Ron DeSantis takes his last gasps in Iowa

At a sports bar in Dubuque, Iowa, Ron DeSantis was taking questions from the audience. Most would have been familiar to the governor of Florida by this point in his presidential campaign trail. Would he stick it to the swamp-dwellers and oligarchs of Washington, DC, and return power to We the People? Would he claw back the billions our country gave to the useless and corrupt United Nations? A man asked DeSantis if he was familiar with the books of Samuel in the Old Testament.

“Sure,” said DeSantis, cautiously.

The man, who I couldn’t see, said that DeSantis reminded him of David to Donald Trump’s Saul, “even though you took on a mouse, not a giant”. DeSantis, who has been fighting an ongoing battle with Disney, which has a sprawling theme park in his state, over its diversity policies, ran with the conceit. “Point of clarification,” he said. “Disney is the Goliath of the state of Florida…”

The man explained how the king of the Israelites (Trump) had abandoned his campaign against the Philistines (the left) to fight, unsuccessfully, against his rival (DeSantis). Although, he pointed out, “I don’t think either of you are anointed by God.”

“Well look,” interrupted DeSantis, “King Saul shows the danger of hubris, the danger of thinking you know more than God. Pride, all that stuff. I don’t consider myself a ruler over the people. I’m a servant of the people. You gotta have that humility.”

Humility is not something DeSantis communicates terribly successfully, though he talks about it a lot, surely to draw a contrast between him and the former president. DeSantis was meant to be Trump without the hubris, Trump without the crazy, Trump without the incompetence. Victorious Prosecutor of the Culture Wars, Scourge of the Woke. He was what Republicans had dreamt of and the Democrats feared.

And yet, heading into the caucuses, the would-be Trump-killer was 50 points behind him in national polls. In Iowa, a must-win state, he was more than 30 points down, almost level with Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina. What had earlier seemed like an inevitable juggernaut – some polls in 2022 had put DeSantis way ahead of Trump – looked like it was grinding to a halt.

Unless…the polls were fake, rigged, wrong, and his dogged trips across the state over the past year were going to pay off, shocking everybody. That was the case DeSantis and his team were making. “The polls and the pundits don’t vote,” he told Iowans, as has every politician with discouraging numbers in the history of the Iowa caucus, “you do.”

His campaign and “Never Back Down”, a DeSantis-aligned super PAC, which have injected massive bundles of cash into the state, want us to believe things are better than they look. More than 900,000 doors have been knocked on and 40,000 Iowans have pledged their vote to DeSantis, said a “Never Back Down” spokesperson. In 2016 Ted Cruz, who ran a similar ground campaign, beat Trump in Iowa with a total of 51,000 votes. But despite DeSantis’s claims to the contrary, the Republican nomination looks to be all but sewn up, and the usual electric feel of Iowa in a presidential year was missing.

At a social club in the small city of Decorah, DeSantis laid out his vision to around 50 people on folding chairs. The press was squeezed onto a platform at the back of the room, directly underneath an alarmingly large elk head. “The way I see it,” said DeSantis, “Donald Trump is running for his issues, Nikki Haley is running for her donors’ issues, I’m running for your issues.” (This was a recent addition to his standard remarks, and he was beating it to death everywhere he went.)

He argued that he would be an honourable role model for children; that he would defeat Joe Biden in a landslide; and that he would deliver on his promises. The implication being that Donald Trump was not the first, couldn’t do the second, and hadn’t done the third. As DeSantis ramped up towards the big finish, he quoted the Gettysburg address, George Washington and Rabbi Hillel’s question, “If not now, when?” If this was meant to be an inspiring crescendo, he didn’t quite pull it off, hustling through the end of the speech like he was late for lunch.

What he likes is talking about logistics. What he likes are details. He’ll tear through his right-wing bona fides happily enough – his fights against Disney, Anthony Fauci’s covid-19 measures, the teachers’ unions – but he’s most animated when he’s talking about the gritty details of exactly how he went about getting power restored and bridges rebuilt after a hurricane.

The Iowans I spoke to at his events liked him. Some had had enough of Trump; others were worried that the ex-president couldn’t win or might be in prison by November, and with that in mind, couldn’t help wondering how storming the palace was going.

Many of them bought DeSantis’s argument that Trump had talked a good game but hadn’t seen it through – that he had failed to build a wall, had failed to undo birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, had failed to stop covid hysteria from shutting down the economy, failed to defeat the liberals, and failed to win re-election (I was surprised at how many people mentioned this last one). Four years of Trump had seen a lot of triumphalism on the right and less by way of triumphs.

To his critics, DeSantis is a bad campaigner: unlikeable, awkward, soulless, a robot that malfunctioned when it tried too hard to appear human. Although it’s true that he’s not a good performer, especially compared with the Colossus of Mar-a-Lago, DeSantis struck me as essentially sincere. When he says “I am what I am,” you really believe that he is, indeed, what he is.

He’s someone who’s annoyed by stupidity and incompetence (“we don’t have time for that kind of nonsense,” he often says). He’s impatient and will often interrupt voters’ questions, eager to answer them. He’ll ask people’s names, as his advisers no doubt instructed him to, but fail to use them. He has not the slightest ability as a storyteller, at most making gestures to some of the broadest outlines of his biography to clumsily introduce his policy positions.

He is primarily an executive, interested in deliverables. And therein lies some of the answer to what has gone wrong for DeSantis. A broad swathe of America fell in love with a New York businessman who doesn’t seem to care that much about the business – at least the business of politics. What they like is the brand. The power of Make America Great Again was not deliverables but stories: stories of pride and resentment and fury.

DeSantis likes to say that politics isn’t entertainment, but nobody had told that to Trump’s crowds. The MAGA movement wasn’t necessarily about conservative policy. Rather it was about giving expression to a great feeling of despair and anger: the sense, shared by millions of Americans, that their rulers and elites had been ripping them off for decades. DeSantis was telling the same story – just not very well.

I’d dropped off the governor’s trail for an afternoon to see the former president in Newton, Iowa, where Trump spoke for more than an hour and a half, much of it greatest hits, though with some rambling bits new to me (“I wonder what my parents would say as they look down: my kid was indicted four times!”).

Outside, the people I spoke to repeated Trump’s tales of an unfair, rigged America, beset by radical leftists intent on controlling them and destroying all that was good about their country. It put me in mind of the myths that form the basis of cultures.

“What does Trump have that DeSantis doesn’t?” I asked one middle-aged woman.

“What?” she said.

“Why does Trump have your vote?”

“Because fuck you.”

But DeSantis’s audiences wanted something more. Booing Joe Biden was fine. Beating him was better. Undoing what the Democratic Party had achieved would be best. As he wrapped up at a sports bar in Ankeny, a city close to Iowa’s capital, Des Moines, a young landscape gardener told me he was feeling increasingly hopeful. “I think electing Donald Trump was like sending a fox into a corrupt henhouse,” he said. “You needed something to go disrupt it. But at some point you’ve got to get that fox out of there.”

DeSantis – who spent three terms in Congress and two in the governor’s mansion – has never lost an election. “I will not let you down,” he told the crowd. They cheered wildly, though they probably knew it was a promise he was unlikely to get the chance to keep. ■

Dan Halpern is a feature writer for 1843 magazine