The plug is being pulled on Ron DeSantis
Ron DeSantis is now “rebooting” his 2024 campaign. Going forward it’ll reportedly consist of fewer public appearances by DeSantis, and have less of a focus on DeSantis’ record in Florida. In other words the Ron DeSantis campaign is now trying to hide the fact that Ron DeSantis is its candidate.
This is an interesting approach, to put it mildly. It’s also an admission, on the part of whoever is really pulling the strings on the DeSantis campaign, that DeSantis is a fatally flawed candidate. A presidential campaign, particularly this early on, is solely about the candidate. It’s all about the candidate’s personality, personability, positions on the issues, and track record. If a campaign decides to deemphasize all of these things because the candidate sucks at all of them, there really is no campaign anymore.
When it was announced several days ago that the Ron DeSantis campaign would be firing a large number of employees, I quipped that unless one of the people being fired was DeSantis himself, it wouldn’t do any good. Now it turns out the DeSantis campaign is sorta kinda firing DeSantis, by trying to downplay the “DeSantis” part of the “DeSantis campaign.”
There’s no real endgame with this kind of strategy, of course. It’s not like they can send Ron DeSantis to a crash course at human training school and get back a personable, viable candidate. The guy’s a wet fish on a good day, a creepy weirdo on a bad day, and his record reveals him to be both a deranged extremist and a petty insecure loser. That’s not going to change.
Of course what Ron DeSantis and his wealthy puppetmaster donors are really trying to do is to get DeSantis off the stage for awhile so everyone forgets what a joke he is. Then, once Donald Trump is hauled off to prison and there’s a sudden vacuum in the Republican primary race, perhaps DeSantis can drift back into the spotlight at the last minute and win the nomination by default.
But really, when we’re still nearly a year and a half from the next presidential election, and a high profile campaign is already trying to deemphasize its own fatally flawed candidate, it’s already over, isn’t it? He’s laying off his staff, he’s disappearing from public. The only reason he’s not suspending his campaign is that he’s not broke yet. But how much longer are his mega donors going to be willing to keep sinking money into him? There’s a point of diminishing returns where even the money grubbers decide to cut their losses and try again with some other candidate.
