The obituaries are almost too easy to write.
What killed the presidential candidacy of Ron DeSantis, suspended on the Sunday before New Hampshire? Let us count the causes.
There was, of course, his shambolic super PAC; campaign infighting; his reckless spending on private jets; his disastrous rollout with Elon Musk; his serial strategic and tactical blunders. His campaign operation was both incompetent and tone-deaf, totally misreading the dynamics of GOP primary politics.
His campaign operation was both incompetent and tone-deaf, totally misreading the dynamics of GOP primary politics.
But the proximate cause of his demise was pretty obvious: DeSantis was a bad candidate with a lousy message, as unlikeable in person as he was on television. He was, in the memorable words of GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, “Ted Cruz without the personality.”
And he refused to actually run against the man he had to beat.
The Florida governor was not, of course, the first fantastic-on-paper presidential contender who failed to flourish in the spotlight. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida’s Jeb Bush (!) blundered and floundered their way to presidential asterisk status over the past few decades. Indeed, political history is full of could-have-beens who imploded in the heat of a presidential contest: Democrat Ed Muskie in 1972; Gary Hart in 1984; Rudy Giuliani in 2008; and who could forget the hopes dashed by the collapse of the Fred Thompson boomlet that same year?
Even so, there is something rather extraordinary about DeSantis’ defenestration.
Amid an otherwise bleak midterms for the GOP, he won re-election in a landslide in one of the nation’s biggest and most crucial states.
The timing could hardly have been more propitious: Trump had been defeated, disgraced, and was facing serious legal peril, and the GOP looked poised to finally move on. The smart kids in the anti-anti-Trump wing of party — including much of Conservatism Inc. and its media allies — moved…
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