What Would It Have Taken To Beat Trump?

DeSantis's "a more competent Trump" pitch was probably the right one, but he never really made it

Donald Trump’s victory margin in the 2024 Iowa Caucuses, by county.

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A lot of the post-Iowa commentary has been about how Nikki Haley failed to deliver a surprise second-place finish, and whether she still has any plausible path to the nomination. But Haley never had a plausible path to the nomination. She’s a restoration figure in a party whose base has zero interest in going back to the Bush era. The notion that she could turn things around with a strong second-place showing in New Hampshire on the back of non-Republican votes is laughable. That didn’t work for John McCain, celebrity war-hero, who actually won New Hampshire by a large margin. How on earth is it going to work for Nikki Haley?

No, the important post-mortem after Iowa is for the DeSantis campaign, because DeSantis was the only Republican to challenge Donald Trump for the nomination to ever have a chance, and he was depending on Iowa to give him that chance. It was always an outside chance—even at his worst points over the past three years, Trump was the substantial favorite to be the next Republican nominee; the only reliable way to prevent him from being that would have been for the Senate to convict him in his second impeachment. But there was a chance, I believe, and DeSantis could have made the most of it, if he had understood the assignment, which was to beat Donald Trump, someone the overwhelming majority of Republicans supported, approved of and agreed with.

DeSantis seemed to understand, at the beginning, that this meant running as a stabler, more effective version of the former president. But what is a stabler, more effective Donald Trump, and how do you run as that? That’s where the DeSantis campaign lost the thread, and lost it early.

In 2016, what was distinctive about Donald Trump was that he was running what Sam Francis called a “middle-American radical” campaign inside a Republican primary, and was getting traction. His most authentic precursors were third-party candidates like Ross Perot and George Wallace, people who weren’t Republicans at all. Trump offered no serious policy ideas in his campaign, but he absolutely ran on issues. It’s just that most of the issues weren’t framed in the way Republicans had grown used to. He was going to fight a trade war with China, stop unauthorized immigration (and cut back on legal immigration as well), and build a bunch of infrastructure. He was going to give everyone great health care and protect Social Security. He was going to end “forever wars” in the Middle East, avoid starting new wars, make amazing deals with our enemies like Iran and North Korea and force our freeloading allies pay tribute. He was going to make America great again by putting America first.

It’s not that he didn’t hit any good old Republican hits. He was going to cut taxes (particularly on corporations) and slash environmental regulations. He was going to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade and roll back the administrative state. He talked tough on crime. But the overwhelming thrust of his campaign was against the GOP establishment, not just for being squishes—that was Ted Cruz’s pitch—but for being wrong. And that’s what the plurality of Republicans voted for. It turned out that a huge percentage of Republicans weren’t particularly attached to the ideas peddled by the conservative movement or to the traditional Republican framing of issues. They were attached to their identities and their fear of Democrats and the left, but they were highly receptive to a Peronist economic message of the sort that was anathema to Conservatism, Inc., and to a foreign policy message that eviscerated the rhetorical idealism and grandiose ambitions of Bush-era Republicanism.

Could Ron DeSantis have delivered that message? As governor, he compiled a record that aligned reasonably well with the “angry radical centrist” image that Trump tried to project during the 2016 primaries. His most notable and popular right-coded stance was his COVID dovishness, which didn’t require him to demand radical changes but to resist radical changes that others were imposing, in defense of normal life. (I’m not arguing whether this stance was wise or foolish in policy terms—that’s a debate for another time. I’m just trying to describe it neutrally.) He talked tough on crime and engaged in high-profile stunts on immigration. But he also raised teacher pay and tacked to the center on environmental issues. Most important, he was a winner.

But very early on DeSantis appeared to completely forget the success of Trump’s persistent heterodoxy, and positioned himself as the true orthodox conservative. He had other problems of course. His campaign was much too on-line and spent money very unwisely. DeSantis is also short and comes off as weird. But Donald Trump is hardly abstemious in his on-line activities, and has mostly spent money on direct marketing of his own merchandise; Ross Perot, meanwhile, was a lot shorter and a lot weirder than DeSantis is, and he won a lot of Republican votes in his 1992 third-party run. Those were not DeSantis’s core problems. DeSantis’s signature mistake was running not as someone who could be counted on to fight for the people, but someone who could be counted on to be faithful to received conservative ideas. That was the Ted Cruz strategy, it is not what actual GOP voters want. It isn’t even what they wanted from Trump. As president, Trump’s record on policy matters was more influenced by the ideas of the conservative movement and the priorities of Mitch McConnell’s Senate and Paul Ryan’s House than was suggested by the Trump campaign. But these deviations frequently were Trump’s least popular moves. Trump lost his reelection campaign for a variety of reasons, but it beggars belief to suggest that his loss was due to insufficient fidelity to the true church of conservatism.

If Ron DeSantis ever had a prayer of winning, he didn’t need to attack Trump for his deviations from conservatism, for being too nice to gay people or for not enacting a flat tax. He needed to attack Trump personally, hard and often, for his failures. His failure to build the wall and his failure to boost American manufacturing. His failure to stop the rise in crime and his failure to slow the fentanyl epidemic. His failure to keep COVID out of the country, and his failure to reopen the country once COVID was everywhere. Most important, his failure to win reelection in 2020 and his failure to help other Republicans win their elections in 2018 and 2022. He needed to mock Trump for refusing to learn from defeat and for being more obsessed with himself than with the country. These are all true things, and most Republicans—even most of those who think the Democrats won in 2020 by cheating—know them.

He needed to attack Joe Biden and the Democrats, of course, but those attacks also needed to be primarily focused on things that matter to the big swath of Republican voters: immigration, inflation, crime. Overwhelmingly, issue-based polls suggest that the electorate tilts more toward a moderate version of Democratic positioning while also clearly showing that the Democratic Party is not trusted and is considered to be doing a bad job. A Republican nominee who wanted to beat Trump would have to convince Republicans that he was also focused on those things that most people—not just the most conservative Republicans—are angry at the Democrats about, that he would do a better job of delivering on those issues than Trump did during his first term, and that he was more likely to win the election in the first place.

I’m not saying DeSantis needed to position himself as a moderate. Republican primary voters hate moderates! A moderate insurgent has never won a GOP primary race, and I would expect any Republican nominee to rail against all the perfidy of Democratic liberalism. DeSantis could hang out with Chris Rufo all he liked. And I understand how DeSantis came to the mistaken conclusion that he needed to run to the right. He was putting his chips down on Iowa, and Iowa caucus-goers frequently reward the most socially-conservative major candidate in the field. But candidates who win Iowa that way have rarely gone on to win the nomination; the GOP has consistently rejected factional conservative candidates as well as moderate ones, even fake factional conservatives like Mitt Romney in 2008. Moreover, Trump’s strongest support these days is with ordinary conservative evangelical Christians. DeSantis was trying to dislodge them, make them his base, and then build out from them to a majority, which would have required two or three improbable events to happen, not just one. There was just no reason to believe that a factional conservative campaign strategy could ever win.

So would the alternative strategy I describe above have been enough? Probably not. Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is powerful, and has only grown more powerful with time. But there was never any point in running if not to win, and winning campaigns are usually modeled on other winning campaigns. What winning playbook was DeSantis following?