DeSantis is losing and this isn't why

The fallacy of candidate traits

The New York Times recently ran a very juicy piece about the failures of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, trying to understand why the Florida governor, who seemed close to besting Donald Trump for the presidential nomination this time last year, now seems likely to flame out shortly after Iowa, if not in it.

I want to dig into this because I think we’re going to see a number of pieces along these lines over the next few weeks and months. And also because, while pieces like this aren’t exactly wrong — they do contain quite a bit of useful information and research — they’re built on a pretty significant set of fallacies about this nomination: a) that this contest was winnable by someone other than Donald Trump, and b) that it was winnable by a more appealing candidate who spent campaign dollars more wisely.

First of all, the juicy stuff in the piece is really good. Some examples:

Ryan Tyson, Mr. DeSantis’s longtime pollster and one of his closest advisers, has privately said to multiple people that they are now at the point in the campaign where they need to “make the patient comfortable,” a phrase evoking hospice care….

Federal records show that, by the time of the Iowa caucuses, the DeSantis campaign is on pace to spend significantly more on private jets — the governor’s preferred mode of travel — than on airing television ads….

“You’re running against a former president — you’re going to have to be perfect and to get lucky…. We’ve been unlucky and been far from perfect”….

If the great promise of the DeSantis candidacy was Trump without the baggage, Stuart Stevens, a top strategist on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said that what Republicans got instead was “Ted Cruz without the personality.”

Okay, good stuff. But if we look at the polls among Republican primary voters over the last year, I think a lot of pundits are looking at this backwards. Yes, we might ask why DeSantis has lost the popularity he had a year ago. But the better question is why DeSantis was even popular a year ago.