Meatball Sub

Now that the hilariously inept Ron DeSantis campaign has come to a merciful end, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on what it meant for him and for us.

For the candidate himself, the collapse of his presidential campaign represents a reversion to the mean. He never possessed any special political skills, as shown by the fact that he barely won his first election in 2018. He did win re-election in a landslide in 2022, but that was largely due to the fact that he was running against uninspiring former Republican Charlie Crist in a year that Florida Democrats just completely imploded.

Despite the considerable asterisk on the 2022 race, DeSantis’s advisers believed he was some sort of political juggernaut who could outmaneuver Donald Trump. Even weirder, they believed he could outmaneuver Donald Trump not by appealing to the “Never Trump” wing that was looking for a more sober and serious champion of modern conservatism in the Reagan-Dubya vein, but rather by trying to out-Trump Trump by moving even further right on divisive issues of the culture wars.

The DeSantis campaign staff was terminally online, to an almost comical extent, which meant that they were very keyed in to the bubble universe of “anti-woke” weirdos on Twitter. Their goal was apparently to peel away the online influencers that echo and amplify the far right’s concerns, but it quickly became clear that DeSantis was an awkward spokesman for that crew and, moreover, that their obsessions didn’t have as broad an audience as they hoped.

The oddest part of DeSantis’s thoroughly odd campaign was the way it threw away what should have been his biggest asset — the fact that he’s a two-term governor of a major state.

Typically, when governors run for the presidency, they have the most desirable position in politics imaginable: they can showcase their record and the results of their “executive leadership” but far removed from Washington DC, which combine to give them the experience of an insider but respectable distance of an outsider.

Governors get to claim credit for a state’s good news, get to blame the legislature for the bad news, and generally get to preen as problem solvers who are ready to move up to the big league. For just two examples, Bill Clinton used his experience with Arkansas schools to stake a claim to education in 1992, while George W. Bush talked about the “Texas miracle” to build up his economic credentials in 2000, and so on.

Now, DeSantis did campaign on the theme of “Make America Florida” but the ways in which he chose to highlight his state and his leadership of it always made that sound more like a threat than anything else. While other governors always used their roles to claim they could be, in Bush’s immortal refrain, “a uniter, not a divider”, DeSantis used his powers as governor to assert that he was the greatest divider of all time, someone who would target women and migrants and the trans community and colleges and critical race theory and anything else his weird little team decided was “woke.”

Even though it was apparent last summer that this performative cruelty against some of the most marginalized people in his state wasn’t winning over the MAGA chuds like they hoped, the campaign kept at it. While Adam Serwer famously observed that with Trump “the cruelty is the point,” Tim Dickinson nailed it recently noting that with DeSantis, the cruelty was pointless.

Or pointless for DeSantis. Even though it failed to win him the nomination, his campaign nevertheless scorched the earth in Florida. All the cruel legislation he signed as vice-signaling for the MAGA crowd is still on the books in Florida. Real people will continue to suffer there, all in service of Ron DeSantis’s vanity run.

And while DeSantis will likely fade into irrelevance now — loathed by moderates and the Trump campaign alike — the residue of DeSantism in Florida will remain, inflicting further cruelty on innocent citizens there long after he’s gone and forgotten.