In the classic of new political journalism, “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer tracked the performance of six 1988 U.S. election candidates in the primaries and began by asking, “What kind of faith could compel, say, a dozen regular winners?” Sacrifice their lives and those of their loved ones to take part in an embarrassing public game of dice in which all but one are doomed?”
That's the question worth asking Ron DeSantis, who conceded defeat on Sunday and decided to abandon the campaign for the Republican nomination after last week's fiasco in the Iowa caucuses and a strategy plagued by miscalculations. And he had a good hand at the dice game: He had just won re-election as governor of Florida, in the same election cycle in which his hard-to-beat rival Donald Trump suffered a serious setback in the polls. Republicans finally seemed ready to lift the state of emergency Trump has imposed on the party since 2016, and DeSantis, a serial winner, seemed the ideal candidate to give the tycoon the final push.
The media repeated it so often and the Republican establishment wanted it so badly that DeSantis believed it was done. A little more than a year later, he joins the long list of those who underestimated Trump, whose candidacy he endorsed on Sunday in a resignation video released two days before the second leg of the New Hampshire primary process. . He's doing this, DeSantis said, because he considers the former president to be “superior to all candidates, including…” [Joe] Biden” and because he considers it unacceptable to “return to the old Republican guard of yesterday.” He also neglected to add that he made this decision despite Trump's preoccupation with insulting and ridiculing him in recent months.
The governor of Florida, who presented himself to voters as a version of Trump, without the drama and shocks in which the tycoon seems to live comfortably, did not take into account that his problems with the judiciary – with which, among other things, he still had unfinished business Deals – four criminal proceedings for a total of 91 crimes – should catapult his fame again among the conservative electorate. You can't blame him: Trump is an exceptional case in the history of American politics for many reasons, but above all because he has gone through situations in his eight years in office (the attack on the Capitol, two impeachment trials and countless accusations). in court), which would have ended anyone else's career, but apparently only made him stronger.
Another widespread diagnosis among forensic experts on the body of DeSantis' candidacy is that he took too long to enter the race for the Republican nomination. Instead of doing so after the November 2022 election (after which Trump immediately announced his intention to return to the White House in a flight to the front, an art he has mastered like no other), he instead spent six months Picking leaves to jump into the ring while the main opponent was on the canvas.
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When he finally did, a disastrous presentation on Twitter served as an ominous prelude to a poorly run campaign whose protagonist avoided hand-to-hand combat with the former president for too long and was burdened by his robotic lack of charisma and his own allergy to the, what is known in the United States as the art of “retail politics,” retail politics: contact with the voter, kissing children, shaking hands with the living powers, those things that require a talent that DeSantis lacks of all lights.
The governor thought that he wouldn't need it and that showing off his impressive resume (a Navy veteran and graduate of Harvard and Yale universities) would be enough; for his reputation as an impeccable family man, without a hint of the kind of scandals that have plagued Trump since his decision to run in 2015, and for the list of his achievements in Florida, which he never tired of referring to as “the country “to present freedom” in which “the awakened one” (progress) will die.
But on the latter, he went too far rather than failed: He implemented all the tough measures he had promised in his re-election campaign, but he did so when the entire country was already looking at Tallahassee, the capital of the state, trying to interpret , what it would be like to have DeSantis in the White House. What they saw was a politician who was tough on abortion and wanted to set a six-week deadline for terminating a pregnancy when most women have no way of knowing they are pregnant. Also an ultra with education and someone obsessed with restricting the rights of LGBTI people and attacking immigrants. All of these measures do not reflect as well on other, more moderate parts of the country, as shown by the Republican defeats in which women's reproductive freedom was put to a referendum.
After sidelining the sympathy of moderate voters, DeSantis launched a megalomaniacal campaign based on the huge fundraising he did at the start but then slowed down; So much so that he was forced to lay off half of his employees over the summer. He also didn't know how to win over his party's establishment, and that's certainly a credit to his consistency: When he was a congressman in Washington between 2013 and 2018, he didn't leave much of a mark, but at least it was clear that he had nothing to do with it wanted to have something to do with the old guard, and so he took part in the founding of the so-called Freedom Caucus, which brings together parliamentarians, extremists and sometimes eccentrics from the hardest wing of the US party.
This refusal to offer an alternative that would bring together those who want a future of American conservatism without the tycoon was key to the rise of the rival who ultimately gave him the final touch: Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Ambassador to the United Nations in the USA. Trump times in the White House.
In a conservative state like Iowa, where he spent tens of millions of dollars, Haley almost beat him; And what's worse, Florida's governor didn't thoroughly visit any of the 99 counties he targeted to search for every last vote. In New Hampshire, a far more hostile place for a conservative like DeSantis, Haley's surprise was taken for granted. “His strategy, sometimes defined as 'Trumpism without Trump,' assumed that Republican voters were willing to turn away from Trump personally, even as they supported his views on the issues,” pollster Nate Cohn writes in his newsletter for The New York Times. “Needless to say, it wasn’t like that. At the same time, his consistently conservative views on these issues alienated moderates and culminated in Haley's rise to power.”
One of the doubts that DeSantis had during his presentation was whether it would be better to wait for the next election, that of 2028. Time management is crucial in politics. And finally, this year's events are a real anomaly in which, for the first time in history, everything indicates that two tenants of the White House will compete against each other: the current and the previous, in a repeat of the duel of four years before. . DeSantis supporters hope he will have better luck next time.
And Ben Cramer's book proves that anything is possible. The six candidates he followed in that election, which George Bush Sr. won, included Bod Dole, the Republican candidate who lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, and a senator from Delaware named Joe Biden, who was still 32 years old away. about “having what it takes” to be President of the United States.
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