One year ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) was the most exciting commodity in politics.
Fresh off a landslide reelection victory and newly sworn in to a second term as the governor of now-ruby-red Florida, DeSantis was widely viewed as the only person who had a viable shot to challenge and break former President Donald Trump’s ironclad support from Republican voters as the political calendar shifted toward the 2024 presidential race.
It was with this momentum that, in May of last year, DeSantis launched his much-hyped campaign for the presidency. But a year later, following a distant second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, the Florida governor suspended his campaign for the White House in a muted and succinct video posted on X.
“If there was anything I could do to produce a favorable outcome, more campaign stops, more interviews, I would do it,” DeSantis said. “But I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory. Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign.”
There are two main lessons to be gleaned from the end of one of the most hyped presidential candidacies in years. The first is that the face of a political movement matters, and this is why it was always unlikely anyone was ever going to defeat Trump. This should have been recognized early on.
Trump has a magnetic energy and appeal that is unmatched by any major-party presidential candidate since Barack Obama. The personality of the pugnacious billionaire matches the metaphorical middle finger to the establishment that voters feel they are delivering when they cast their votes for him.
There was no way that the Republican voters, who felt robbed in 2020, were going to abandon this larger-than-life persona, especially as the “system” threw criminal indictment after criminal indictment after him. And DeSantis had no hope of competing with that despite his stellar record of conservative governance because, regardless of what might be said, the messenger is just as important as the message.
The second is this: Conventional Republican campaign strategy is not a salient road map when it comes to presidential campaigns.
While this should have been obvious after the failures of Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush in 2016, DeSantis ran his campaign largely in their mold. He had a massive war chest of $130 million and an army of expensive political consultants that oversaw his campaign and super PAC. With all that money, DeSantis built out a massive campaign operation from the get-go, only to turn around months later and lay off dozens of staff and finish a distant second in the state he bet his political fortunes on.
This should be a cautionary tale. All the expertise and money in the world couldn’t sway the Republican electorate because the Republican electorate wants a leader it can feel inspired by, not a leader who is a creation of political consultants.
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When Trump ran in 2016, he barely spent money on advertisements or other conventional campaign expenditures during the primary that year. Rather, he sucked the air out of the primary by dominating social media and the airwaves on cable news and allowed his support to build up through a sort of radical transparency. In doing so, he created a political movement that propelled him to the presidency and may yet again.
The next political movement won’t be the same. The individuality of Trump will make sure of that. But whoever leads it, whether it’s DeSantis or someone else, should take some cautionary lessons from the failures of the governor’s 2024 campaign and let his political movement arise from the people, not from the consultant and donor class.