The DeSantis Post-Mortems Pour In
And the body isn't even in the ground yet.
Political consultants rarely look at what failed. Take Jeff Roe, who hasn’t had a competitive winning campaign in a decade (his stats are padded by numerous races in massively red districts or with no opposition at all). Roe took an already screwed-up DeSantis campaign and, if possible, made it worse.
That is because the majority of campaign consultants are only in it for the money, and to them losing with a fat paycheck is a win. Ask Adam Laxalt or John McCain.
After the Iowa primary, which Ron DeSantis vowed to win—-and which he lost by over 30 points, coming in third—-his campaign flat gave up on New Hampshire, where as of today he was at 6% in the Suffolk poll. His website has been scrubbed of all events (which, typically, the campaign says is nothing unusual) and he is now talking wild-eyed about how he’s going to clean house in the Virgin Islands primary. (I think the last one who said that was Marco Rubio in 2016.)
So two major post-mortems appeared this week. Each was brutal in its own way. First, Politico said the campaign was the “worst in American history.” Now, as a history professor, I might challenge that. After all, there were Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, Howard (“Yeaaaaagggghhhh”) Dean, Gary (“Monkey Business”) Hartpence, and the evergreen fecalpile Yeb. But Politico may be right. If not the worst, to quote Dizzy Dean, “it’s among ‘em, Pee Wee.”
DeSantis out of the gate had a problem identifying himself. Was he “Trump plus” or “Trump minus?” He couldn’t decide whether to go after the President or stick to his own record and ideas. The result was that after the illegal, grotesque raid on Mar-a-Lago, DeSantis had to vaguely criticize the lawfare overreach that included charges against Trump’s by Porny Daniels, but added ““I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair. I just, I can’t speak to that.” If you wanted to infuriate 40 million Trump loyalists, you couldn’t have come up with a better line.
Next was NBC News, that said DeSantis’s campaign was “doomed from the start”.
Both articles, however, overemphasized the botched Twitter/X rollout. To this day, elites and reporters still assign way too much influence to, well, “influencers.” George Will, who is wrong more than he is right, quipped that being the “most influential journalist in Washington is like being the tallest building in Topeka.” True dat!
The “influencers” in Twitter/X were nothing short of obnoxious and, well, stupid. One dolt took it upon himself to constantly compare this primary, of someone who is essentially an incumbent running against wanna-bes, with an equal primary field of 2008. He (and others) insisted the polls were wrong. Well, douchenozzle, the polls were dead on. Richard Baris, Emerson, and a couple of others had the percentages within one. Other than that, Twit “influencers” spent most of their time heaping dung on Trump without ever making the case for DeSantis, which only alienated the very few “persuadable” Trump voters left.
This brings me to the other point that, alas, I think all the campaign “insiders” will ignore, and that is President Trump’s repeated strength in the GOP. Today’s Suffolk Poll in New Hampsire asked if voters were persuadable to move to another candidate by asking, “Are you voting for President Trump or against someone else?” For Trump, the number as 92% for. With Nikki Haley (Nick Knack Paddywhack Give a Uke a Bomb), almost half said they were voting against Trump, not for her.
The great Rush Limbaugh used to say that no one could separate his audience from him—-only he could do that. He said the same of Trump voters. It’s clear that in the continuing “lessons learned” by other campaigns, they will refuse to learn this one.
Larry Schweikart
Rock drummer, Film maker,NYTimes #1 bestselling author
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