Requiem for a Heavyweight

What’s the realistic best outcome for Ron DeSantis now?

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Ron DeSantis looks on after speaking at the Republican Party of Iowa's 2023 Lincoln Dinner on July 28, 2023.(Photo by SERGIO FLORES/AFP via Getty Images)

“Enjoy the Final Two Weeks of the DeSantis Campaign,” Jonathan Last advised his readers in a column published on Wednesday. “You won’t have Ol’ Puddin’ Fingers to kick around much longer.”

Is that right? I tend to think we’ll be kicking around Ol’ Puddin’ Fingers for months to come.

Last wasn’t predicting that the governor will be out of the race in two weeks, though. He was predicting that DeSantis’ time as a serious candidate is winding down, with the coup de grace likely to be delivered at the first Republican primary debate on August 23. 

That’s plausible. Here’s Chris Christie speaking to Fox News on Wednesday night:

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  1. Avatar photo
    Mick.Staton

    DeSantis should never have entered the race. There was never a chance he could win. It was always good to go this way. Nearly 40% of the party is still in an idolatrous trance for Trump and too many people think they can be the last man standing when/if Trump falls.

    Ron should have stayed out, but he was forced into the race by people desperate for a shiny new idol to replace the old idol. They were looking for a savior to vanquish the monster, but the monster only has the power given to it by the voters. So in essence their prayer was, "save me, Ron, before I vote for Trump again!"

    So now Ron's political career is toast, and given his hard populist turn that's not really a bad thing. We are left with Trump once more, and all the right wing pundits and pols that are calling Trump unfit will bend the knee once again and endorse and vote for him. Republicans will lose in 2024 again to a doddering, senile old man, and then the Republican party will implode under the weight of infighting and failure.

    Hopefully something can be recovered from the ashes to form a respectable conservative party or the Democrats will find no opposition as they send our country over the cliff.

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  2. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    So if you think DeSantis is a goner, who is your new “all NeverTrumpers must hold noses and vote for this person to stop Trump” candidate? Scott?

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    1. Poisonwood Bible

      Yes? I'm going to go with "Yes."

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        Ben Connelly

        Yeah I think Scott is the next most likely option. And I like him a lot better than DeSantis.

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  3. Bob Cherichella

    It’s been tough, for a whole bunch of different reasons, to go through the last 7 years with two of the most loathsome characters in the White House. I hate to think we’re in store for 5 more years of one jackass or the other.
    I see no mention of Governor/Ambassador Nikki Haley in your article. I’m very interested in seeing her performance in the 1st debate; I think Haley will hold her own. I wouldn’t lose sight of her just yet; I believe Ms. Haley has a great deal to offer the Republican Party.

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  4. Betsybowditch

    According to Newsweek:

    A top Republican pollster released results on Thursday showing that Florida's Republican governor has slipped to third place in the Republican field behind businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, a grim milestone for a candidate many once considered the best option to unseat former President Donald Trump at the top of the field.

    Per a survey of 2,000 voters nationwide, the Republican-leaning pollster Cygnal—which holds an 'A' rating with poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight—DeSantis is now the preferred option of just 10 percent of the electorate, and is running virtually neck-and-neck with Ramaswamy (11 percent)....

    DeSantis' claim he would "slit throats" as president raised eyebrows to say the least. Beyond that, he misread his nearly 20-point reelection results in Florida and so did a lot of other people. He felt it reflected the popularity of his anti-woke agenda.

    In reality things were going well for most residents and he faced a weak challenger so why change horses? Few people who go to the polls rank wokeness as an issue of great concern.

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    1. Bobby D

      I think DeSantis missed the fact that most of Trump’s transgressiveness is performative. Trump’s supporters aren’t looking for Trump to follow through. They just enjoy watching the left squirm when Trump starts performing.

      After all, is Trump going to halt immigration from Mexico and Central America? Of course not. He’s a real estate developer whose business largely depends on a steady flow of cheap construction labor coming across the border. In a few instances when Trump was legally forced to use union labor, he did so. But he generally chose to avoid union labor when legally permitted to do so. And the non-union labor pool in the construction industry is chock full of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

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      1. Jfan

        What I never understood is that the enjoyment you describe is exactly how I always thought blacks viewed Al Sharpton. They knew he was a con artist, but enjoyed watching him drive the establishment crazy. Yet when Sharpton ran for president, he got little black support. Blacks enjoyed the show but didn't trust him with anything important. Why did their white counterparts actually vote for Trump?

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      2. Betsybowditch

        You have a good point. Trump says things that are politically incorrect, hence guaranteed to get a reaction from the Left, and often mean spirited like referring to COVID as "kung flu," which provoked laughter.

        It is hard to imagine anyone laughing at DeSantis' bloodthirsty language in which he envisions inflicting violence on bureaucrats.

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        1. Avatar photo
          Ben Connelly

          Yeah I heard Trump on the radio recently saying something about how the Democrats want to restrict people’s water usage, “even in states like Pennsylvania, where they have more water than they know what to do with. It’s called rain!” Which despite my dislike of Trump politically, made me laugh. And I said to myself that even after all these years I get why his supporters like him. I think to many of them, that comment sounded as dumb as it did to me. But the way he said it came off as very self-knowing (ie so dumb it’s funny or so dumb it’s true). His supporters aren’t looking for a guy like DeSantis to glower at them and make water rationing illegal. They just want a guy who will make dumb jokes that all the liberals hate.

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          1. Betsybowditch

            A friend of mine on Facebook, a liberal, wanted her friends to weigh in on a recent piece by David Brooks, which I glanced at, explaining why rural America saw Trump as their savior.

            The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

            It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on....

            Me on Facebook: I looked at the response on National Review where elites were criticized for not emphasizing their values, like having a steady source of income before you marry and have children, are the reasons for disenfranchised minority failure, which is instead blamed on racism.

            But I remember back in 2008 when Sarah Palin was picked for McCain’s VP. It was soon revealed her daughter, then a high school student, was pregnant. The pushback was “she chose life while a liberal would choose abortion.” Translation: The Palin family is morally superior to their elitist critics.

            Conservatives can’t have it both ways. I just finished reading “The Forgotten Girls” written by Monica Potts who grew up in rural Arkansas and got a scholarship to Bryn Mawr and now lives in DC. As the NYT’s book review notes, when she returns and is asked whether she feels safe in big cities this is her response: “The worst things that had ever happened to me or to Darci [her best friend] had happened here, just a few miles from where we were born.”

            In Clinton [Arkansas], one misstep can derail an entire life. Darci’s life is upended when, despite her good grades, she is informed late in her senior year of high school that she’s missed too many days to graduate. She immediately spirals out of control: early pregnancy, an abusive relationship, drugs, addiction, multiple rehabs, jail and homelessness....

            What gives wealthy elites an advantage is being able to pass down assets to their offspring. Everyone I know has done better through property ownership than what they bring in as a salary. And ownership was often facilitated through inheritance.

            Was just reading about an English Prof at City College of SF who lives in Mill Valley. I immediately thought, “he must have inherited his house because there is no way he could buy into that community on his salary.” The security of a home likely enables him to do his job better and he appears to be dedicated to his students.

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  5. Well, you know...

    "I’m ending my campaign and endorsing Donald Trump because the rule of law should matter in this country.” "

    Lmao

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  6. Avatar photo
    Soniak21

    I wish I could remember which Florida insiders I'm thinking of (there were a few of them) but they were spot-on. Back when DeSantis was supposed to be the New Trump-Slaying Hotness, there were Florida folks basically saying: "You only think that because you haven't really met him yet."

    Boy were they right. I never saw myself supporting DeSantis, but I did buy him as a Trump-slayer, and heck, I wanted *someone* to slay Trump. So I guess the wishful thinking was part of it. A lot of us wanted someone to slay Trump, and DeSantis seemed to want the job. Then the conventional wisdom became: "Let's rally around one guy early. Otherwise the field will be fractured and Trump will win." So that played to DeSantis's advantage too.

    And then... we met him. What a schmuck.

    I wonder how much of the Myth of DeSantis was kind of... self-reinforcing. I think even before his 2022 landslide, he'd grabbed enough headlines and displayed enough ambition to be talked about as a serious presidential hopeful. And... maybe that's what caused his landslide? People like to back a winner, and I bet a lot of Floridians got a little thrill out of pulling the lever for a potential future president... thus causing the landslide that made him look more like a future president. He kept getting propelled by what, for him, was a "virtuous cycle." But there was never any "there" there.

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  7. Jack H Wolf

    That DeSantis is failing is reflected in the polls. That this offered an outlier chance of a non populist Republican like a Tim Scott to rescue the party from the domain of being the party of Trump that exists to hate liberals, is belied by who is in third place now- Ramaswamy.
    Trumps comments on Vivek are telling - ""The thing I like about Vivek is that he only has good things to say about 'President Trump.'" speaking of himself in the third person.
    As a conservative Dem I still have hope that the Republican party returns to being the reasonable voice of the right of center of American politics and will vote for Scott in the NC primary as a registered Independent assuming somebody doesn't challenge Grandpa Joe, but face it, the party is lost and the best I can hope for it to come to its senses is a route in 2024 though the polls now indicate Trump will win and very possibly with a trifecta, lord help us.

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  8. Brian The 2nd

    DeSantis has already sank his chances for being president in this cycle, and like Ted Cruz, probably for ever.
    Trump has created a perfectly no win situation for republicans. I believe that to most people the only thing worse than a bully is a toady to a bully. Be a toady to a bully, and you can never shake that stink off. the only way to win with a bully in the game is (to continue the kids on a playground analogy) is to totally vanquish the bully. Beat him up and make him cry in front of all the other kids.
    People will stand back and silently support a bully who is bullying the right people (people you also don't like) but be an obvious suck up to a bully, and you will be left alone while the bully is in power, but as soon as that bully is knocked out of power and humiliated, do you think his toadies are next in line for leadership positions? No, of course not, nobody took them seriously or respected them. The bully's shame sticks to the toadies, and the new tough guy that knocks the bully down is in charge of the playground now.

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    1. Wes.Bridges

      Dang, BrianII--That's about as good an analysis as I've seen this cycle. Kinda sucks to be us. If only there were a path for the Governors of North Dakota or Virgina, two gentlemen that might govern accordingly.

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    2. J. Everett Schubert

      I now have images of the scene from "A Christmas Story" where Ralphie has had enough, and pummels the schoolyard bully over and over. :-P

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  9. The Pragmatic Conservative

    I'm not a fan of DeSantis, but I would have more respect for him if he dropped out now and admitted that he was doing so because he knew he couldn't win the nomination. Maybe go back to governing Florida and possibly running for the Senate if Rubio or Scott go for the presidency in 2028. At the end of the day, there's not enough room in the country for one Donald Trump. The last thing we need are lots of Donald Trump wannabes, which unfortunately seems to be what we're getting.

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  10. Trichwages

    Nice analysis. We shall see.

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