Just HOW bad was Ron DeSantis' campaign?

Really, really bad.

(Ron DeSantis)

Well, it’s finally over.

Ron DeSantis’ ended his campaign for president, officially, on Sunday afternoon — although his relevance as a candidate had already long passed.

Watching the final days of DeSantis’ campaign — after a 30-point loss to Donald Trump in Iowa — I was reminded of the New York Times review of Paul Simon’s musical “The Capeman”:

The show registers as one solemn, helplessly confused drone. It's like watching a mortally wounded animal. You're only sorry that it has to suffer and that there's nothing you can do about it.

Yup, that about captures it.

That DeSantis’ campaign was a disaster is indisputable. This chart, which shows the polling progress of the Republican primary race over the last year, tells the story — in blunt terms (DeSantis is the green line):

Simply put: DeSantis’ best day in the race was his first day. Or, actually, before his first day. DeSantis ran strongest against Trump — and the rest of the Republican field — in late 2022 and early 2023, before he officially became a candidate.

Once DeSantis entered the race — via a disastrous Twitter Spaces event with Elon Musk — his numbers began to drop. Steadily.

I kept waiting for the moment when DeSantis got a second look from Republican primary voters, a re-evaluation where he could emerge as the comeback candidate. It never happened. There was no dead cat bounce. There was no bounce. Ever.

So, what, exactly, went wrong? The truth is that when things go as bad as they did for DeSantis A LOT of things go wrong. Let’s go through some of them — in order of importance.

1. The candidate: I am a broken record on this but the simple truth is that DeSantis was not and is not a talented candidate. He is awkward. Uncertain on his feet. Angry. Arrogant. What became clear as the campaign wore on was that the center of the campaign was, well, sort of empty. There was no there there. People who initially liked DeSantis liked the idea of him — a conservative warrior who had won overwhelmingly in a swing(ish) state. But, the reality of DeSantis was much, much less than advertised. He never looked comfortable — or happy — on the campaign trail. And people can tell that!

2. The message: DeSantis ran, effectively, as Donald Trump without the baggage. He was all the good things about Trump without any of the bad things. The problem? Trump was ALSO in the race — and Republicans liked him. A lot. They weren’t looking for Trump Lite. They had the original recipe right there. Had Trump not been in the race, then, maybe, the message that DeSantis chose might have worked. But, in this race? No way.

3. The super PAC: DeSantis tried something we have never seen attempted before in national politics — he farmed out virtually all of his campaign operations to his Never Back Down super PAC and its leader Jeff Roe. This setup always felt odd to me since, by law, the campaign (and the candidate!) cannot communicate with the super PAC. Meaning that the candidate was constantly beholden to decisions made without his input. Never Back Down had all the money and the bulk of the staff. It was, in effect, the campaign. Except that it didn’t have the candidate. It was recipe for disaster. And, of, course, it exploded. DeSantis was repeatedly beset by staff turnover as it became clear that the campaign and the super PAC — surprise, surprise! — didn’t see eye to eye on strategy. Even before the Iowa caucuses, the entire leadership of Never Back Down — including chief strategist Roe — was gone.

4. The strategy: This goes hand in hand with the message. DeSantis, for 95% of the primary, refused to attack Trump in any meaningful way. When Trump suggested that Ukraine was not a priority for the United States, DeSantis referred to the country’s war with Russia as a “territorial dispute.” When Trump was indicted (again and again), DeSantis leapt to his defense — insisting it was the result of out of control prosecutors and a weaponized Justice Department. Only in the final days of the campaign did DeSantis start to tell some hard truths about Trump. But by then it was WAY too late. It seemed to me that DeSantis’ strategy was to wait until Trump was disqualified from the race — either by something he said or by his many legal entanglements. But, that was NEVER going to happen. The 2016 election proved that Trump is immune to that which kills most other candidates and campaigns. The only way around Trump was through Trump. DeSantis was never willing or able to execute on that strategy.

5. The online-ness: This probably could be a subset of the strategy mistakes but it was SO bad that I thought it deserved its own category. From the start of his campaign, the DeSantis team was maddeningly online. (Witness his Twitter announcement.) As in, they seemed to think that the campaign would be won by memes — or that the average voter had some sort of interest in the daily snipings that happened between their side and the Trump campaign. And, time and again, the DeSantis online strategy got the candidate in trouble in the real world. There was the secret video that contained a Nazi symbol. And the homophobic video. It was one debacle after another.

There’s obviously more. Pudding fingers. The boot lifts controversy. The decision to postpone entering the race until the end of the Florida legislative session. Not responding to Trump’s schoolyard taunts and nicknames. And on and on.

In the final days of the campaign, DeSantis started hinting at 2028. Recounting conversations with voters in South Carolina, DeSantis said: “They were coming up to me saying, ‘We want you in 2028, we love you, man.’”

Whether or not these conversations actually happened — I am always skeptical when politicians talk about how much people love them and want them to run for stuff — it’s clear that DeSantis (and his team) thought that the best way to preserve his chances in the next presidential race was to end this one and endorse Trump.

(Sidebar: A week ago DeSantis said this of Trump: “You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring he'll say your wonderful.” Ahem.)

Count me as VERY skeptical of DeSantis’ presidential prospects in the future. Sure, he can fix some of the problems I laid out above — like his message and strategy. And, sure, Trump probably won’t be around in 2028. (If Trump loses this race, of course, I could totally see him running again in four years.)

What DeSantis can’t change is him. He is who he is. And as we saw in this campaign that was a bad candidate. A really bad one. (It’s not easy to lose support for the entirety of a presidential campaign!) I don’t know how DeSantis gets around the fact that when the bright lights came on, he shrunk.

That doesn’t mean he won’t run for president again. He will be governor until early 2027 and could easily use his second term as a springboard to a second bid. I just think DeSantis emerges from this race badly damaged — and in ways that he can’t fix.