Why DeSantis Came Up Short | Opinion

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis burned twice as bright for half as long but never cast as large a shadow as he'd hoped.

Gary Hart, John Edwards, Jeb Bush—the Mount Rushmore of failed presidential candidates has a new contender: Ronald Dion DeSantis.

Florida's governor, elevated to national prominence through petty culture war battles and weaponizing state government—all while showcasing a personality indistinguishable from a sheet of drywall—looked like the real deal for an unnaturally long time. Up until his official announcement in May he was "the talk" in all the right smokey cloakrooms, with a lot of smart pundits and conservative bigwigs proclaiming that he was the lone candidate who could coalesce the loose MAGA vote while also pulling in independents who had grown tired of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Now? He's the guy fighting for table scraps in Iowa with Nikki Haley and a sack of bile with a bouffant hairdo (Vivek Ramaswamy, not Trump).

"Meatball Ron" and his aligned super PAC spent $100 million to lose 11 points in national polls. He went from a net +5 percent favorability in January to a recent -16 percent. And while the story of this primary has yet to be fully written, DeSantis has pulled off a special kind of failure that deserves some honest reflection as we approach the new year.

So, honestly, what went wrong?

Well, for a man who built his brand on being just like Trump but competent, he's clearly failed to walk the tightrope of both praising the former president while simultaneously lobbing grenades over the walls of Mar-a-Lago. How do you possibly sound sincere saying the greatest president of our lifetime shouldn't be made president again?

Then there were the gaffes: the ham-fisted campaign launch, the putrid homophobic video, the call for Iowa caucus fraud. Add in the tone-deaf legislation and shipping humans around the country like bushels of oranges. Plus, the smile. And the shoe lifts.

Some of these are just bad optics, the kinds of missteps that plague most campaigns but which the best find ways to overcome. But some screwups, like the abortion and education legislation he championed, threatened to upend his donor base of rich Republicans looking for their technocratic Donald Trump alternative. Unpopular policy may get you clicks on Twitter and interviews on Fox News, but it's poison to the kinds of independent voters DeSantis would need to win the general election.

Much ink has also been spilled writing about his campaign drama, from blowing a million-plus on private jet flights, to changing campaign and super PAC leadership more frequently than Trump changes lawyers. I'm personally more interested in the missives yet to be written once this moribund campaign is put to rest. It's clear his team hates him, how else to explain this?

In the end, none of this is why Ron DeSantis won't be the next Republican presidential candidate. The only reason that truly matters is that he's not Donald Trump. Their party is no longer a political apparatus, it's a cult of personality, one proudly focused on creating a dictatorship bent on revenge for the election fraud that never happened. DeSantis was counting on some unspecified magic of being uniquely qualified to take over that cult, while also assuming Trump would be removed from the equation through choice, felony convictions, or maybe bad health. Sorry, you're no magician and Trump will probably outlive the sun.

As a classic liberal, I'd prefer a strong Republican Party offering real ideas and policies. Instead, we got a pissing contest between two Florida babies that was always going to be won by the guy with a much better track record of pissing people off. Maybe next cycle ... if we survive that long.

Noah Abelman is a film producer and TV writer.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.