After doing a bit better than expected in this week’s Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis is off to South Carolina. And oblivion.
For a seemingly smart guy and accomplished vote-getter, the Florida governor, who supposedly had been fully prepared to battle 2024 front-runner Donald Trump, has proven to be a dud both as a candidate and as a strategist. Through the campaign, he has shown no ability to learn from his mistakes, or from Trump.
Republicans don’t like to nominate rookies. Since 1944, there have been 12 elections where the GOP nominee was not the incumbent. Eight times Republicans nominated a candidate who had previously run nationally, and the other four times included Dwight Eisenhower, a towering public figure in 1952, George W. Bush and Donald Trump — both well-known and highly experienced in the cauldron of media scrutiny.
The only true outsider the Republicans ever nominated was Barry Goldwater, who crashed to the most disastrous electoral defeat since Alf Landon and opened the door to a massive overexpansion of government: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
For the GOP, experience has worked, and inexperience has been a mess. DeSantis and the others showed themselves to be the GOP “B” Team, with former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley perhaps a B-plus.
The road was certainly open for DeSantis in early 2023, as he was running strong against Trump and leading in several GOP state primaries. But once the race was on, DeSantis showed he had no message and no strategy, and that he completely failed to understand what made — and makes — the former president so formidable.
No message
To be fair, DeSantis had a lot to say, but his messaging was a toxic mix of gloom, excessiveness and minutiae. DeSantis’s message was, “America is in decline!” followed by a tedious list of his policy actions in Florida.
Nobody wants to hear that.
Republican voters are angry, but like all voters, they want to be both riled up and uplifted. Trump’s “Make American Great Again” is one of the best political slogans ever. It is both an attack line and an uplifting rallying cry. MAGA gets people to want to charge forward. “America in decline” makes people want to sulk in their basements.
It is an axiom in campaign politics that lists should be three items or less — any more and people either tune out or forget. DeSantis’s droning on and on about every bill and proclamation smacks of the rookie mistake of trying to be all things to all people but succeeding in being not much to anyone. Worse, his delivery was never much better than a LinkedIn video resume.
Trump, by contrast, understands you need to focus your message and make it memorable. For the real estate mogul, it’s simple: set-up, then punchline. No two-minute treatise on immigration, just one to two sentences following by “build the wall.” Angry about corruption? “Drain the swamp.”
DeSantis never once hit on a memorable one-liner that would encapsulate what he stands for, what he’s done or what he would do.
No strategy
DeSantis made two awful strategic blunders, one early and one ongoing.
He began by trying to run a national campaign against a former president with 100 percent name recognition, hardcore loyalists everywhere and a network of backers in the conservative media. Not only that, Donald Trump is catnip for all the media. Anything Trump-related gets clicks, giving him an ability to dominate coverage DeSantis could never hope to equal.
But the primary process is a sequence of events, not a national election. Winning in Iowa and New Hampshire matters far more than organizing the entire Southeast (save South Carolina). Voters in both states are prickly and possessive of their role in the process. They like to upset the apple cart and respond to retail politicking.
DeSantis did eventually make a full-on commitment to Iowa, but he squandered precious resources elsewhere in the summer. Making things worse, he never seemed to craft a New Hampshire strategy. The Granite State has not polled well for Trump, but it’s even worse for DeSantis. Finding a way to partner with anti-Trump Gov. Sununu – especially taking his political advice – should have been a top priority, but it does not seem to have been a thought.
His current fumble is splitting time between South Carolina and New Hampshire. Granted, DeSantis has polled poorly in New Hampshire and is far behind Trump and Haley. But DeSantis does not have a choice. If he gets creamed in New Hampshire, there won’t be a South Carolina. He simply must make a throw of the dice now.
These are the mistakes of a rookie and an inexperienced (at best) or incompetent (at worst) campaign team. And against a formidable force like Trump, you can’t make these mistakes.
Taking a page from Trump (not)
Anyone in politics knows that when your opponent is doing something right, steal it. Of all his mistakes, DeSantis not understanding what makes Trump successful — and copying Trump’s tactics — is the worst.
The first Trump trait is fearlessness. The former president has no fear of his opponents or his donors, his endorsers or his campaign staff. From the start of his campaign in 2015, he has been on relentless attack against whomever he perceives as his biggest threat. He has no respect for traditional campaigning and does not worry about blowback or making up in the future.
The second Trump trait is the big picture. Donald Trump rarely sinks into the minutiae of the attack. Nor did he get into the policy weeds. Trump always pivots to simple accusations, simple charges and simple solutions. There’s no ad nauseum recitation of Hillary Clinton’s many scandals — just “Crooked Hillary.”
The third trait is modulation in delivery. Trump is not just a dour fear-monger (like DeSantis) or snarky lecturer (like Vivek Ramaswamy); he shifts his delivery constantly. More often than not, he is calm and low-toned — a great technique for forcing people to listen. He also draws people in by playing the victim, just as his audience feels victimized. And he uses a lot of humor. Trump puts on a good show.
DeSantis missed all of this. He seemed to be in constant fear of alienating the Trump base when he should have been running to decimate Trump. After all, who among Trump’s base will end up voting for Joe Biden? Alternately pushing back and shrinking from the fight left him nowhere. Being a punching bag killed Mike Pence — didn’t DeSantis notice this? Plus, getting into a fierce battle with Trump sucks all the oxygen away from anybody else. His timidity left the door open for Haley.
When Haley had her moment, DeSantis could not shake her. He sank into the minutiae of who sold more acreage to China and a constant back-and-forth over their respective tedious opposition research folders. Instead of Trump humor, ridicule and perhaps a compliment that would turn into an insult, DeSantis offered grumpy gainsaying. When DeSantis had a one-liner, it was obviously tightly crafted and focus-grouped instead of light and spontaneous-sounding. And they all flopped.
In the end, rookies will rookie. But it isn’t over for DeSantis. He has had his baptism of fire. If he learns from his mistakes, he could be the next Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon. If he doesn’t, he will be Tom Dewey, John McCain, or Pat Buchanan.
DeSantis made the right decision to run. What he makes of his future is up to him.
Keith Naughton, Ph.D., is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm. Naughton is a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant. Follow him on Twitter @KNaughton711.