DeSantis Drops Out of Presidential Race, Endorses Trump
Ron DeSantis dropped out of the presidential race Sunday afternoon and endorsed former president Donald Trump, announcing the suspension of an embattled campaign that began with a bungled launch on Twitter Spaces with a video posted to the same platform just two days before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.
DeSantis acknowledged in the video announcement Sunday afternoon that he no longer had a “clear path to victory” in 2024, but emphasized that his political career is just beginning. “While this campaign has ended, the mission continues. Down here in Florida, we will continue to show the country how to lead,” the governor said. Coinciding with the video announcement, DeSantis canceled a meet-and-greet event with voters originally scheduled for 5 P.M. in Manchester, New Hampshire.
DeSantis’s departure comes after his allies had spent days making calls to top donors asking whether the candidate should drop out ahead of the New Hampshire primary, as first reported by National Review. The bundler page on the campaign’s finance website was no longer working earlier that day, which signaled the campaign, NR reported earlier Sunday, which signaled that a drop-out announcement was imminent.
DeSantis had put all his eggs in the Iowa basket, which won him some key endorsements from Governor Kim Reynolds and influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. But given that DeSantis and his allied PACs invested heavily in Iowa to the exclusion of New Hampshire, Trump’s roughly 30-point defeat proved a fatal blow to a campaign that was already on life support.
While DeSantis initially publicly claimed he punched his ticket out of Iowa and was staying in the race, the pro-DeSantis PAC Never Back Down was hit by layoffs last week and the campaign had canceled scheduled media appearances in recent days.
The campaign continued to tell reporters as recently as Sunday afternoon that their candidate would 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 were of course mindful of the fact that the Florida governor continued 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.
DeSantis entered the race with huge expectations in May, with many believing his huge 2022 reelection win in what proved to be a tough year for Republicans, along with his rising national star, would give him a chance to dethrone Trump as the leader of the Republican party.
But Trump’s grip on the Republican base ultimately proved too firm, with the former president’s various legal issues only serving to boost his standing among voters. While DeSantis had largely been pitched as a Trump without the baggage, many voters viewed DeSantis as “Trump-lite,” making it difficult to carve out a niche in the primary against Trump himself and other more vocal Trump critics.
New Hampshire state house leader Jason Osborne told RealClearPolitics in recent days that it would have been better for DeSantis “personally” to wait for 2028 to run, though he suggested that would be “too late” for the country.
Nationally, DeSantis was polling in third place at 10.5 percent, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average. The campaign had been plagued by controversies from a bungled launch on Twitter spaces to significant turnover among both the campaign and the DeSantis-allied Never Back Down PAC.
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