(CN) — A little over a year ago, Florida governor Ron DeSantis led Donald Trump in New Hampshire by double digits. Large numbers of Republicans seemed ready to move on from the former president, blaming him for a poor showing in the midterms and viewing him as too full of baggage and as radioactive to suburban women.
And that was before he was indicted.
A year later, with his last rival, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, bowing out after a poor showing on Super Tuesday, Trump made clinching his third straight Republican nomination seem effortless. But it was hardly inevitable. The tale of how he dispatched five governors, a popular U.S. senator and his own vice president involves considerable political skill and a good dose of luck, and it says a lot about the Republican party and what might happen in the general election.
After their defeat in 2020, Republicans splintered into three groups: a minority of diehard Trump fans, a different minority of traditional never-Trumpers, and “a lot of people in the middle” who generally liked Trump’s America-first policies but disliked his personality and thought he’d be a poor candidate, said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
The story of Trump’s victory is the story of how he gradually expanded beyond his base and consolidated those people in the middle.
Early on, the people in the middle were directly targeted by DeSantis, who positioned himself as Trump without the drama. But while the governor attracted a lot of big-money donors, he proved to be “a terrible candidate,” said Smith. “He didn’t have the soft skills you need. He didn’t come across as likeable and sympathetic to the concerns of voters.”
He was “awkward and boring,” said David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati.
An early DeSantis misstep was not announcing his candidacy until late May 2023, after spending months on Florida legislative matters and a book tour. Trump, who had announced the previous November, spent tens of millions of dollars attacking DeSantis before the governor got into the race and could respond.
And when he did begin his campaign, it failed to launch — literally. His big announcement on Twitter was derailed by technical issues.
DeSantis then outsourced many traditional campaign operations to his Super PAC, which resulted in “a lot of wasted money, stepping on toes, and an incoherent message,” said Linda Fowler, a professor of government at Dartmouth College.
“A lot of big-state governors think that going from Triple-A to the majors is similar, but it’s different in kind,” explained Robert Kaufman, a political scientist at Pepperdine University. DeSantis responded to questions from Iowans by talking about his record in Florida. In New Hampshire, where voters are socially liberal, he emphasized his anti-woke agenda, Smith noted.
In the end, the candidate billed as “Trump without the drama” came across as neither Trump nor without the drama. New Hampshire voter Beverly Bennardo complained that DeSantis generated his own drama with Disney and wondered how he’d manage the country when he had difficulty managing his campaign. Another New Hampshire voter, Dan Flynn, called him “arrogant, like he thinks he deserves it.”
DeSantis’ nosedive created a brief summer boomlet for Vivek Ramaswamy, another “Trump without the drama” candidate. But in the debates, Ramaswamy proved “immediately unlikeable,” Smith said.
Meanwhile, the never-Trump faction was split among multiple candidates, most of whom were reluctant to directly attack Trump because they calculated that they would need his supporters to win a general election. “They feared becoming Liz Cheney,” said Charles Bullock, who teaches political science at the University of Georgia.
