That’s what it’s come to. He’s just spreading disinformation for fun now. He’s not going to win anything in New Hampshire.
I thought this was an interesting look at what happened to his once vaunted campaign from Marc Caputo. An excerpt:
There’s dispute about whether Trump was ever beatable in a GOP primary. But there’s little disagreement among connected political pros about the multiple problems with the campaign of DeSantis, an aloof not-ready-for-primetime candidate who didn’t know what he didn’t know and was arrogant about it, according to more than a dozen insiders who shared their insight to The Messenger since March. They spoke on condition of anonymity, many out of fear of retribution from DeSantis or his aggressive army of social media followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
DeSantis’s prickly personality estranged one-time allies, donors and political pros. His likability problems turned off many voters. The $47 million spent against him by the super PACs of Trump and Nikki Haley damaged him. And the spring and summer criminal indictments of Trump changed the trajectory of the race.
“We had to be perfect and lucky. And we were neither,” said one adviser.
Still, the DeSantis downfall was striking in light of polls showing him ahead of Trump a year ago. He received fawning coverage from conservative media. He had the backing of big-dollar donors who helped stuff his Never Back Down super PAC with $130 million at the beginning.
Much of that money was spent in Iowa, where DeSantis made sure to campaign in all 99 counties. Iowa instead became a field of nightmares for DeSantis. The more he built his campaign there, the more voters didn’t come. He lost every county Monday.
At 45 years old, DeSantis had no close senior advisers older than he, and he had a reputation for disregarding advice and data that conflicted with his opinions (on abortion, for instance). Known for demanding loyalty he doesn’t frequently reciprocate, DeSantis established a top-down campaign structure designed to give him information he wanted to hear.
Critical voices didn’t last in the campaign.
“The DeSantis campaign was too much of a DeSantis fan club,” said one disillusioned consultant who worked to elect DeSantis.
Said another: “Ron is the smartest guy in the room. Everyone else is an idiot. No one tells him he’s wrong. So it didn’t happen that often.”
Only two staffers held senior positions in a prior presidential race, but they had tensions with DeSantis’s first campaign manager before she was replaced in a summer shakeup. The campaign then had disputes with the Never Back Down super PAC, which was staffed with more seasoned political pros. They didn’t last after multiple departures in recent months.
There’s more about all the money they flushed down the toilet too.
He was living in the wingnut bubble:
An avid X user, DeSantis campaign speeches were stuffed with acronyms on heady topics that thrilled the very-online intellectual right, but the concepts just weren’t top of mind for the older not-very-online early state voters who didn’t have alphabet-soup fluency with CRT, DEI or ESG (Critical Race Theory, Diversity Equity & Inclusion and Environmental Social Governance).
DeSantis ignored calls early on to stay more laser-focused on the economy and sound more positive. But he only started to do that after his needed campaign reboot.
DeSantis fashioned himself as a different type of candidate. So he decided to have a different type of campaign launch on Twitter Spaces with billionaire Elon Musk on May 25. It became a glitch-filled disaster on May 24, an easy metaphor for his troubled candidacy. When the sound finally worked in the event, DeSantis was somehow talking about heady topics like the Chevron Deference, DEI and ESG without explaining what any of it was.
The DeSantis campaign’s response: it was great.
“We broke the internet,” his campaign said.
No DeSantis aide dared publicly admit it was a campaign catastrophe or that he should have listened to the advisers who wanted him to have a traditional campaign launch with his telegenic family onstage at the baseball diamond in his hometown of Dunedin, Florida where his athletic skills led his team to the Little League World Series and led him to Yale University to play ball.
DeSantis also wanted to break another convention: he completely stiff-armed the mainstream media at first. In hindsight, conservative writers have detailed what a mistake it was.
But DeSantis had built a national political brand by refusing to cow to the “corporate media” in the face of unremitting negative coverage when he kept Florida open during COVID. With the exception of conservative Fox and hand-picked conservative outlets, DeSantis kept the media at bay heading into his 2022 reelection. It worked. He notched a historic win of 19.4 percentage points in what used to be a swing state.
“He wanted to run the reelect for president because it worked for him,” said one Republican who has discussed DeSantis’s campaign with him privately. “But that’s not how this works.”
This is a lesson in what you see is what you get. DeSantis appears in public to be a weird, fascistic, asshole and it turns out that’s what he is. Surprise.