DeSantis Campaign Post-mortem

Ron DeSantis has officially announced that he is suspending his presidential campaign and I wanted to give my thoughts and some insight I think some people might not have regarding what went wrong.

Let me start with a few things I still consider to be true:

1) DeSantis was the most likely candidate to have a chance to beat Trump in a Republican primary right now.

2) DeSantis is the most successful GOP Governor in decades and it’s not particularly close.

3) DeSantis would have made a much better President than Biden or Trump.

4) Regardless of campaign shortcomings, DeSantis would have lapped any field that didn’t have Trump in it purely because of his record.

With all that said, I can now publicly reveal that back on August 25th, 2023, I stayed up late and wrote a detailed post-mortem for the DeSantis campaign. I shared it with a few well-known writers/DeSantis supporters but did not publish it out of respect for DeSantis (who continued to work very hard) and supporters. I hoped I was wrong and would have been glad for it, but everything I wrote then still holds up.

You can find what I wrote that night below without any substantive changes (I apologize for the lack of editing):

Post-Mortem Of the DeSantis Campaign

8/25/2023