In the wake of Ron DeSantis dropping out of the primary race, many are wondering why he decided to leave the race at this point. On today's show with me, I speak with Oren Jacobson, a conservative pundit, to discuss the reasons why he left the race, and why it may have been the best thing that happened to him.
00:00:33.400I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:37.580So the big news that I'm sure most people have already seen is that Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the GOP primary.
00:00:46.900He is no longer in the hunt for that presidential seat.
00:00:50.660Now, I think it was pretty obvious that this was coming after he canceled a number of appearances.
00:00:56.660He wasn't going to be on some interviews with, I believe, CNN and others.
00:01:01.780And it seemed very clear that after the loss of momentum in Iowa, that he was going to have a very difficult time finding a way forward for his campaign.
00:01:12.020So joining me today to discuss all things Ron DeSantis and the GOP primary is the Prudentialist, everyone's favorite frog.
00:01:37.640I think there's many lessons to learn from what happened with the Ron DeSantis campaign and what the GOP primary is going to look like going forward.
00:01:45.840So I guess first things first, were you surprised at all?
00:01:50.540I mean, I know you made the call on the show, but I have to do the were you surprised.
00:02:00.140Well, I was surprised by how soon he dropped out.
00:02:02.860I figured that he would have gotten a campaign shot in the arm after a second place finish in Iowa.
00:02:09.880That might have rejuvenated him a little bit.
00:02:11.920But I think after you look at the polls in New Hampshire, things were not looking good for him.
00:02:17.700And I think that was sort of the death knell was that you can win one state pretty well.
00:02:21.680But as soon as the race is being shaped by the press, that there's no way out for you.
00:02:27.300I think Ryan James Gerdusky put out a great article talking about sort of these campaigns.
00:02:33.040Now they all work for Ted Cruz in 2016 that this seemed like Ron DeSantis was the sort of Trumpism without the Trump, anti-Trump kind of movement that people wanted to have some alternative that wasn't the Nikki Haley's of the world.
00:02:48.400But yeah, I'm only surprised by the timeline.
00:02:51.320But to me, really, the bigger news out of all of this was apparently, you know, Senator Tim Scott is now engaged.
00:02:57.380So, you know, you've got that going for you.
00:02:59.820I thought that was bigger news than anything else.
00:03:02.020That's one less confirmed bachelor in the Senate.
00:04:04.680But the fact that a second place finish just one point ahead of Haley looked okay kind of spoke to where his campaign had fallen to, how desperate it had become.
00:04:14.160I think originally the plan for the DeSantis campaign was get him there, you know, beat Trump soundly or, you know, come in just behind to show that he could believe, to show that, you know, evangelical voters were kind of up for grabs,
00:04:28.080that he could build momentum among some of those social conservatives that Trump might have lost due to kind of his positions on things like the pro-life issue or his general foibles in his personal life.
00:04:40.140The people who are maybe uncomfortable with Donald Trump as a man would switch over to Ron DeSantis.
00:04:47.520And then with that momentum, he would be able to show that he was the viable alternative, especially given Trump's many different problems when it came to legal issues, that kind of thing.
00:04:57.520However, you expect him to hang in a little bit longer because now we're in a scenario which, you know, if for some reason Trump cannot run, obviously, you know, run, Ron DeSantis is not in the mix in a lot of ways.
00:05:12.000I guess a lot of people would see it that way.
00:05:14.540And so, yeah, you expected him to carry this a couple more states in before making that decision.
00:05:20.380But I think you're right that after kind of looking at that performance and then looking at the possibility of the next couple states going forward,
00:05:26.860it became clear that there just was a very, it would be very unlikely.
00:05:31.660And to his credit, he did not drag this out.
00:05:35.380I think that could have been, could have damaged his political reputation a lot more.
00:05:42.220And so he steps away at this moment, still has the chance to, I think, recuperate, kind of salvage that reputation,
00:05:49.920make good on his governorship and still put himself in a strong place, a place much better than if he had continued to kind of kick and drag his way through multiple primaries.
00:06:00.080He wasn't going to be victorious in and kind of bleed everything dry up to that point.
00:06:04.400Yeah, I mean, the last time we had really had seen sort of these like last standing Republican nominate,
00:06:09.960you know, people running for the nomination that we're going to win.
00:06:12.460I remember John McCain and Governor, you know, Huckabee back in 2008.
00:06:18.040That's some, some, some ancient history, politically speaking.
00:06:20.300But I mean, it's important to sort of consider that.
00:06:24.860But it does illustrate, I think, sort of that it is good that he didn't do that.
00:06:28.740I don't agree with Charlie Kirk almost ever.
00:06:31.180But I have to agree with Charlie Kirk when he said that, you know, hopefully DeSantis will like raise $120 million to help rejuvenate sort of the Trump campaign treasury and to pursue some kind of victory in 2024.
00:06:43.600I think that that's a very good call on his end.
00:06:46.200No, but it was, again, it's why there was so many like Ted Cruz staffers that were there with working in this area in Iowa in 2016.
00:06:54.060Because anyone who was looking for a viable alternative or even trying to show that the Republican voter base might entertain an alternative was to have some kind of 2016 style Iowa caucuses result.
00:07:06.160Because when you looked at the split in 2016 for Iowa, it was mainly split the three places were Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio.
00:07:15.880And the split was like 27%, 24%, and like 22% between the three of them with Cruz and the win.
00:07:22.680And because it was such a heavily divided, you know, voter base picking different options for where to go, that looked like your way forward.
00:07:29.260And since there was no alternative besides Trump having a 30 point, he got over the percent, as we talked about the other week.
00:07:35.960And now, you know, the other two were struggling to maintain 21, 22%.
00:07:42.860And as Nikki Haley, unfortunately, is correct that this is a two person race that is between her and really the entire Republican establishment and the Democrats as well versus Trump in this instance.
00:07:54.760I mean, there's been some weird things in the backdrop of this, like, you know, J.P. or is it J.P. Morgan?
00:08:02.700Yeah, with Jamie Dimon saying that, you know, Trump might have been crass, but mean tweet society was right.
00:08:08.560And that sort of gives me a very strange sense of where things might go in this election.
00:08:12.780But DeSantis, you know, when you and I had first met in person, one of the things that you had told me that, like, DeSantis has a high chance of ruining his political credibility by running against the heir apparent Donald Trump.
00:08:23.540And, I mean, we've been lucky that Trump didn't debate on any of these Republican primary stages because, you know, Ron Sanctimonious and Lord knows what other kind of insults would have been thrown his way.
00:08:33.040And he would have sort of autistically stumbled through that and managed that, which would have made it worse.
00:08:39.280And now he had given a rather lackluster endorsement of Trump, but he was very much correct in saying that, you know, whatever happens next, the pathway of Nikki Haley should never be the option.
00:08:49.320And that was the one good thing that he really said outside of getting community noted on Twitter for an alleged fake Winston Churchill quote.
00:09:12.280But but yeah, I think there was a to be fair, a couple of good things that he said he rightly called Trump out when it came to his behavior during the pandemic.
00:09:23.320I think that there was a failure of leadership Trump by Trump there.
00:09:27.340Obviously, you know, Operation Warp Speed and its consequences are huge.
00:09:32.920And I think it's I think it's right for people to hold him accountable and understand that there is a there is a degree of, you know, you're in that moment and it's never happened before.
00:09:45.340And those choices are in many ways happening around you and being made for you.
00:09:49.660But that's your part of your job as the executive is to step in and make that, you know, to stop that kind of thing and make that that critical change in the moment.
00:09:59.060So I think it's entirely fair for him to call him out on that.
00:10:02.840And like you said, he stepped out and said, you know, whatever happens, no matter what my disagreements might be with Donald Trump, we can't go back to Nikki Haley.
00:10:11.960We can't go back to the corporate GOP.
00:10:31.440I understand why you would think that.
00:10:33.660But I do think that DeSantis genuinely is coming at the system in his own way.
00:10:39.340And while it might not be as successful as other certain strategies, it's it's still legitimate.
00:10:45.040And I think that him showing his ability to step out and say, I still I'm going to endorse Trump.
00:10:52.420I'm going to decry Haley, even though, you know, that that would be siding with with the establishment would would be the safe move there.
00:11:00.480I think that that does show that he was somebody who was who's trying to run his own outsider campaign to a certain degree, even if it was it was less successful.
00:11:10.580I don't think that DeSantis was running some kind of, you know, I'm going to burn MAGA down, even though some of his supporters on Twitter might say that they're willing to do so.
00:11:19.540No, I mean, like in that and DeSantis isn't like, you know, Dean Phillips.
00:11:22.660He's not this like mugwump style character who's running on this like holier than thou sense of, you know, battling corruption or whatever.
00:11:29.820I mean, he does have a proven track record as an executive.
00:11:32.100And you of all people would know, being a Floridian, that, you know, from his skin of his teeth election victory in 2018 to recreating the state political machine and creating a sizable electoral victory to go in coalition in 2022 for his reelection.
00:11:48.980And he's absolutely right to call Trump out on those things.
00:11:51.240The question now becomes, what can he do to, you know, maintain a sort of this unity behind Trump in terms of the GOP electorate and making sure that Nikki Haley doesn't get it?
00:12:03.860Because, again, I think there will be a lot of DeSantis staffers and campaigners and donors that either go back to Trump or seeing, you know, Trump as the worst of all alternatives, like we saw with 2016 and sort of the National Review types, that they'll throw their lot behind Nikki Haley.
00:12:19.540And, I mean, I've said this before and other commentators have as well.
00:12:23.260But, I mean, you saw those debates, especially the first few debates where it was a very packed stage.
00:12:27.300And it was basically what the Republican Party looked like in 2012, you know, talking about taxes, talking about spending, talking about education, talking about things that have no real relation to the paradigm that we're currently in,
00:12:39.200all while dressed like Donald Trump, all while trying to act like Donald Trump, without anything that Donald Trump talked about, which was, you know, bringing the economy back to the United States,
00:12:49.540closing the border and actually making sure that America gets a relatively fair deal for its position on the world stage.
00:12:55.840And so, you know, DeSantis dropping out, I hope that at least people can use his political machine or energy towards a more fruitful endeavor.
00:13:04.680And we'll see how it affects, you know, New Hampshire.
00:13:11.340I think it's Tuesday, but still does illustrate where we're at.
00:13:15.080And good on DeSantis for, I think, doing the right thing, because dragging it out would have only hurt him and any sort of political future he has.
00:13:21.840I know Florida's got that weird bit in the Constitution where there's no term limits, but you can't serve more than two terms in a row.
00:13:28.160So we'll see what happens for his future.
00:13:30.700Yeah, I want to go ahead and take this back to the beginning, because I think a lot of people are going to look at this campaign and they're going to say, what happened here?
00:13:40.360Right. Like, this is a guy who had a lot of momentum.
00:13:46.540He was America's governor making big changes.
00:13:49.840He was, you know, there was a lot of support for him in general in the party.
00:13:55.160And there's going to be a postmortem that looks at this this campaign and says, you know, I've already seen some people on Twitter say, oh, this is, you know, that people will be studying this campaign for years to kind of figure out what went wrong.
00:14:06.420But I don't think it's really that complicated.
00:14:08.680So I remember because I was a God forgive me.
00:14:14.140You know, it's going through the 12 steps.
00:14:15.700I was a I was a journalist at the time.
00:14:59.460Yeah, I've never seen anything like this.
00:15:01.920I've been working in some capacity in politics for a very long time, like, you know, 17 years at this point in one way, shape or form.
00:15:13.260And I had never seen that level of energy when someone's supposed to be coming in the room.
00:15:18.440I mean, it felt like a football game on, you know, but like hyped up even more.
00:15:22.680Everyone's there are people in costumes and body paint.
00:15:26.120And they're, you know, they're they're wrapped around lines around a stadium full of people.
00:15:32.060You can't you have to park, you know, 20 minutes away and walk the entire time just to get there with it, with the journalist badge and everything with it, with the press badge.
00:15:44.320I remember standing in that press pit right next to the CNN guys.
00:15:49.760And the whole place is just booing us, just chanting, you know, media sucks, media sucks, screaming at rightfully so.
00:15:57.200You know, we had earned their ire 100 percent.
00:15:59.740And, you know, you sit in that room and DeSantis comes in and again, you know, candidate, not a lot of people there are super excited about at that time.
00:16:10.040But Trump is, you know, on stage and he's a, you know, look at this guy.
00:16:14.700DeSantis is a great guy, amazing guy, blah, blah, blah.
00:16:20.380Now, I know, you know, somewhere DeSantis supporters are going to be like, ah, that's not why he won.
00:16:25.440And I'm pretty sure that's why, like, I'm pretty sure that those kind of, that final push with Trump certainly helped move him over the edge.
00:16:34.920And in doing so, you know, Florida really dodged a bullet because obviously Andrew Gohm ended up with a gay prostitute and doing drugs.
00:16:48.780But on top of that, obviously, DeSantis, despite not being a great campaigner, obviously at that time, it was very clear he was not the best campaigner.
00:17:06.720And, of course, in this moment, and this is where DeSantis supporters support him most and their right to do so, in the moment where Trump was failing, right?
00:17:21.320He's stepping up and he's protecting the state against these different federal mandates, against these different requirements during COVID.
00:17:34.080He's working with the legislature to get all this stuff done.
00:17:37.240He's refusing to go along with the hysteria, right?
00:17:40.640So the quality of life that I had as a Floridian during the pandemic was just wildly different.
00:17:47.800Like I was talking to people in New York and in California, and I was just living an entirely different life.
00:17:53.380It was like they were living in North Korea and I was living in South Korea.
00:17:57.140It was that stark of a contrast between the way that things were happening.
00:18:02.300And so after that, he doesn't just step into this COVID moment, but he also steps into the culture war and in a way that Republicans have been told they can't get involved, you can't fight big businesses, you can't fight on these cultural issues.
00:18:18.260You just cut taxes and shut up about everything else.
00:18:20.940Instead, he steps in that breach and he's banning the indoctrination of kids in third grade while everyone else is talking about how this is the return of some kind of McCarthyism or something.
00:19:17.160You are showing GOP governors how to build a power base outside of Washington, reform the entire state.
00:19:25.440You know, just there's a massive shift of people coming into the state who want to live there just because you're the governor and you are reshaping the political future of Florida.
00:19:35.060It goes from being a purple state, you know, that is trending blue to a bright red state where he's like winning reelection in Miami-Dade.
00:21:23.480I think a lot of it has to just do with the charisma and media capability.
00:21:28.840I mean, it does not matter that Trump is not a competent.
00:21:32.380And this is something that, heaven forbid, even Richard Hanania got right, was that, you know, it does not matter what kind of executive you are.
00:22:03.820But can that bull in the china shop run the china shop better?
00:22:06.540And that was the question a lot of people were asking after 2020 and everything that had taken place there.
00:22:11.300And so DeSantis looks like the great guy to do that, like a competent political machine, a heck of an executive building a way to, like, eliminate corruption in some of the bluest counties in the state of Florida.
00:22:24.060And I think, like, that's the big problem.
00:22:25.900I mean, there are clip after clip after clip of him with awkward body language, unable to really put out a smile on the debate stage.
00:22:34.320I mean, there was the whole bad lip reading about his time in Iowa, and when I hear the bad lip reading of him, and I find that to be more relatable than when DeSantis is trying to be relatable to, you know, families and kids and mothers and fathers, it really illustrates a big problem with your messaging and your ability to do so.
00:22:52.700Now, historically speaking, when it comes to these sort of challenges in the primaries, that does not mean that your career is over.
00:22:58.600I mean, Ronald Reagan had famously, you know, fought it out over Gerald Ford in 1976.
00:23:02.740I mean, we had thought that Richard Nixon was done for good after failing, you know, and for to be the governor of California after losing 1960 election and would come back in 1968, not only be the president, but then win one of the largest reelections in 1972 shortly thereafter.
00:23:19.080And so I don't think his career is done, but I do think that some of the biggest things to take away from this postmortem is going to be who your campaign online spokespeople are.
00:23:29.480If I'm turned off by your campaign, by your avatars and your proxies alone, that's a huge issue.
00:23:36.560You have to have some sort of human relatability.
00:23:39.640I don't know what kind of like acting coach, you know, Curtis Yarvin has over the years, but maybe hire that guy, make you look a little more livable.
00:23:47.320You know, I understand the whole sort of like autistic, literally me thing.
00:23:50.960Like, unless you're going to lean into that, like learn how to be a better performer.
00:23:53.960Uh, cause if not, you're, you're going to look as robotic and cringy as you did on the stage.
00:23:59.000And then finally, you need to have some conviction.
00:24:01.700And I don't mean that he doesn't have convictions or doesn't have deeply held beliefs, but there was no fire in him on the debate stage or what he says.
00:24:09.020I mean, even his announcement to suspend his campaign, endorse Trump and criticize Trump was very, you know, monotone, very, very boring.
00:24:20.160And that's my problem. This is that this is the money ball problem on paper.
00:24:24.740This guy looks amazing. And then he steps up to the plate.
00:24:28.140This is going to be a really important lesson for him in the future.
00:24:31.060And I don't think he, I think if he manages to bury the hatchet with Trump and whatever of that sort of voter base that exists out there for him, which is like 75 plus million Americans.
00:24:41.700DeSantis will be in a good position in the future.
00:24:44.060And depending on if Trump decides to be dictator for a day or win the 2024 election, Lord only knows there's a bright spot in DeSantis's future.
00:24:51.640It's just that everyone who's doing these postmortem should realize this is a competent executive who can be pushed probably further to the right than he already is and knows how to get things done to, you know, curtail bureaucracy, fight business,
00:25:05.140and to ensure that your political machine wins elections in highly contested purple or blue areas outright.
00:25:11.540So, I mean, at the end of the day, DeSantis is in a very strong position, I think, going forward.
00:25:16.420And we're all kind of glad, as you had said, he didn't drag this out and further sully his his political future by by hanging in until the convention.
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