DeNouement

Coverage of DeSantis’ loss reveals a particular kind of pundit error

Campaign rally in Ankeny, IA

Ron DeSantis lost, but not for the reasons you think he lost.

There’s a strong tendency among the punditry to say that all of a losing candidate’s traits and actions were mistakes and the reason for the loss, while all of a winning candidate’s traits and actions were genius and the reason for the victory. This is a fallacy, but a particularly seductive one with DeSantis. I’m not sure there’s a name for this — it’s not the Pundit’s Fallacy or the Fundamental Error of Attribution — but I’ll call it the Candidate Trait Fallacy for now.¹

There are plenty of things pundits did not like about Ron DeSantis. He was off-putting, joyless, and robotic. He wore strange boots. He seemed permanently on-line, reacting to niche obsessions of the right wing Twitterverse. He definitely had a mean streak, and he would direct it at young people. His campaign wasted millions of dollars on plane flights and other things it could have spent on voter contact.

It’s easy to blame these things for DeSantis going from being tied with Trump a year ago and having the best field operation in Iowa to not even making it to New Hampshire now. But these are not the reasons for his campaign’s demise. (And I agree with what Noah Berlatsky says about this here.)

How do we know this? For one, as my regular surveys of Republican county chairs repeatedly demonstrated, DeSantis was one of the least disliked candidates among Republican leaders throughout 2023. He was widely being considered by chairs across the board, and almost none ruled him out. 17% of chairs in the December 2023 survey said they definitely did not want to see DeSantis as the nominee; 37% had ruled out Trump, and 30% had ruled out Haley. DeSantis was broadly acceptable to the Republican Party, and, given his electoral record in Florida, was most likely quite electable. A party nomination system that still selected on those qualities would likely have picked him.

Another reason we know that DeSantis’ behavior and traits didn’t cost him the nomination is because basically everything one could criticize about him one could say roughly the same thing only worse about Donald Trump, who vanquished him. Trump can be off-putting. Trump has a mean streak and harasses people he doesn’t like. Trump speaks like someone who spends eight hours a day watching Fox News and jumps to NewsMax and Twitter during commercial breaks. Trump’s campaign has spent millions on courtroom defenses and other things that have nothing to do with reaching voters.² If being a terminally on-line bully who wastes campaign money is deadly in elections, neither of these candidates would still be in the race.

And I know it’s an example I bring up a lot, but Joe Biden won his party’s nomination in 2020 over a large field of people who were better debaters, public speakers, fundraisers, and policy wonks than he was. It’s not that candidate traits and actions have zero effect, it’s just that parties and voters/caucusgoers select on a whole bunch of other things before them.

We might legitimately ask why Ron DeSantis, who was roughly tied with Trump among Republican voters a year ago, saw his support steadily fritter away while Trump’s grew. My impression is that the more important question than why his campaign failed was why it was considered viable a year ago.

To my mind, this has much to do with the legacy of the 2022 midterm elections. A particularly influential and common interpretation of Republican under-performance in that election was that Trump was somehow to blame – he recruited and championed poor congressional and gubernatorial candidates, he convinced candidates to ape his 2020 election conspiracies, he gave frequent rallies to make the election about him, and so forth. A good many Republicans came out of that election thinking that maybe the party needed a different path forward. And when asked whom they might prefer, they picked the only other candidate with any real name recognition – DeSantis, who ran for governor in 2018 by appearing almost constantly on Fox News for a year.

Slowly, this election narrative lost footing, but it wasn’t until April of 2023 that Trump rebounded, and that happened for a very simple reason: Trump was indicted by Manhattan’s District Attorney. According to a variety of surveys, Trump’s surge in the polls after that indictment came not just from Republican voters who’d been undecided up until that point, but from those who were already committed to DeSantis.

DeSantis made a number of errors in 2023, but by far the mostly costly was that his opponent was indicted 91 times. That sentence makes no sense but is completely true. The indictments sent a signal to Republican voters and leaders that they needed to rally around their endangered former president.

Campaign post-mortems can be useful, and I can only assume that the DeSantis team will be working over the next few weeks and months to figure out what went wrong, possibly so that he can run again in the future, and possibly to serve other candidates. But he was likely seeking to do something that was impossible in the first place.

1. Other possibilities: Dean Scream Ergo Propter Hoc, Gaffeocracy, #TanksDukakis

2. Oh and by the way, Trump keeps taking time away from the campaign trail to appear in a trial in which he has already been found liable for rape.