Issue #151: Thoughts and Numbers behind DeSantis' Failed Campaign

Iowa was the final straw

On Sunday, less than a week after a crushing loss in the Iowa Caucuses, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced he was suspending his Presidential campaign. As a result, the Republican nomination contest is down to Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, who will both compete in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Of course, Trump is overwhelmigly favored to secure the nomination when all is said and done.

With the DeSantis campaign crashing and burning like it deserves, I wanted to delve into my thoughts on his campaign and look at why the Iowa results were so damaging to him. I’ll go over a bit of where it all went wrong for the man who turned a re-election landslide into one of the worst major Presidential campaigns in modern memory.

The Expectations Game

One of the reasons that DeSantis’ Presidential campaign will be looked back on so negatively is that it seemed like he should have been much stronger. Many serious candidates run for President; whether they are Governors or Senators, who flame out. However, many of them rarely gain traction at all, and hence become just forgotten. Comments like “it wasn’t there time” or “they just could not break out” are thrown around. It doesn’t often hinder the longtime prospects of the candidate.

For example, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott was not really damaged by his campaign never getting momentum. Hell he is currently viewed as a possible VP. However, its clear DeSantis has been damaged. If he makes another play in 2028, he will have to answer for the problems of this campaign.

So why is that the case for DeSantis? Why his his failure viewed so much more biting that the litany of folks who never even made it to Iowa? The answer is because he started off “strong on paper” - viewed as a serious candidate from day one. DeSantis leaves the 2024 campaign looking alot like Rudy Giuliani did in 2008; a campaign that seemed very formidable on paper and then flamed out as time went on. Like Giuliani, “on paper” - DeSantis should have done much better than he did. However, the Governor collapsed under the weight of Trump attacks and failed to secure a real coalition of voters.

Before I delve into the failures of the DeSantis campaign, I want to quickly look at how “strong” of a candidate DeSantis really was.

The “DeFuture”

In the end of 2022 and heading into 2023, Ron DeSantis was hailed by countless conservatives as the future of the party. The NY Post of course articulated this most with its “DeFuture” headline; which came just after the Governor secured his massive re-election.

The Presidential push really began once those midterms were over, though it was clear plans existed well before that. DeSantis’ national star was further risen by the enormity of massive 19 point win.

The DeSantis landslide further aided the narrative that he was the future of the party. However, even then, I saw his win as much more hollow than it appeared. As I wrote about extensively in the weeks and months following 2022, the DeSantis win, which also saw big GOP wins up and down the ticket, came amid the worst partisan turnout gap in history. Read all about that here.

Thanks to little outside investment from national Democratic forces (which went from over 50 million in 2018 to under 5 million in 2022), the DEM GOTV efforts were non-existent. As a result, Republican turnout was 67% and Democratic turnout was just 52%. A record-breaking 15 point gap.

The final electorate was 46% in terms of registered Republicans. Just 33% of the votes cast came from registered Democrats. Never in history has the gap been so high.

The fact is, DeSantis’ win, while impressive from a money raising perspective and the FL GOP efforts to turn out voters, was NOT fueled by millions of Democratic-leaning voters switching sides. DeSantis merely represented what happens when party infrastructure is one-sided. Charlie Crist went from losing to Rick Scott by 1% in 2014 to 19% to DeSantis in 2022; all thanks to money and infrastructure.

That electorate ensured that all statewide Republicans did very well in 2022. DeSantis’ was not special for that evening in Florida. I have precinct maps of all the 2022 races here. The narrowest GOP win was the US Senate contest, which saw Rubio win by 16%. The biggest GOP win was Attorney General, which saw Moody win by 21%.

Regardless of the nerdy data behind the DeSantis 2022 landslide, the fact is his win made him a national sensation. With his landslide next to a fairly mediocre GOP midterm, which saw them Republicans fail to take the Senate and barely take the House, the early numbers showed DeSantis competitive with Trump. So how did all that go wrong?

Doomed Campaign

Ample coverage has been devoted to where DeSantis’s presidential campaign went wrong. I do not intend to delve into it all here. The campaign was full of a litany of errors, with some of the highlights, as documented well in this article from NBC.

• Burned through money on staff way too early and then expensive travel

• Infighting within the Never Back Down Super PAC and a great deal of turnover

• Moving too far to the right, and scaring off country club conservatives (who are also often donors)

• Failing to build a proper grass-roots donor base. So much of his massive financial hauls were max-out donations

• Countless gaffes caused by his terminally-online staffers, with many having ties to nationalist groups

The terminally online issue was best seen with the disastrous twitter campaign rollout; which saw DeSantis attempt to announce his bid with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces. Instantly the rollout faced problems from server overloads and glitchy audio. Truly no moment in politics has ever made me laugh to much in real time.

What is your base?

The other major issue, as I see it, and really this was more important, was the campaign making the mistake of who to target in the primary. For team DeSantis, they should have seen that their best path forward against Trump in a primary was to focus on suburban/exurban conservatives that remained with the party; people turned off by Trump’s oafishness. Many of these were Rubio and Kasich backers in 2016. While many have left the party, many still remain, as we will see with Iowa in a minute.

On top of this block of voters, DeSantis, with his biography, could have played up the George Bush style “religious conservative” aura. This two groups may seem to be at opposite ends, but in reality they could have been weaved together. DeSantis could have used his early 2023 Governorship to push conservative tax and religious issues, but not steering too far into the far-right lane. DeSantis could have

• Pushed back on COVID mandates without going entirely anti-Vax

• Aimed to reshape education in a more conservative light without getting into debates over the “benefits of slavery”

• Push “traditional values” without seeming to be mean-spirited attacking LGBT voters

• Increased abortion restrictions without going to a 6 week ban

Instead, DeSantis seemed to think his best option was to out right Trump, and that was NEVER going to work. DeSantis had already angered many Trump supporters by running against the man who made him Governor in 2018. I wrote about this last year, showing how, indeed, Trump’s endorsement in 2018, ensured he won that critical primary against Adam Putnam.

DeSantis embraced the far-right, and in response lost donors who once funded him while also turning off moderate and even right-of-center Republicans. And for all that effort, he failed to really push into Trump’s lane.

All In on the Iowa Caucuses

The entire 2023 DeSantis campaign was one disaster after another, which put the Governor in the position have having to focus entirely on Iowa. Nationwide the polls shows a continued widely rift between Trump and the Governor; as seen from 538.

Without an Iowa win, there was no realistic path for DeSantis. The Never Back Down Super PAC was responsible for the field operation on the ground; which boasted of knocking on 3 million doors (which must include double knocks since the state doesn’t have that many voters). The campaign was relying on his strong field program to deliver a shock upset despite polls showing Trump well ahead in Iowa.

Evangelicals and Iowa

Iowa has long been a state won by the Evangelical candidates in the race. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won it with Evangelical backing. In 2012, Rick Santorum rode a wave of last-minute momentum with Evangelical voters to narrowly carry the causes. Then, in 2016, Ted Cruz shocked onlookers by taking Iowa, almost derailing Trump’s campaign.

Now the truth is all these Iowa winners then suffered defeats in New Hampshire and never won the nomination - often not expanding past their Evangelical bases. Huckabee was stuck with a religious block that didn’t expand. Santorum did have some working class and southern backers. Cruz likewise has religious voters and did well in caucuses but struggled outside of those bases.

In 2016, Cruz’s win was fueled by the Evangelical vote; with most of the big Huckabee and Santorum counties backing him. Rubio, meanwhile, nearly got 2nd place by doing well in the city centers and suburbs. While Rubio did struggle in the rural counties, often finishing in 4th behind Ben Carson, who also had an Evangelical following, he did do decently in several other Evangelical communities.

A Rubio and Cruz Voter Coalition

From my point of view, DeSantis’ best shot at winning Iowa would have been mixing a degree of the Cruz and Rubio coalitions. DeSantis needed to do well with Evangelicals and take some suburbanites. At this point into the campaign, with the messaging being so-far right, and already turning off moderates, that was not going to happen. Much of what I discuss here is about what he should have been pushing for MONTHS or even years ahead of time.

The reality is, DeSantis hard-right push gave Nikki Haley the opportunity to cultivate the suburbs/exurbs that Rubio had done back in 2016. Meanwhile, DeSantis realized too late that many of the Evangelical voters were still committed to Trump. Evangelicals, who’d come to Trump’s side after the 2016 primaries, and through his administration, flirted with abandoning Trump in late 2022, but it never came to pass. DeSantis did secure the backing of prominent evangelical leaders in Iowa, namely Bob Vander Plaats, but it did not end up mattering much to the voter base.

As a result, the Iowa caucuses were a crushing victory for Trump, who took 51%. DeSantis was in a distant 2nd.

DeSantis got to claim second place, but he found himself 30 points behind Trump. Only a handful of counties, largely in more populous centers, saw a modest gap between the two. In many areas, Trump was blowing DeSantis out of the water.

In the battle for second, DeSantis secured his place ahead of Haley by racking up wins in the rural counties. Haley largely outperformed in the same areas Rubio had done well in back in 2016; except for Polk.

While DeSantis tried to put a brave face on that night, this was clearly the end of his campaign. He had no clear coalition of voters, and his efforts to frame a narrow 2nd place win as “punching his ticket out of Iowa” was sad.

Two me, two counties perfectly tell the story of DeSantis’ coalition failure.

First, the lone county Trump did not win - Johnson. This county is home to Iowa City and the University of Iowa. Nikki Haley actually won it by a SINGLE vote. Her win came thanks to dominant performances in the urban centers. DeSantis, meanwhile, was a district 3rd.

In the 2016 caucuses, Johnson County had given Rubio 30%, Cruz 19.6%, and Trump also at 19.3%. This was the type of county Haley needed to be winning by more too carve out 2nd place. She did not do that. However, this DeSantis margin also reflects the failure of his campaign to cultivate anti-Trump suburbanites. While these voters continue to move Democratic, there were still many participating here. Instead, DeSantis bled them to Haley.

The other county of note is Sioux County, which if you watched the Iowa coverage, was discussed plenty as a major litmus test for the Evangelical vote. This is a heavily Evangelical county, and as such was very much not in Trump’s camp in 2016. That year, Trump came in 4th, getting 11% there, while Cruz easily took it.

Well on caucus night in 2024, Trump won it easily with 45%. DeSantis was way back at 31%.

This loss was catastrophic for DeSantis, showing clearly he had failed to secure enough Evangelical voter support. This county has no qualms about not backing the winner of the caucuses either. It has routinely backed candidates with strong Evangelicals backing, regardless of their nationwide viability. In recent years, this is how Sioux County has voted in the caucuses.

• In 1996, Bat Buchanan beat Bob Dole 39% to 19%

• In 2000, Gary Bauer beat George Bush 40% to 28%

• In 2008, Mike Huckabee got 53% with McCain at 16% and Mitt Romney at 14%

• In 2012, Rick Santorum got 46% with Romney at 14%

How many people reading this even know who Gary Bauer is? Well don’t feel bad I didn’t either. He was a former Reagan official who was a bigwig in conservative organizations like Focus on the Family. So clearly these voters have no qualms about backing someone they believe in - not voting strategically.

Really, as a very religious person myself, I could say alot about the Evangelical community selling its soul to a cheating, vulgar, white nationalist who almost certainty does not believe in any God. The fact that Trump ever got Evangelicals on his side, and has kept them on his side, says alot about the rot at the core of American Christianity. BUT I will hold off on a 30 minute religious rant for another day. The fact is DeSantis SHOULD have taken these voters; simply on personal traits. His inability to do so is partly on the voters themselves, but also on his campaign’s failures. He tried to out-Trump Trump, and that was never going work.

With this loss, DeSantis really had no choice but to call it quits.

He Deserves This

From my point of view, its impossible to feel bad for Ron DeSantis. This man has sought the Presidency since he became Governor. By all accounts, he’s sought it long before that. Once Governor he used the office to try and galvanize a loyal following. In the process, he has done ample damage to the people and institutions of the state. Many of these I have covered.

• He’s suspended Democratic officials in order to boost his far-right cred

• He would delay scheduling elections for black-majority districts in order to cater to white nationalists and/or “own the libs”

• He pushed the legislature to passing bills to marginalize the LGBT community

• He’s led the vicious charge against transgender youth in Florida

And as I have covered extensively in this newsletter, in his bid to appeal to conservative racists who live online, he led the charge in dismantling a North Florida black-performing congressional district. This move is still the subject of ongoing lawsuits as of this writing.

One day after he lost Iowa, his party lost a special election for a state house seat in Orlando. This district had been in Republican hands, but flipped as the Democratic candidate road a wave of NPA and likely moderate Republican support.

DeSantis now slinks back to Florida. He no doubt wants to run for President again in 2028. I do not believe he will be an automatic frontrunner if he does so. He is damaged. Of course, he will make his ambition Florida’s problem. My state still must deal with him for 3 more years. I cannot promise that won’t suck.

But for the moment… for today. I can say this. Ronny, my boy, you deserve all the humiliation you’ve gotten.