti-COVID mitigation movement. Though he initially endorsed COVID mitigations and enacted restrictions in Florida for a time, and did not lift them as fast as other GOP governors, he became the most vocal about returning to normal in the months after restrictions in Florida were lifted. He pinned himself and his state up against Democratic governors in New York and California who insisted on keeping COVID restrictions far longer. He advertised Florida as a “free state,” where strict business and school closures, mask mandates, and social distancing would not be tolerated, and promoted it as good for business.
Ironically, this is his legacy. He has singlehandedly turned Florida from a purple to a red state by positioning Florida as a refuge for disaffected blue-state Republicans. That led tens of thousands of Republicans to relocate to Florida in 2020-2021 to escape fears of a dystopian COVID-centric future, permanently altering the state’s political landscape in his party’s favor. Further, he ended up being right. As the pandemic ended, the doomsday predictions about healthcare collapse and economic collapse in Florida never came true, and in fact, the states with longer COVID restrictions trailed Florida in their economic recovery. If he had just called it there, he would have gone down in history as one of the most successful Republican governors in modern times.
He didn’t though. DeSantis took his anti-COVID movement and unleashed it on the entire left-leaning social justice cause. Connecting “wokeness” to COVID, he targeted anti-racism and pro-LGBTQ campaigns and became the poster child for “anti-wokeness.”
The problem was this flipped his image from the tough rebellious bad boy standing up to the powerful elites to a pawn of cruel suburban Regina Georges picking on the marginalized and obsessing over how people were living their lives. It’s hard to argue that you govern the “Free State of Florida” when you’re banning books and making children cry because their favorite backpacks are banned at school due to there being a rainbow on them. There is no sustained base of undecided voters looking for a candidate like this, all those people are already behind Trump. The types of independents and disaffected Democrats who were attracted to DeSantis over his COVID policies are largely not interested in, or repulsed by his anti-woke campaign. Many got off the DeSantis train when he stopped talking about COVID-19, or when it ceased to be an issue.
This brings me to my next point:
We Got Someone Already, But Thanks
As long as Trump remained viable as a general election candidate, he was never going to lose the GOP nomination. Trump secured the 2024 nomination at 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2021. The rest of the Republican Party knew it, which is why they refused to impeach him or ban him from running for any future office. They knew their base voters would still rally behind them and they would get caught in the undertow if they didn’t as well.
That reality has played out ever since. Former Rep. Liz Cheney, Trump’s top Republican critic, was bounced from office, as were former Reps. Peter Meijer of Michigan and Jamie Herrera-Beutler of Washington, after both voted to impeach him. Others, like former Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, called it quits. Republicans who were once critical or dismissive of Trump, like Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Elise Stefanik of New York, have become Trump sycophants.
That left DeSantis without a real clear path. He couldn’t criticize Trump harshly, as others like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did. DeSantis needed the votes of Republicans who still loved Trump. This made him look cowardly and feckless, and in not taking on Trump, he failed to make a convincing argument for why voters who want Trump back in the White House and believe Trump *should* still be there, should dump the former president for him.
It is possible that if Trump polled so terribly that it looked like Biden would clobber him in 2024, the GOP electorate would have let him go and moved on to someone else, but that never happened. There was a moment after the Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterms that it seemed like the GOP base would dump Trump for DeSantis, but that was halted when polls showed Trump could beat Biden and when Trump began facing felony indictments, a move that renewed Republican voters support for him. There is no place in the GOP for anyone running against Trump, which left DeSantis with no real argument for his candidacy.
After all, why rally around a Trump-like candidate when you can have Trump himself, with the same chance, or better, at beating Biden?