Ron DeSantis starts firing everyone
Throughout 2021 and 2022 the entire mainstream media (on the left and right) chased ratings by building up Ron DeSantis as if he were some kind of smart, disciplined, charismatic, viable inevitable presidential candidate. Major media outlets on the right built him up as an unstoppable hero, while major media outlets on the left built him up as an unstoppable villain, but the messaging was the same: DeSantis was the future. Then he spoke.
As 2023 has gone on, Ron DeSantis has had to step out on to the national stage and be his actual self in front of the American people. Everyone on all sides has quickly found out that the actual DeSantis has almost nothing in common with the fictional version of DeSantis that the media had been selling. It turns out DeSantis has all the personality of cardboard, while also being an eccentric weirdo with zero charisma and no people skills. The media knew all along that this was the real DeSantis, but the media sure did manage to rack up ratings in 2021 and 2022 by portraying him as inevitable (the media also collectively got this inept idiot reelected as Governor of Florida as well). But DeSantis’ safety net is gone now, and left to his own devices, he’s in freefall.
DeSantis’ 2024 Republican primary poll numbers have fallen so badly that he’s barely even in second place ahead of the rest of the also-rans. As a side note, even as DeSantis’ primary polling numbers have fallen by about thirty points, Donald Trump’s primary polling numbers haven’t gone up at all. If you want to know just how non-viable Trump is, even within the Republican primary base, look at his complete inability to win over the people who had been planning to vote for DeSantis. These voters are all now back in the “undecided” category or backing some other also-ran.
Of course if DeSantis were smart he’d simply suspend his campaign for several months while Trump gets indicted some more and gets convicted in some criminal trials. Then DeSantis might have a better shot, given that the Republican “frontrunner” would be, you know, in prison. But as we keep seeing, DeSantis is… not smart.
DeSantis has now laid off a dozen mid level staffers, and is planning to lay off plenty more staffers, according to NBC News. This is being characterized as a cost cutting move, as the campaign claims that it hired too many staffers to begin with. But in reality the DeSantis campaign likely hired precisely as many staffers as it thought its fundraising efforts would be able to pay for. Now that DeSantis has turned out to be the wet fish he always was, donations are weak, and so the headcount has to be reduced.
This is starting to feel eerily similar to the Jeb Bush campaign implosion of 2016. He’d been built up as such a viable candidate, his fundraising was expected to be massive, and so his campaign spent money accordingly. Once everyone saw that Jeb was an even more out of touch and even less charismatic version of his brother, his fundraising dried up, and the campaign couldn’t keep paying for the huge operation it had built.
In Jeb’s case he ended up having to drop out fairly early, after he couldn’t convince donors to keep his limp campaign alive any longer. We’ll see what happens with Ron DeSantis. He has absolutely nothing going for him on any level, beyond the fact that his party’s “frontrunner” is on his way to prison. Will donors write just enough checks to keep DeSantis minimally in the race so they have a Plan B once Trump is hauled away? Or will donors write off DeSantis as a mistaken investment and look for some other Plan B candidate? We’ll see. But with the media no longer doing his PR for him, the embarrassingly witless DeSantis further hurts his prospects every time he opens his mouth.
