The Florida governor Ron DeSantis needed to make the GOP primary a one-on-one contest. Instead, his weakness tempted a lot of other candidates into the field before he could announce his candidacy.
When Ron DeSantis formally enters the 2024 presidential race later today, he will already be a diminished White House aspirant. The Florida governor’s pre-candidacy got off to a roaring start last autumn. His landslide reelection as leader of a party that had quickly turned Florida red gave him reams of admiring press in the conservative-media world, particularly in contrast to his presumed chief rival, Donald Trump, who got a lot of blame for Republican under-performance nationally and then spent weeks sulking in his tent. Very soon there was talk of Republican and conservative-movement elites consolidating behind a DeSantis candidacy to put Trump out to pasture once and for all without sacrificing the base-pleasing appeal of MAGA culture-war politics. Indeed, it looked like DeSantis could offer Republicans a steadier 2.0 version of Trumpism on the campaign trail and a much calmer (if still quasi-authoritarian) presence in the White House.
DeSantis faced plenty of thorny strategic questions in those early days, but one thing was quite clear: The governor needed to make the case that Trump could only win the 2024 nomination if the GOP field was as divided as it was in 2016. And thus every argument for DeSantis ’24 became an implicit argument against other candidates entering the race, as reflected in the attention given to DeSantis’s much stronger performance in polls testing a one-on-one contest.
From that perspective, DeSantis’s strategy has already failed. Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, and Tim Scott are announced candidates, as is at least one White House aspirant scratching the itch for new faces, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
