After Damaging Florida, DeSantis Suspends His Campaign

Over the last year and a half Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans in the state house have done severe damage to Florida public education through book ban, re-writing history to remove the truth about slavery and Jim Crow, and to erase LGBT people. The results have included teachers and professors leaving institution, travel warnings by civil rights groups, and convention boycotts.  Meanwhile Florida's homeowner insurance crisis continues and Florida schools rank 46th in the nation.  All of these efforts, many intentionally cruel, had a goal of turning DeSantis into the darling of the MAGA base as DeSantis sought the Republican presidential nomination.  While successful in damaging Florida, the efforts never won the hearts of the Christofascists and white supremacists who dominate the GOP base and who play an outsized role in the GOP nomination process.  Now, DeSantis has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump who just days ago he was saying was not the standard bearing Republicans needed.  A piece in the the Washington Post looks at DeSantis' spectacular collapse after at one time seeming the great hope for far right Republicans.  Here are excerpts:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is ending his once-promising presidential campaign, which steadily deflated as he struggled to connect with voters and convince Republicans to swap Donald Trump for a younger, more disciplined champion of his ideas.

DeSantis, 45, had seemed to many Republicans like the most viable challenger to Trump after the 2022 midterms, when the governor won reelection by a landslide. But he started to lose ground in polling even before his official campaign launch in May — via a glitchy live chat that neatly embodied the way his grand plans were going awry.

The second-term governor echoed Trump’s combative style and “America First” rallying cry while arguing he would be more electable, truer to conservative values and more effective at executing an agenda. He appealed heavily to the party base as someone willing to dig in on polarizing issues and go to battle with critics, the media and companies such as Disney. Struggling to make headway against Trump, he increasingly criticized the former president as “high risk” and “low reward” for the Republican Party.

But DeSantis’s strategy fell flat as voters refused to leave Trump and even gravitated back to him, galvanized by outrage at the former president’s four criminal indictments. DeSantis alienated more moderate primary voters and donors who increasingly looked to former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley as a Trump alternative. Awkward interactions on the trail dogged his campaign, spawning viral videos and feeding the governor’s longtime reputation for aloofness.

DeSantis barely bested Haley for a distant second in Iowa, the state where he bet the vast majority of his time and resources. After Iowa, DeSantis confronted a difficult map with no obvious states to help him turn the tide.

And a sprawling DeSantis operation that quickly amassed more than $100 million was plagued by infighting and distrust among different factions. DeSantis loyalists in Tallahassee clashed with the national consultants brought in to run a supportive super PAC — their tensions culminating in the late creation of a new group and the resignations and firings of top officials.

DeSantis enacted an aggressive home-state agenda in the run-up to his campaign. He passed laws limiting discussion of LGBTQ issues in school, defunding college “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs and banning abortion after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, among many others. He called Florida “the place where woke goes to die,” . . . .

Despite the national buzz, some Republicans who worked with DeSantis in Florida harbored doubts that his success in the state would translate on a national stage. As governor, they said, DeSantis was effective but also ruthless and insular, unenthusiastic about the social aspects of politics and keeping a small circle of trust that centered on his wife.

Money was one of DeSantis’s big advantages when he entered the race. . . . But the campaign quickly ran into financial trouble after launching with a massive staff and setting expectations for fundraising too high. Layoffs commenced. The super PAC absorbed even more costs. Major donors were also backing away, some of them aghast at DeSantis’s signing of a six-week abortion ban or his statement to then-Fox host Tucker Carlson that the U.S. had no compelling reason to become “further entangled in a territorial dispute Russia and Ukraine.”

The largest known contributor to Never Back Down, businessman Robert Bigelow, pulled back and said DeSantis had gone too far to the right.

DeSantis banked on a strong performance in Iowa, the first state in the GOP nominating calendar. He had championed causes important to the evangelical voters who dominate the Republican caucuses there, and tapped into the Christian, social conservative networks that powered past winners in the Hawkeye State. His legislative priorities in Florida echoed the priorities of Iowa Republicans, who also passed a six-week abortion ban that got caught up in the courts.

As DeSantis struggled, the divisions in his team grew and spilled out into public view. Close allies of the governor launched a new super PAC late in the fall, and campaign leadership gave the new organization its blessing to effectively take over advertising. Sidelined and instructed to focus on field organizing, Never Back Down saw repeated shake-ups in leadership.

Its CEO resigned. His replacement was fired less than two weeks later, along with two other senior officials, and the chairman of the group’s board — former Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt, a longtime friend of DeSantis — left, too.