The lost DeSantis moment

Ron DeSantis entered the 2024 campaign as a formidable candidate, with early polls rivaling or even surpassing those of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

Ultimately, that early strength just meant he had more room to fall.

There are myriad reasons why Mr. DeSantis fell apart and ultimately ended his campaign on Sunday — including that his opponent once again proved to be a juggernaut. Perhaps Mr. DeSantis could have won the nomination in most other years if he had not been running against a former president.

But rather than dwell on his losing campaign, it's worth returning to his apparent strength from the beginning — that brief moment when Mr. DeSantis, or at least the idea of Mr. DeSantis, routinely led Mr. Trump in high-quality head-to-head polls.

In the eight years since Donald J. Trump won the Republican nomination, this was the only moment when Republican voters seemed willing to move in a different direction. Mr. DeSantis did not take advantage of this moment, but nevertheless it is the only glimpse we have had of the post-Trump Republican Party. We saw something that could make this happen, and we saw what it could look like.

What accomplished it: The midterm elections

Over the past eight years, Mr. Trump has said and done countless things that could have brought down any other politician. He has been impeached twice. He encouraged what culminated in the January 6 riot. He has been charged with multiple federal crimes. None of this really made any difference in his support.

That is, until November 2022. The Republicans' disappointing results in the midterm elections damaged Trump in the polls, and DeSantis opened up a clear lead in head-to-head elections that lasted for months.

Before the 2022 midterm elections, it would have been difficult to predict that this would be the event that would put Trump at a disadvantage. But it was, and it's worth noting at least a few things that may have helped make the post-medium term period different:

• The attacks came not from liberals, but from conservative elites and conservative media.

• The midterm elections made Trump look weak and a loser. Unlike in the 2020 election, Republicans admitted defeat. Mr. Trump himself acknowledged that the midterm elections were disappointing. This time there were no alternative facts.

• The midterm elections allowed Mr. DeSantis, who won by a landslide, to contrast favorably with Mr. Trump without having to attack or attack him directly.

We will never know what would have happened if Mr. DeSantis had acted quickly to take advantage of the opportunity. Instead, he waited months before announcing his candidacy.

What we know is that these favorable conditions did not last long. In late January, Mr. Trump went on the attack against Mr. DeSantis, and he did not back down. Now it was Mr. DeSantis, not Mr. Trump, who looked weak. Instead, Trump's blows came from the criminal justice system, not the right. Conservatives rallied behind him, as they have done time and time again.

The wagons had already circled by the time Mr. DeSantis began attacking Mr. Trump this summer.

What it might have looked like: The imagined DeSantis

Mr Trump triumphed in the 2016 primaries, not least because his opposition was divided.

On his right were orthodox conservatives, such as Ted Cruz, who saw Mr. Trump as a big moneymaker for government and as socially liberal. On his left were the moderate establishment types like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who opposed Trump on foreign policy, trade and immigration. Together, the two factions had the numbers to defeat Trump, but their deep divisions were irreconcilable.

But late in the 2022 campaign, Mr. DeSantis briefly reneged on a promise to unite moderate and conservative opposition to Mr. Trump around a new set of issues: the coronavirus response and the “woke” left.

It may seem strange to think that these conservative issues could help Mr. DeSantis with moderates, but they were fought on the left of the old culture wars of the 1960s. Conservative donors were adamantly opposed to DEI initiatives as the foundation of the party. In many cases, these conservative causes found qualified support from liberals in defense of free speech on campus, opposition to school closures, skepticism about trans issues, support for colorblindness and merit-based education, and more.

What all these issues had in common was that the left, and especially the academic left, had penetrated far enough to provoke a response. And more than any other politician, Mr. DeSantis was the conservative politician who stood up to that backlash against the “woke” and coronavirus restrictions. The wide range of anti-woke and anti-pandemic politics meant there were many moderates and conservatives who thought they agreed with Mr. DeSantis. They imagined him as a politician much like them, in the same way that both anti-war progressives and centrist Democrats saw themselves in Obama in 2008.

That was not the case. The coalition behind the imagined Mr. DeSantis crumbled.

The new problems did not help him:

• They lost their battle. The pandemic ended. 'Woke' steadily disappeared from the news. The uproar over critical race theory subsided. More traditional issues, including abortion and the border, became more salient.

• The issues did not provide a clear contrast to Mr Trump, who could hardly be derided as “woke” and was not exactly known for his support of Covid-related restrictions.

• The issues dragged Mr. DeSantis into the world of the far-too-online right, leaving his speeches full of arcane acronyms such as ESG and devoid of any coherent, overarching message.

Worse, Mr. DeSantis campaigned as if completely oblivious to the delicate balancing act of coalitions required to defeat Mr. Trump. It's hard to imagine he didn't know — it's exactly what rattled Trump's opponents eight years ago. Yet a major super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis brought in Jeff Roe, the adviser behind Mr. Cruz's losing campaign in 2016. And Mr. DeSantis never appeared to have thrown a bone to the party's establishment Republican wing. He couldn't even be acceptable to moderates in Ukraine, a favorite issue of the neoconservatives who inevitably had to play a role in any anti-Trump coalition.

Instead, Mr. DeSantis offered little contrast with Mr. Trump on these issues. The strategy, known as “Trumpism without Trump,” assumed that Republican voters were willing to part ways with Mr. Trump personally even as they supported his views on the issues. Needless to say, that turned out to be wrong. At the same time, his consistently conservative views on the issues alienated moderates and culminated in the rise of Nikki Haley.

DeSantis would have struggled to maintain an ideologically diverse anti-Trump coalition even if he had been as adroit as Obama in his 2008 victory over Hillary Clinton. The fight against “woke” was not a war in Iraq. National security, abortion, rights and other issues still divide Republicans, as they did in 2016.

But to get a glimpse of what a successful alternative to Trumpism might one day look like, the imagined DeSantis of the early campaign is a good place to start. The backlash against the woke left may have fizzled out, but it is a reminder that campaigning against the excesses of the left has the potential to unite the right while appealing to a pocket of disaffected moderates or even liberals. If these or other new issues overwhelm the old ones, there could suddenly be an opening for conservative politics to look very different.