(CN) — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced on Sunday that he would bow out of the 2024 presidential race after failing to build support in New Hampshire and finishing a distant second to former President Donald Trump in the Iowa caucuses.
“If there was anything I could do to produce a favorable outcome — more campaign stops, more interviews — I would do it,” DeSantis said in a video to supporters. “But I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory.
“Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign,” he said.
DeSantis pledged to support Trump while giving one last dig at the only other potential Republican nominee, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
“While I have had disagreements with Donald Trump, such as on the coronavirus pandemic and his elevation of Anthony Fauci, Trump is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden,” DeSantis said. “I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee and I will honor that pledge. He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear — a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism — that Nikki Haley represents.”
With DeSantis out of the running and Haley lagging behind Trump in national polls by double digits, the former president has emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee.
The Trump campaign released their own statement “honored by the endorsement from Governor Ron DeSantis and so many other former presidential candidates” and asking Republicans to rally around Trump against President Joe Biden.
After announcing his candidacy in May, DeSantis had eschewed his stance as a staunch Trump acolyte and re-positioned himself as a more ideologically conservative alternative to the former president. By turns, he criticized Trump for setting the stage for inflation, condemned the former president’s “overreach” in handling the Covid-19 pandemic and accused him of inconsistency on abortion rights.
But after spending months campaigning in Iowa, DeSantis received just 21% of the vote in the caucuses there last week, failing to make a significant dent in Trump’s support among Republican voters. Trump cleared 51% of the vote in Iowa.
DeSantis trailed Trump and third-place Iowa finisher Haley by wide margins in New Hampshire and South Carolina, where Haley is favored to score more support in next month's primary due to her six-year tenure as that state's governor.
The decision to suspend the campaign comes days after the Associated Press reported that DeSantis would reallocate the majority of his staff to South Carolina.
According to aggregated poll data on the FiveThirtyEight website, DeSantis’s highest position in the primary polls came last January. Since then, the governor’s numbers have steadily declined.
In May, DeSantis announced his run for the presidential election online with a conversation with Elon Musk inside a Twitter Spaces event plagued with technical difficulties.
Soon after, several high-profile Florida Republicans endorsed Trump, including U.S. Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, and much of the state’s congressional delegation.
In poll after poll, campaign stop after campaign stop, as DeSantis attempted to distance himself from Trump, the governor saw his former popularity grind to a halt.
DeSantis now returns to Florida during the state’s legislative session to serve out another two years, leading his “anti-woke” agenda and defending lawsuits with the corporate giant Disney.
The state’s political leaders had varying responses to his failed presidential bid, with Republicans thanking him for supporting Trump and Democrats not surprised by the outcome.
“Florida gets our governor back, and it’s time for America to get its president back,” Republican U.S. Representative Cory Mills of New Smyrna Beach said on X, formerly Twitter.
Nikki Fried, chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, said, “Florida Democrats have spent the last year making sure that voters from Iowa to New Hampshire and everywhere in between know exactly how Ron has failed the people of Florida.
“His ridiculous obsession with the presidency has had real consequences here, from his refusal to address our property insurance and affordability crises to the effects of his made-up culture wars,” she said.
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