Sergio Flores for The Washington Post via Getty Images
- Ron DeSantis blamed local and federal prosecutors for upending the GOP primary.
- "It's sucked out a lot of oxygen," the Florida governor said of Trump's legal woes.
- DeSantis has a point. But a lot his struggles have been self-inflicted.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says that prosecutors upended the GOP presidential primary. He has a point. But the harsher truth is that despite all the hype, DeSantis was just bad at this.
Now, the once-vaunted Trump primary foe sounds like an NFL quarterback who complains about officiating after his wide receivers dropped potential game-changing passes and he threw costly interceptions.
"I would say if I could have one thing change, I wish Trump hadn't been indicted on any of this stuff," DeSantis told the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody. "I mean honestly, I think from Alvin Bragg on, I've criticized the cases, I mean someone like a Bragg would not have brought that case if it was anyone other than Donald Trump, someone like that is distorting justice, which is bad, but I also think it distorted the primary."
DeSantis added that Trump's legal woes, "sucked out a lot of oxygen."
Hindsight is, of course, twenty-twenty, but in retrospect, it's clear that DeSantis made some pretty critical errors that have nothing to do with Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, or Fani Willis.
As Nate Silver previously wrote, DeSantis really could just be a pretty average politician who ran one extraordinarily good race. There's also still a chance I eat my words and DeSantis pulls off a historic comeback. But he's also really not one for fairytale endings.
DeSantis' problems began before he even launched.
Before he even launched his campaign, The Florida governor made two critical decisions that already and will continue to be picked apart. Neither of these have anything to do with Trump's indictments.
First, DeSantis made the decision to wait to formally announce his presidential campaign until after the Florida legislative session ended.
At the time, it somewhat made sense. DeSantis and his Republican allies in the legislature could ram through a bevy of conservative priorities that the governor could then brag about to prospective primary voters. The problem was simultaneously, in fact before DeSantis even won his resounding reelection, former President Donald Trump was hammering him. Trump and his allies spent months assaulting virtually every aspect of DeSantis' record with nary a response in return.
When DeSantis finally started to return fire, his volleys didn't pack the same weight compared to the haymakers the MAGA-side continued to land. National polling shows that what was once a close race in the aftermath of DeSantis' midterm rout quickly started to turn into a double-digit Trump lead.
Second: DeSantis had an unfortunate pickle because he didn't hold federal office. He had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his reelection. But legally, he couldn't just transfer the money over. So instead, he outsourced most of the decisions to an allied super PAC. In theory, this could have worked. DeSantis even wooed an advisor close to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, himself a potential 2024 hopeful, to run the outfit.
No Republicans have voted yet, but we can safely label that decision to be a disaster.
As The Washington Post recounted in embarrassing detail, DeSantis' super PAC was plagued by allegations of mismanagement. Even top officials discussed publicly how difficult it was for the Florida governor to break through. The operation's early designs for an expansive and expensive ground game through Super Tuesday states later pivoted to a hail mary on the Iowa caucuses. And amid that final play, top officials continue to resign sparking more headlines about the woes in DeSantis world.
These two decisions are not alone.
His issues didn't improve once he finally joined the field.
It wasn't Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's choice for DeSantis to spend years tormenting Disney to the point that even some conservative donors grew queasy. But DeSantis did. Nor did Bragg choose to formally announce the campaign in an audio chat with Elon Musk, a glitch-filled rollout that looked like amateur hour at its finest. DeSantis did that too.
Special counsel Jack Smith has no responsibility for DeSantis' actions on Capitol Hill. Despite being a former congressman, the governor had few allies in Washington. Smith also didn't tell DeSantis to blow off his own state's delegation to the point that no one bothered to check in on a congressman who fell from his roof.
Trump, on the other hand, wined and dined lawmakers at Mar-a-Lago like a college coach in desperate need of signing major recruits. Trump's efforts led to his campaign's frequent trolling of DeSantis as the former president strategically released endorsements timed to inflict embarrassment and pain.
True, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is responsible for Trump's mugshot. But she didn't encourage DeSantis to hire a media team that produced videos that seemed better suited to the deep fringes of the internet. She also didn't encourage the governor, or for that matter, any of the other presidential candidates, to continue to attack each other instead of Trump. As anti-Trump Republicans feared, the pre-primary debates became a repeat of 2016 where everyone
The beauty of DeSantis' lament is that we will never know what the primary would have been like without Trump's four indictments and 91 charges.
Perhaps, he's right that Republicans rallied to their fallen leader so quickly that the opportunity for any opposition was squelched before it had the chance. However, if this is true, it can't account for former UN ambassador Nikki Haley's rise. As DeSantis has fallen, Haley has shot up, especially in the key early state of New Hampshire.
There's also a third option: the Nothing Matters lane. As many Republicans have pointed out, why would their voters settle for an imitation when the original was so readily available? As polling has made abundantly clear, many Republicans continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen from the former president. Just like his hero Andrew Jackson, Trump wants to ride a wave of recrimination into the White House. (Jackson, though, actually kind of did have the election stolen from him.)
In this view, Republicans see a way to right their perceived wrong. Handing the keys to DeSantis or for that matter anyone else wouldn't satiate this lust for revenge. Only Trump can fulfill that.