After Iowa, it’s time to put a fork in Ron DeSantis’s campaign.
The Florida governor had staked his entire run on the first-in-the-nation caucus: visiting all 99 Iowa counties and moving huge numbers of staff into the state. In the end, it was all for naught. DeSantis came in a distant second in a state he needed to win — or at least come extremely close — to have a chance at the nomination. Polls suggest he’ll be a non-factor in New Hampshire, the next primary, and his national poll numbers have been collapsing for months. After this dismal Iowa result, his campaign is finished in all but name.
There are many reasons DeSantis failed, ranging from the candidate’s awkward personality to his weirdly lavish spending on private flights. But there’s also a more fundamental explanation: Ron DeSantis and his backers completely misread what the GOP electorate wanted.
The DeSantis campaign was fundamentally a product of a certain class of the GOP’s elite: people who admired Donald Trump’s willingness to break the traditional norms of American politics but saw him as basically declassé or ineffectual. These are the sorts of conservatives who look admiringly at Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, seeing his use of legalistic arcana to crush liberal opposition as a model for how to fight a culture war and win.
Obviously, most Republican voters aren’t this hyper-ideological. But DeSantis and his allies theorized that the “Trump but competent” shtick would allow them to pull from all sides of the GOP electorate. By focusing on his “culture warrior” background — like his fights over Covid restrictions and Disney — DeSantis could win over a key portion of the Republican base. By seeming more competent and organized, he could scan as palatable to the traditional establishment.
Except it turned out that the kind of culture war politics DeSantis offered, an often-abstract assault on “wokeness,” paled in comparison to what Trump served up. The…
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