Ron DeSantis and the Costs of a Losing Bet

S ometimes, doing the right thing turns out to be the wrong move. We can’t know until November — indeed, as contingent as politics can be, we won’t really know for years — but as things stand today, it looks like Ron DeSantis might have made a mistake by running for president in 2024. That choice may now end up having potentially grave consequences not only for DeSantis but for the party and the country.

Now, I will be the last person to criticize DeSantis for that decision. I was loudly in favor of DeSantis’s running and made the argument vigorously before and during his primary campaign that it was the right thing to do. Based on what we knew at the time, I still think it was a worthy, calculated gamble. Republican voters were owed a choice other than a coronation of Donald Trump, and DeSantis was widely recognized to be the strongest possible alternative. Even now, we see how Democrats have paid for not giving their own voters a similar choice.

Riding high after his thumping gubernatorial reelection, enormously popular within the party, and lavishly funded, DeSantis could choose to put all that on the line, or to bide his time. It’s to his credit as a man and a leader that he took the risk. His campaign was based on three premises: that he would be a better president than Trump, that he would be a stronger general-election candidate because he lacked Trump’s baggage, and that the party would be healthier charting a post-Trump future with a candidate who could build a bridge between MAGA and traditional conservatives — and who could show the country what that kind of movement might look like in the hands of a young, smart, competent, law-abiding leader. Even with Joe Biden’s weakness having propelled Trump to a surprisingly strong lead in the polls, I still believe that all three of those premises were correct.

But it didn’t work. We can debate why that was, what mistakes the DeSantis campaign made, and what he would have needed to do in order to run Nikki Haley off the road and consolidate the non-Trump vote, but two reasons were predominant: Republican voters weren’t ready to move on from Trump, and they closed ranks around Trump once he started getting indicted on bogus grounds. The sharp movement toward Trump in the polls beginning with the Alvin Bragg indictment never let up.

Had DeSantis sat out 2024 and thrown his considerable political weight behind Trump, he might well have been the prohibitive favorite to be Trump’s running mate, to the point where it would have been worth the risk and effort for Trump to find a way around the residency issue of DeSantis’s being a Floridian. Even now, he may still be the most popular Republican in the party after Trump. A YouGov poll in June found that 41 percent of Republicans considered DeSantis an acceptable running mate for Trump and only 11 percent considered him an unacceptable one — a plus-30 margin of favorability exceeding that of the other six names polled (J. D. Vance was plus nine; Nikki Haley was minus 15).

At the time, I thought that being Trump’s running mate was something that DeSantis should have avoided like the plague, and he obviously considered it a less desirable prospect than taking his shot at the top job at the cost of alienating Trump. After all, consider what would have been the two likeliest outcomes had DeSantis chosen to throw his weight behind Trump. One, much likelier in 2022–23, was that Trump would lose, damaging his running mate’s ability to offer a clean break from a defeated candidate. Bob Dole was the only running mate on a losing ticket to have won a subsequent presidential nomination since FDR, and it took Dole 20 years. The other possibility for DeSantis would have been to serve under a second Trump term that could easily prove unpopular with the general electorate, poison DeSantis’s political prospects, and end as badly as working for Trump did for Mike Pence.

As things stand now, it is much likelier that Trump will win. (If he doesn’t, DeSantis will be able to say the world’s biggest “I told you so.”) And instead of picking as a running mate a Pence-like compromise or a relatively elder statesman, such as the 67-year-old Doug Burgum, Trump selected 39-year-old Vance in an obvious effort to anoint him the heir to the MAGA movement. That could put obstacles in DeSantis’s path for years to come — and make it much harder for conservatives to influence policy in the next four years or stage any sort of comeback within the party after that.

Vance, being tied to a second Trump term, may well face the same pitfalls with the wider electorate as DeSantis would have, had he been Trump’s running mate, and they may be more acute if the administration follows Vance’s bad economic ideas rather than those that delivered prosperity during the first Trump term. But so long as he is the designated MAGA candidate, he doesn’t need to win general elections; the important thing is to win nominations and block the rest of the party from power. That would allow a MAGAfied Republican Party to drift ever closer to the Democrats on economic and foreign policy, and even some social policies, without risking the possibility of voters’ being offered an alternative.

While Vance has some superficial similarities to DeSantis in age, military service, academic background, and the like, the two are quite different philosophically. DeSantis is a devoted small-government guy who came up in the Tea Party, helped found the House Freedom Caucus when it still stood for something, and has presided over a tightfisted budget in Florida. He has resisted Obamacare-prescribed Medicaid expansion in the state (a favorite cause of Vance’s). DeSantis is a foreign-policy hawk by temperament and experience, with a long-standing focus on Iran, although he has tried (with limited success) to strike a middle ground on Ukraine aid. During his campaign, he proposed an ambitious expansion of the Navy. (That, likewise, puts him at odds with Vance, who stands on the far dovish end of the GOP.) DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida. He is also fundamentally rule-of-law-oriented. When pushed on the debate stage, he said that Mike Pence did the right thing on January 6 — while Vance auditioned for Trump by saying the opposite.

On all of these fronts, if Trump is elected, Vance will have a leg up in influencing the direction of the party, even at the detriment of policy positions that are popular in many of the biggest and fastest-growing Republican-run states. Again, he wouldn’t necessarily even need to get policies enacted; it would be enough to prevent people with opposing views from getting through the door in the next administration, which seems to be the role that Don Jr. and Eric Trump have promoted him to play. So long as Vance has Trump’s backing to be the next leader of MAGA, he can veto any Republican coalition that expands beyond his control.

DeSantis took an honorable and calculated risk, and he ended up on the outside of what now looks likely to be the next Republican administration. We could be paying for the failure of that gamble for a very long time.