The closing paragraphs of a long and in-depth portrait of the DeSantis campaign by Marc Caputo:
On Monday night, Trump won by a historic margin for a Republican in Iowa.
The ever-online true believers in the DeSantis camp were shocked at how the results mirrored the public polling and not the bogus polls his supporters circulated on X. So they falsely claimed the too-early call declaring Trump the winner before people had voted in the caucus was tantamount to “election interference” that significantly changed the results.
Rather than concede, DeSantis knew who to blame.
“The media was against us,” he said. “They were writing our obituary months ago.”
Gee, if only there was some way that DeSantis and his team could have foreseen that the media would be against him. Usually the institutions of the national mainstream media are such big fans of conservative GOP governors!
It may well be that there was no way that anyone could have beaten Trump in the 2024 presidential primary. And DeSantis was in a uniquely challenging position. Democrats hated him and would do anything to tear him down, Trump hated him and would do anything to tear him down, and every other Republican in the presidential primary not named “Ron DeSantis” saw him as an obstacle to be shoved aside or torn down. DeSantis was/is short on friends and long on enemies.
The disappointing (okay, okay, disappointing so far) results of the DeSantis effort are further evidence that running for president is extraordinarily difficult, much more difficult than it appears from the outside. It may be particularly hard for governors, who are used to dealing with the press corps in a state capital. It doesn’t matter how much you have mastered the press in Tallahassee or Madison or Baton Rouge. The national press corps that covers presidential campaigns is just much tougher, much more likely to dig into your past, much more interested in listening to anecdotes from your political enemies back home, and much less inclined to give a candidate any benefit of the doubt. The scrutiny as a presidential candidate is much, much tougher than for a governor. Off-the-cuff comments can turn into multi-day controversies. A presidential candidate’s preferred message in any given day or week is often something like, “I want to renew American education.” And the media’s preferred topic of conversation that week is often something like, “does this candidate eat pudding with his fingers?”And that’s just in a normal political time; this is all separate from a former president who roars during rallies that DeSantis wears “six-inch heels.”
Yes, this is all terribly unfair. But it is not exactly unpredictable or unforeseeable. DeSantis and his campaign had to have a strategy to deal with a hostile media environment.