Well, that was quick.
Ron DeSantis dropped out of the presidential race Sunday afternoon and endorsed former president Donald Trump, announcing the suspension of his embattled campaign in a video posted to social media just two days before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.
DeSantis’s departure comes days after his allies began making calls to top donors asking whether the candidate should drop out ahead of the New Hampshire primary.
The campaign continues to tell reporters that their candidate will stay in the race through South Carolina, force rival and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley to drop out should she lose her home state, and hopefully go toe-to-toe with Trump in the event that she drops out.
But behind closed doors, DeSantis allies are of course mindful of the fact that the Florida governor continues to poll in the single digits in New Hampshire compared with Haley, who is still polling behind Trump but is gaining on him in some surveys. As recently as Tuesday, one day after DeSantis finished roughly 30 points behind first-place finisher Donald Trump in Iowa, the campaign insisted that DeSantis still had a path forward to the nomination.
No one outside of the MSM and desperate NeverTrumpers give a rat’s ass about Haley.
On paper, DeSantis should have been a formidable candidate. The popular governor of a large, thriving state, DeSantis had more impressive credentials than Trump when it came to fighting wokeness, pulling it out root and branch in Florida institutions.
But his campaigning has, alas, been anything but impressive. Indeed, he never gained any traction and all the media attention as the “Trump alternative” has been lavished on Haley.
Usually second place in Iowa is quite a respectable showing (Trump himself came in second to Ted Cruz in 2016, and Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush in 1976), one that punches your ticket to later primaries, usually to at least Super Tuesday. But Trump won an absolute majority in Iowa, something that hasn’t happened for a non-incumbent in the last half century. (Maybe longer; online records before that seem spotty.) DeSantis and his team seem to have figured, I think correctly, that he had no path to the nomination.
At this point, Trump looks poised to win every primary on the schedule, including Nikki Haley’s home state of South Carolina, where he currently leads her by 35 points.
Now the only question is whether the NeverTrump rump (and I include National Review here) will swallow both their pride and their shame at refusing to fight over the stolen 2020 election and embrace the overwhelming choice of the Republican Party base, or will they go hunting for another Egg McMuffin to prop up in a desperate bid to spoil Trump’s election chances?
Tags: 2024 Presidential Race, Donald Trump, Elections, Iowa, New Hampshire, Republicans, Ron DeSantis
I was hoping for a President Ron. Trump may be able to govern better, but I know so many people who would vote for him except they hate his guts.
Sadly, constant personal attacks work. I guess that is why there is an advertising industry. MSM is the ad agency with OrangeManBad as their only product they care about.
I have never seen the antipathy directed at any one man like it has been directed at Donald Trump. They are fucking terrified of him. I didn’t want Ron to drop out either, but still the absolute hatred directed at Trump and his allies symbolizes a force to eliminate the deep state that the deep state doesn’t direct at anyone else except him, and that’s enough.
Halting illegal immigration dead in its tracks and dismantling the deep bureaucracy are the only things that matter now. I would’ve wanted DeSantis to do it. I want to Trump to do it. I want anyone to fucking do it. Just do it.
Trump doesn’t have a chance against any Democrat – it won’t be Biden – they decide to put up. Rumors of Michelle Obama running are about the same as fairy dust, but someone will be dug up, probably after the convention and old Joe drops out. I voted for Trump twice and I firmly believe he actually won in 2020. I will vote for him again as I will never vote for any Democrat but I do not see a path to him wining the general election. This is a sad day for America.
“I do not see a path to him wining the general election. This is a sad day for America.”
Warmed-over corporatist Tricky Nikki FTW!
DeSantis exhibits more self-control and has a far better administrative record than “The Donald”. Of course, he operates in a far more congenial environment than exists in Washington, D.C.
That said, Donald Trump ought to have learned a sad lesson and “experience keeps a dear school”. He is now much less likely to recruit D.C. careerists or NYC opportunists this time around and that may be all that is necessary to deal a fatal blow to the Administrative State.
Living in Texas, I know other than a debate discussion; I never had a choice in the GOP candidate. I’ll vote for Trump. I rather have DeSantis or Ramaswamy, but they weren’t likely and are now not a choice. I know Ron ran a poor campaign and Vivek lacked name recognition, but Nikki absolutely fails to articulate a position I truly support on many subjects.
The Never Trumpers are a farce to me. They routinely pick the weakest GOP candidate I think they could possibly find and rally around them. There was please clap Jeb, then skipping Rubio and Cruz for Katshit, and Egg McMuffin. This year they couldn’t even back DeSantis and jumped to Haley.
IMHO National Review will never accept Trump. They are far too invested in NeverTrump-ism.
I cannot bring myself to vote for the guy who enabled Fauci, generated vast mountains of debt, sat there like an idiot while the Dems messed with the election (no offense to Trump’s army of incompetent lawyers), all while not building a single mile of his beloved border wall. I especially can’t wait until his gaggle of sycophantic grifters all get cabinet positions.
I’d rather wait for things to get worse and vote for someone who wasn’t a Democrat up until they ran on the GOP ticket.
Hundreds of miles of border all were constructed while Trump was President.
The real question about Trump is that of “What the hell are they afraid of…?”
I still don’t see a rational explanation for what the Democrats did after he won in 2016. They could have worked with him, and done a much more effective job of rolling him than what they did. This time around, assuming he wins? I really hope he’s less trusting of the idiots that seeded his administration with traitors like Barr and Sessions.
There’s no way you can convince me that Trump expected to win in 2016. He was not at all prepared for a victory, and he allowed the people in DC to screw him (and, the country…) good and hard. If he makes it to the election, I want to see what the hell he’s doing to prepare for afterwards, in terms of who he’s going to put in his administration and who is going to be running things.
I remain suspicious of him. I think he was a put-up job in 2016, with the Hillary people thinking there was no way he could win. When he did, it came as much of a surprise to him as it was everyone else, but I’ll be damned if I know why the assholes in DC chose to oppose him and do all the damage they did. Had they simply played along, they could have kept right on doing the things they were doing in the background, and nobody would have ever been the wiser… Or, so I think.
The question, as I’ve said, is this: What the hell are they afraid of? Why did they react to Trump’s election the way they did?
Answer that, and you’re going to answer a lot of other questions. I suspect a great deal of it had to do with the Epstein situation, because we know from factual evidence that Trump doesn’t play that game. I still want to know how Epstein “suicided” on Barr’s watch as Attorney General, while in Federal custody. That’s just a little too f*cking convenient, for my taste.
The Fat (Biological) Women ain’t singing yet.
All else is Speculation and Hope-ism.
Kirk:
That, sir, is the $1 Million Question. There’s political opposition, and then there’s total freakout. When the left goes into total freakout it’s always over some person that just triggers their inner Beelzebub.
Remember Sarah Pailin in 2008 and the hysteria over her, not only during the campaign but months and years afterwards. For crying out loud she was a housewife with a political job on the side, but suddenly everyone in a teaching or media or union job went absolutely freaking crazy that she continued to breath oxygen.
Some others have provoked the same kind of reaction; Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, etc. Go back far enough and you get Whittaker Chambers, and even further and you get Abe Lincoln. It’s aways the same nasty demon-driven overreaction.
There’s a logic to all of this, but it’s not political. It’s spiritual. All of these guys had that sort of spirit that the demons just hate.
The Iowa caucuses were the bifurcation point. Either:
1: The poll numbers were real, and Trump was going to crush all before him, or
2: The poll numbers were people responding to the illegitimate lawfare being conducted against Trump, but when it actually came time to vote, they weren’t going to go with the guy who spent his entire first term getting beat by the Deep State
Sadly, the answer was “1”. DeSantis gets all my respect for running hard while it was possible that “2” was the answer, and then calling it off when it was clear that continuing to run against Trump this year was a vanity project.
I’d love to see a Trump – DeSantis ticket, because that might mean we get DeSantis competence to go with Trump bluster. Because w/o some serious competence, unlike what the Trump campaign displayed in 2020, 2024 will be stolen for the Dems, too.
No honest vote counter kicks out the press and poll watchers because “counting is done for the evening”, and then IMMEDIATELY resumes “counting votes”.
The fact that the entire country didn’t land hard on the Fulton Co Dems for that obviously criminal behavior says that the 2020 election was a cesspit of fraud.
We can’t have a Trump-DeSantis ticket due to Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.
@Kirk
“There’s no way you can convince me that Trump expected to win in 2016. He was not at all prepared for a victory, and he allowed the people in DC to screw him (and, the country…) good and hard.”
Indeed. Hell, he put Omarosa in his cabinet FFS. Did he not watch his own show? And the circus around her afterward, trying to cash in and claim racism?