'I'll just f---ing quit!' The campaign, mocked as 'Ted Cruz 2.0,' never broke through and was riven by internal tensions and bad poll numbers
After a year of high expectations and low results, of constant bad press and negative ads from opponents, of repeated shakeups and internal feuding, of strategic blunders and tactical mistakes, Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign Monday suffered its biggest humiliation yet.
The Florida governor was demolished in Iowa by almost 30 percentage points against former President Donald Trump.
For months, DeSantis clung to the fiction that his relentless Hawkeye focus would lead to an Iowa victory, springboard him into frontrunner status in the primary and expose Trump as the weak figurehead of a flimsy Potemkin village of a campaign.
But Monday’s Iowa blowout showed the folly of the belief. All the pre-election polls did, too. Yet DeSantis refuses to quit, complaining that an early call declaring Trump the winner amounted to “election interference.”
DeSantis is still vowing to fight on in the other states where all the polls show he’s likely to meet a similar – or worse – fate than in Iowa. The decision to press on despite the odds continues a pattern for a campaign fraught with frequent failure and persistent denial about it.
And DeSantis will face the same problem: he doesn’t know how to beat Trump in a GOP primary.
“DeSantis never established dominance,” Chris La Civita, one of Trump’s co-campaign managers, told The Messenger in July when it became clear DeSantis didn’t have what it takes.
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“If you want to be The Man, you’ve got to beat The Man. Ron DeSantis is not The Man. Donald Trump is The Man.”
The DeSantis campaign’s destruction provides a case study in the complexity of running for president and it exposes a reality that Republican elites, pundits and never-Trump billionaires have tried to ignore for eight years: the GOP is the party of Trump.
There’s dispute about whether Trump was ever beatable in a GOP primary. But there’s little disagreement among connected political pros about the multiple problems with the campaign of DeSantis, an aloof not-ready-for-primetime candidate who didn’t know what he didn’t know and was arrogant about it, according to more than a dozen insiders who shared their insight to The Messenger since March. They spoke on condition of anonymity, many out of fear of retribution from DeSantis or his aggressive army of social media followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
DeSantis’s prickly personality estranged one-time allies, donors and political pros. His likability problems turned off many voters. The $47 million spent against him by the super PACs of Trump and Nikki Haley damaged him. And the spring and summer criminal indictments of Trump changed the trajectory of the race.
“We had to be perfect and lucky. And we were neither,” said one adviser.
Still, the DeSantis downfall was striking in light of polls showing him ahead of Trump a year ago. He received fawning coverage from conservative media. He had the backing of big-dollar donors who helped stuff his Never Back Down super PAC with $130 million at the beginning.
Much of that money was spent in Iowa, where DeSantis made sure to campaign in all 99 counties. Iowa instead became a field of nightmares for DeSantis. The more he built his campaign there, the more voters didn’t come. He lost every county Monday.
‘EVERYONE ELSE IS AN IDIOT’
At 45 years old, DeSantis had no close senior advisers older than he, and he had a reputation for disregarding advice and data that conflicted with his opinions (on abortion, for instance). Known for demanding loyalty he doesn’t frequently reciprocate, DeSantis established a top-down campaign structure designed to give him information he wanted to hear.
Critical voices didn’t last in the campaign.
“The DeSantis campaign was too much of a DeSantis fan club,” said one disillusioned consultant who worked to elect DeSantis.
Said another: “Ron is the smartest guy in the room. Everyone else is an idiot. No one tells him he’s wrong. So it didn’t happen that often.”
Only two staffers held senior positions in a prior presidential race, but they had tensions with DeSantis’s first campaign manager before she was replaced in a summer shakeup. The campaign then had disputes with the Never Back Down super PAC, which was staffed with more seasoned political pros. They didn’t last after multiple departures in recent months.
In contrast, Trump’s campaign and MAGA Inc. super PAC was staffed with a team of presidential campaign vets who executed a plan that continually kept the unseasoned DeSantis off balance even before his campaign launch.
Despite Trump’s penchant for stream-of-consciousness speeches and highly controversial or weird tangents, he still has a mighty Republican brand and clear message as unmistakable as the red hats that bear his slogan: “Make America Great Again.” It resonates with the Republican base, working-class voters and the disaffected. DeSantis offered a vague and derivative version of Trumpism-without-the-chaos.
DeSantis never had a recognizable slogan or motto beyond “Never Back Down.” And when it came to fighting Trump, DeSantis sometimes backed down, backed away or never took a real punch.
An avid X user, DeSantis campaign speeches were stuffed with acronyms on heady topics that thrilled the very-online intellectual right, but the concepts just weren’t top of mind for the older not-very-online early state voters who didn’t have alphabet-soup fluency with CRT, DEI or ESG (Critical Race Theory, Diversity Equity & Inclusion and Environmental Social Governance).
DeSantis ignored calls early on to stay more laser-focused on the economy and sound more positive. But he only started to do that after his needed campaign reboot.
NO, YOU DIDN’T BREAK THE INTERNET
DeSantis fashioned himself as a different type of candidate. So he decided to have a different type of campaign launch on Twitter Spaces with billionaire Elon Musk on May 25. It became a glitch-filled disaster on May 24, an easy metaphor for his troubled candidacy. When the sound finally worked in the event, DeSantis was somehow talking about heady topics like the Chevron Deference, DEI and ESG without explaining what any of it was.
The DeSantis campaign’s response: it was great.
“We broke the internet,” his campaign said.
No DeSantis aide dared publicly admit it was a campaign catastrophe or that he should have listened to the advisers who wanted him to have a traditional campaign launch with his telegenic family onstage at the baseball diamond in his hometown of Dunedin, Florida where his athletic skills led his team to the Little League World Series and led him to Yale University to play ball.
DeSantis also wanted to break another convention: he completely stiff-armed the mainstream media at first. In hindsight, conservative writers have detailed what a mistake it was.
But DeSantis had built a national political brand by refusing to cow to the “corporate media” in the face of unremitting negative coverage when he kept Florida open during COVID. With the exception of conservative Fox and hand-picked conservative outlets, DeSantis kept the media at bay heading into his 2022 reelection. It worked. He notched a historic win of 19.4 percentage points in what used to be a swing state.
“He wanted to run the reelect for president because it worked for him,” said one Republican who has discussed DeSantis’s campaign with him privately. “But that’s not how this works.”
Presidential races are four campaigns in one (the three major early states and the national campaign) and the product is greater than the sum of the parts. They’re massive marketing campaigns that revolve around paid media advertising endeavors and earned free media in press coverage on TV and in online news sources and on Facebook, X, Instagram and even TikTok.
The mainstream media’s horse-race coverage about campaign strategy and speeches builds name ID, boosts polling and drives fundraising in presidential campaigns.
Under the glare of the national spotlight, interaction with voters – viral moments in pizza joints or small town halls – has outsized importance in retail politics states like Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s a sharp contrast to Florida where DeSantis spent millions on TV ads in a paid media campaign, gave rally speeches to supporters, granted select interviews to friendly media, and won.
AWKWARD ENCOUNTERS
DeSantis was told by advisers that interactions with voters were crucial, that he needed to seem more relatable to voters. The advice was dismissed.
“People don’t care about that stuff,” he told one Republican.
Story after story then rolled in about how awkward DeSantis is. How he once ate pudding with his fingers for utensils. How his laugh is strange. How security with “menacing glares” kept him bubble-wrapped. How he snapped at a reporter asking him why he doesn’t talk to voters more. How his staff kicked a 15-year-old out of a New Hampshire town hall because he didn’t like his line of questioning. How he talks about Florida too much. How he should take more questions from voters.
“He should talk less on the stage and interact more with the voters,” New Hampshire House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, a top DeSantis backer in the state, told The Messenger in July.
DeSantis privately fumed about the petty negative coverage of the “corporate media” and “phony narratives.”
In a sign of his comfort as a frontrunner and people person, Trump effortlessly flowed through friendly crowds, snagging headlines, for instance, in Bettendorf, Iowa where a pub waitress demanded the former president sign her tank top above her left breast.
Trump obliged.
Trump also granted interviews to mainstream media outlets, and he unexpectedly participated in a CNN town hall in New Hampshire that was so controversial it led to the resignation of the company’s chief. DeSantis stiff-armed the press because he believed “Republicans don’t trust “the media,” seemingly oblivious to the damage caused by constant bad press and an opponent like Trump who incessantly trashes him.
DeSantis’s communications director from his gubernatorial race, Dave Abrams, continually warned the candidate that he wasn’t running a reelection campaign in Florida anymore and that he needed to play the game with the national media.
Abrams lost his job after the campaign had to downsize due to financial problems.
“Dave tried to change things. So they got rid of Dave,” one insider said.
In the end, DeSantis buckled anyway, granting TV interviews to the likes of CNN and even “Morning Joe” on MSNBC while fuming in Iowa that Fox, which once practically begged him to come on air, was part of a pro-Trump “Praetorian Guard” that failed to criticize Trump.
INDICTMENT GAME-CHANGER
DeSantis, however, had a long history of supporting Trump so intensely that in, his 2018 bid for governor, he ran a self-deprecating TV ad attesting to his devotion to Trump that showed him reading Trump’s “Art of the Deal” to his kids and building an imitation border wall with toy blocks.
Until DeSantis started running against Trump, DeSantis never criticized him publicly. For months, he refused to say Biden was legitimately elected president and refrained from commenting on Trump’s culpability in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, his lie that the 2020 election was stolen or Trump’s decision to hang on to classified records in his post-presidency, which led to a criminal investigation.
In the runup to the first of Trump’s four historic criminal indictments, DeSantis’s team was paralyzed with how to handle it. The situation posed a heads-Trump-wins-tails-critics-lose dilemma for Republican opponents: stand in solidarity with Trump and therefore look like a beta apologist to the alpha dog, or stand with the prosecutors and therefore look to Republicans like supporters of Democrat lawfare.
In February, Tallahassee political insiders began suggesting to those in DeSantis’s orbit that he promise a preemptive pardon of Trump to get ahead of the issue.
“If you want to win Republicans, you’re going to have to pardon Trump,” one consultant advised at the time. “Take this off the table.”
The advice was rejected.
DeSantis didn’t “like playing Trump’s game,” a Republican familiar with DeSantis’s thinking said at the time.
Months later, DeSantis reversed course when he was eventually cornered into saying he would pardon Trump anyway in the classified documents and Jan. 6 cases.
“We could have looked proactive, but instead we looked reactive,” an insider said.
Whether DeSantis could have messaged the issue successfully is debatable. The indictments caused Republicans to rally to Trump’s side. DeSantis’s team initially dismissed the dynamic as a mere “sugar high” for Trump.
But the sugar kept coming. The indictments started rolling out in early April as the tongue-tied DeSantis’s numbers started falling while Trump’s rose. Only last month did DeSantis grouse that the indictments “distorted the primary.”
Republican Chris Christie, already disliked by Republican voters, condemned Trump over the indictments and gained nothing politically. At the first debate, on Aug. 24, DeSantis joined with opponents Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy in raising their hands onstage when asked if they would vote for Trump if he were convicted.
“Give Ron credit — he had to look at everybody else first to see if he wanted to raise his hand,” Christie snarked last week when he quit the race. “But then he raised his hand, kind of like cheating off somebody's paper in high school.”
After that first debate, DeSantis’s team insisted he won. But after most of the debates, polls showed Haley was the one gaining support, not DeSantis. With his comfortable lead, Trump stayed off the debate stage to rob his opponents of a shot him. He also wanted to make them do his dirty work by fighting each other for second place, which they ultimately did.
Doug Mills/The New York Times/Pool/Getty Images
THE ‘PORN STAR’ SLIPUP
The first public demonstration of DeSantis’s discomfort with Trump’s criminal problems occurred days before the first indictment by liberal New York City prosecutor Alvin Bragg on April 4 in a case that involved hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump announced March 18 that he would be the first former president criminally charged in U.S. history. Immediately reacting to the news, Ramaswamy took on the odd role of Trump champion by demanding that “the beloved donor class favorites” DeSantis and Haley denounce the “political persecution through prosecution.” DeSantis tried to avoid commenting on it at first, but Trump’s campaign -- knowing how online the DeSantis campaign was – stoked social media pressure along with Ramaswamy in demanding that all Republicans rally to Trump’s side.
So DeSantis’s political team hatched a plan: he would hold a March 20 press conference and denounce the prosecutor as a tool of liberal financier George Soros. But he would avoid criticizing Trump
To ensure there were no surprises, DeSantis aides arranged for the governor to first call on a reporter from the new pro-DeSantis Florida Standard publication (it’s now defunct). She would ask about the “rumored indictment” and whether, as Florida governor, he had a role concerning Trump’s extradition from their mutual home state to New York if he were charged.
DeSantis delivered his remarks just as designed.
But then he went off script and ad-libbed.
“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair, I can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said as the audience laughed. “What I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction, and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush money payments, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office.”
In response, Trump supporters and conservative influencers flooded Twitter with condemnation of what DeSantis said. DeSantis’s political team was caught flat-footed.
“We loved that he said it, but we didn’t know he was going to say it,” said a former staffer. “The blowback was just intense and so we decided to just leave it alone. The idea was to engage with Trump in a thoughtful way, not just trade insults with him.”
DeSantis soon dropped saying “porn star payoff” ever again.
“Mr. Never Back Down backs down,” one Trump adviser crowed to The Messenger at the time. “He’s scared.”
Three days later, DeSantis backed down again, this time in an interview where he walked back his characterization of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “a territorial dispute,” which DeSantis made in a written statement to garner support from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, whose now-canceled show stood out for its criticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine.
“We want someone to take on Trump and beat Trump,” a top Republican fundraiser who collects seven-figure donor checks said at the time. “Donors just don’t want to fund Trump Lite.”
HARD RIGHT TURN
By that point, DeSantis was trying to out-Trump Trump by running to his right on culture war issues. The 60-day state legislative session had started March 7, and DeSantis’s Twitter base was thrilled at legislation banning abortion after six weeks, fighting Disney World over LGBT issues, limiting preferred pronouns in schools and giving what critics said was a “heckler’s veto” to effectively ban books from public school libraries.
But it left major donors like finance magnate and philanthropist Ken Griffin troubled with what he saw as a shift from DeSantis’s pro-growth agenda to divisive social issues that aren’t popular with a majority of the country and that undercut his electability argument against President Joe Biden. Griffin voiced those concerns publicly and his aides also communicated them to DeSantis’s staffers when they called to check in.
DeSantis’s team was hoping Griffin, who had previously given $10 million to DeSantis’s gubernatorial campaigns, would contribute as much as $20 million to Never Back Down for the presidential primary. Not only did it never come, but other previous DeSantis donors like Robert Bigelow and Thomas Peterffy closed their wallets, leading to a round of damaging headlines for the candidate and less money than hoped for at Never Back Down, which DeSantis had seeded with $82.5 million from his state political committee he socked away for his presidential bid.
Some major donors ultimately funded Haley’s super PAC, SFA Fund, as she struck a more moderate tone and as polls showed her beating Biden in hypothetical matchups. That money was used to wreck DeSantis. Barely any was spent on Trump, whose standing against Biden improved as the president's poll numbers stagnated.
Griffin’s team wasn’t the only one concerned about the six-week abortion ban. DeSantis pollster Ryan Tyson, also a social conservative, had reservations, pointing out how the midterm elections showed how problematic abortion was for Republicans.
“Ryan’s a pro-life guy, but he’s also pro-winning and he didn’t really see the win,” according to one campaign insider who said DeSantis, however, wasn’t interested in any polling or focus-grouping that contradicted his beliefs..
“Evangelicals in Iowa are pro-life,” DeSantis replied.
Months later, when DeSantis launched his campaign with a private briefing to top supporters, the issue still haunted him as fundraisers characterized the abortion ban as problematic.
“Gotta win a primary in order to win the general,” Tyson responded.
“Fair enough,” the fundraiser said.
On Monday night, Trump carried Iowa evangelicals by big margins.
PUDDING FINGERS AND MEDICARE
March marked a clear turning point in the campaign for multiple reasons: the indictment of Trump, DeSantis’s hard right turn, the decision of the MAGA Inc. super PAC to weigh in and DeSantis’s decision to not launch his campaign.
DeSantis believed he had the luxury of time. He was still a darling of the conservative press after his big win and after Trump was shouldering the blame for Republican underperformance in the midterms the previous fall. So DeSantis went on a book tour instead. It earned him $1.25 million and gave him cover to run a quasi-shadow campaign for president where the press was kept at bay.
But it robbed him of crucial campaign trail experience.
“The book tour was a mistake,” one DeSantis donor admitted. “We lost time. We lost momentum. It forced us to focus on Iowa too late and not enough on New Hampshire. You can’t lose both states [as a Republican] and win the nomination.”
On March 15, MAGA Inc. started to grind into DeSantis. It filed a state ethics complaint that accused DeSantis of running a shadow presidential campaign with Never Back Down. The complaint was doomed to fail, but it led to news stories that annoyed DeSantis and his team.
The next day, The Daily Beast ran its story quoting former anonymous DeSantis aides who described how he once “enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert—by eating it with three of his fingers.” The story generated loads of social media buzz and would soon wind up in MAGA Inc.’s paid TV ad campaign, which it launched March 31, spending about $1 million weekly.
The decision to embark on an expensive ad campaign against a Republican who wasn’t an announced candidate was unorthodox, and it threatened to bankrupt MAGA Inc. But the super PAC correctly calculated it could negatively define the distracted DeSantis early and then refill its coffers once the governor started losing ground and financial support.
The first ads targeted DeSantis for once wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare. DeSantis’s team complained that it amounted to a Democratic attack.
But that was the point: the ad was designed to reinforce the notion that DeSantis was too extreme to win against Biden. And elderly Republican primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t fans of Social Security and Medicare cuts anyway.
On April 14 came the coup de grace: the “pudding fingers” ad, which grotesquely reprised the Daily Beast story. It showed a suited man scooping out pudding with his fingers and eating it as a narrator somehow talked about entitlement spending.
It only ran for one day on TV, but the commentators and some reporters thought the super PAC was spending $1 million on it as if it were part of a serious ad buy.
“The media had to cover it. And they couldn’t help themselves. It was wildfire coverage,” said Taylor Budowich, MAGA Inc.’s chief executive officer. “The media was so focused on how disgusting the ad was that everyone just kept repeating the message of the ad: Ron DeSantis wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare.”
In fundraising pitches, Budowich told donors the ad adhered to one of the “Rules for Radicals” espoused by leftist community organizer Saul Alinsky: “Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."
‘THE DESANTIS HATERS CLUB’
MAGA Inc. repeated the technique in November with an announcement it would send new boots to DeSantis, who had been roundly mocked for the footwear that appeared to have heel lifts in it. The boots had a Puerto Rico flag emblem in a nod to the super PAC’s attack on him for once supporting statehood for the island.
Budowich, MAGA Inc. pollster Tony Fabrizio and a handful of other operatives in Trump’s and Haley’s super PAC all once worked for DeSantis and understood his psychology and what bothered him. Few have kind words for the governor, including one former aide who oversaw the installation of a golf simulator in the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee paid for by a major DeSantis donor.
The golf simulator story later appeared in the Washington Post as part of the steady drip drip drip of unflattering media coverage of DeSantis.
“There’s a big DeSantis Haters Club,” said a de facto member.
DeSantis also had a strained relationship with some Florida state legislators, but many endorsed him, some out of fear of his veto pen. His relationship with the state’s congressional delegation, of which he was once a member, is relatively non-existent.
In April, as DeSantis made a trip to Washington, Trump’s campaign rolled out his list of endorsements from the state’s congressional delegation to reinforce the narrative that DeSantis isn’t likable and doesn’t have broad support. DeSantis advisers were powerless to stop it. (On Sunday, in a gut punch to DeSantis, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio endorsed Trump over DeSantis, joining fellow Florida Sen. Rick Scott.)
“The problem with Rondesanctimonious is that he needs a personality transplant, and those are not yet available,” Trump, who insists on mispronouncing DeSantis’s name as a sign of disrespect, said in a video message before DeSantis announced. “Almost all congressmen and women that served with him and knew him well supported me, some of them surprisingly so because of their relationship with Ron.”
In the runup to his announcement, DeSantis’s team was giving briefings to supporters and potential donors that acknowledged the widening polling gap between him and Trump, but the surveys also showed a bright spot: DeSantis still had favorable ratings that were as good, if not better than, Trump’s among Republican voters.
“All we have to do is get him, his record and his message in front of voters,” Roy Bailey, a DeSantis fundraiser said at the time. “Some of these campaigns are out there running on the track and DeSantis hasn’t even put his cleats on yet. And he’s already in second place.”
The comment underscored the supreme confidence the DeSantis team was projecting, and would project, over the months in which it constantly predicted that the governor’s standing would improve with his campaign launch, his first fundraising quarter, his debate performances and then the Iowa caucuses.
None of it materialized.
‘I’LL JUST F---ING QUIT!”
After DeSantis’s glitch-filled launch, DeSantis announced a record first-day fundraising haul, but the operation built was too big for its size and wasn’t able to raise as much money as anticipated. DeSantis also insisted on using expensive private jets. It drained even more money from the campaign, which ultimately spent more on air travel for the governor than air time on TV.
DeSantis wanted to hire Jeff Roe, who masterminded Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign that carried Iowa. So campaign manager Generra Peck put Roe’s firm Axiom at Never Back Down and kept two other Cruz vets on staff, Sam Cooper and Jason Johnson, on the campaign side.
Increasingly, Peck and her allies came to distrust “the Cruz people” and tensions between the campaign and super PAC escalated over the summer that divided “the Florida rubes” from “the DC crew,” one insider said.
As doubts about DeSantis’s campaign grew, Peck held a conference call June 21 with social media influencers, outside consultants and top backers to put their minds at ease. She discussed how DeSantis was doing well in a head-to-head matchup against Trump and how, even after all the attacks on him, Republicans still viewed him favorably.
But consultant Ryan Girdusky was steamed.
“The Twitter launch was a disaster. Stop talking about Florida. People don’t want to hear about Florida,” he said, before turning to a recent interview DeSantis did on the Christian Broadcast Network where he talked about being with Jesus’ disciples.
Girdusky, who did not work for the campaign, would not comment for this article.
“Whoever advised him to go on Christian TV and say he wanted to have dinner with Jesus should be fired,” Girdusky said. “Trump has evangelicals. Do you think they’re going to break with Trump over abortion? They’re not. This campaign is like Ted Cruz 2.0.”
The campaign didn’t have another conference call like that again. Girdusky later told one adviser that the campaign was “like an Irish wake waiting for the body to drop.”
The funereal atmosphere set in about a week later when the campaign was rocked by an embarrassing episode in which staffers created a bizarre web ad attacking Trump that was criticized as being both homophobic and homoerotic. It was posted on social media through a sock puppet account in a failed effort to disguise the campaign’s fingerprints.
The campaign restructured its social media policies, prompting a confrontation between Peck and the campaign’s social media maven, Christina Pushaw, who didn’t create the video in question but was locked out of messaging meetings, which prompted a confrontation in the Tallahassee office.
“If you think I’m so off-message and bad at messaging, why are you cutting me out of messaging meetings!” Pushaw yelled. “I’ll just fucking quit!”
Weeks later, another staffer created and posted an even more controversial video that featured DeSantis’s likeness against the image of a sonnenrad, a black sun rune used by the Nazis. The incident was particularly damaging because it came to light days after DeSantis was embroiled in a race-related controversy over new Florida school standards that would teach kids about “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
On July 25, DeSantis’s campaign announced it was laying off staff, including the aide who made the sonnenrad video. In a symbolic coincidence, on the day his campaign crashed into reality, DeSantis and his campaign staffers got in an actual car wreck.
“We’re in decline,” one of the staffers told The Messenger at the time. “It feels like we’re in the end game.”
The shakeups continued the following month when Peck, who had offered to resign weeks before, was replaced by the governor’s chief of staff, James Uthmeier, who stabilized the campaign. Peck owned up to her mistakes, stayed on the campaign as an adviser and was seen as a loyal soldier by her peers and the candidate.
But DeSantis kept dropping in polls as he centered his campaign on Iowa, urged on by a new transfer from the super PAC, David Polyansky, an Iowa vet. DeSantis won the endorsement of Iowa’s popular Gov. Kim Reynolds and campaigned in each of its 99 counties. His New Hampshire supporters thought it was a miscalculation because he paid less attention to their state, where he sank in polls and Haley rose above him.
The campaign blamed Never Back Down for the situation. Never Back Down blamed the campaign. DeSantis’s Florida allies set up a new super PAC, Fight Right. Within Never Back Down, animosity built between Roe and longtime DeSantis friend Scott Wagner.
After a string of ill-timed leaks, resignations and firings, Roe quit the super PAC on Dec. 16 in a huff that exposed the paranoia and acrimony in the DeSantis camp’s ranks.
FIGHTING FOR DISTANT SECOND
By that point, DeSantis’s super PACs dropped all pretense that he was still in a “two man race” against Trump. It began training most of its fire on Haley, spending almost $5.4 million against her compared to about $830,000 targeting Trump.
That sum was dwarfed by the money spent against DeSantis from Haley’s SFA Fund super PAC, which dropped $24.4 million on his head but less than $660,000 against Trump.
Now the two were fighting for distant second to see who would go on to the other early states of New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina in matchups where polls show Trump remains the clear frontrunner, with Haley in second place.
The sentiment that DeSantis pulled his punches with Trump – in contrast with his full-throated attacks on opponent Nikki Haley -- stayed alive right through the Iowa caucus, where a Republican voter asked DeSantis on Jan. 3 “why haven’t you gone directly after him.”
An annoyed DeSantis cut him off, “What do you mean going directly after him?”
“In my viewpoint, you’re going pretty soft on him,” the voter said.
DeSantis refused to admit it and blamed the press instead.
“What the media wants,” DeSantis said, “is they want Republican candidates to just kind of, like, smear [each other]. That’s just not how I roll.”
But the spending from the DeSantis-approved super PACs and his rhetoric on the campaign trail showed he rolled that way much more against Haley, especially when the two faced off in a head-to-head debate last week in Iowa.
The final days of the campaign trail were humbling for the governor.
On Friday, MAGA media personality Laura Loomer confronted DeSantis at his hotel on video and asked him when he would drop out. DeSantis hurried away without replying.
On Saturday, a comedian with the troupe Good Liars pranked DeSantis before a press conference by acting like an Iowa voter, only to hand the governor a "participation trophy" as onlookers laughed
On Sunday onstage, DeSantis bemoaned how Trump demands loyalty and tolerates no criticism.
“You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring, he'll say you’re wonderful. You can be the strongest, most dynamic and successful Republican and conservative in America, but if you don’t kiss that ring, then he'll try to trash you.”
On Monday night, Trump won by a historic margin for a Republican in Iowa.
The ever-online true believers in the DeSantis camp were shocked at how the results mirrored the public polling and not the bogus polls his supporters circulated on X. So they falsely claimed the too-early call declaring Trump the winner before people had voted in the caucus was tantamount to “election interference” that significantly changed the results.
Rather than concede, DeSantis knew who to blame.
“The media was against us,” he said. “They were writing our obituary months ago.”
DeSantis made that part easy.