Ron DeSantis drops 2024 bid: What does this mean for Trump, Haley?

It’s all over for Ron DeSantis. The governor of Florida, who vowed to ‘never back down,’ has called an end to his bid for the 2024 Republican nomination for president. DeSantis dropped out days after coming second in the Iowa caucuses. DeSantis has spent millions of dollars and hundreds of hours campaigning and on which he’d staked his entire campaign only to be crushed by former president Donald Trump – whom he has now endorsed. The development comes just days before the Republican primary in New Hampshire. But what happened? And what does this mean for Haley and Trump? Let’s take a closer look: What happened? Early last year, DeSantis was considered a top presidential contender and a natural heir to Trump due to his combative style and deeply conservative views. He led several head-to-head polls against Trump. But his support had declined for several months, due to a flawed campaign strategy, his seeming lack of ease with voters on the campaign trail and Trump’s so far unshakeable command of much of the party’s base.

More than 70 per cent of Republicans have a favourable opinion of Trump, according to most polls.

That forced DeSantis to try and appeal to voters who still admired Trump, as well as those who passionately disliked him. DeSantis failed on both counts. He never successfully articulated to most Trump supporters why he was a better option, while Republicans looking to ditch the former president split their votes among multiple candidates. While many major donors threw their support behind DeSantis early on, they began to rebel as early as the summer. Joe DeSimone, a DeSantis donor from Nevada, told the Financial Times the governor was a “victim of circumstance.” “All the legal action that was addressed at Trump seemed to really fire up his base and get them motivated to come out and vote and contribute,” DeSimone said. DeSimone has now switched support to Trump. Several DeSantis allies say the governor waited too long to enter the race, which left him open to blistering attacks by Trump, who had announced his campaign more than six months earlier. When DeSantis did formally launch his White House run in May 2023, it was a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter, now known as X, an inauspicious start for a campaign predicated on the governor’s executive competence. [caption id=“attachment_13619502” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Donald Trump described DeSantis as a ’terrific person’ after getting his endorsement. AP[/caption] The campaign overhired, burning through cash at a rapid rate, and then outsourced much of the traditional work of a campaign to an outside super PAC, which can accept donations of unlimited size but cannot coordinate with the campaign itself. Despite pouring much of his campaign’s time and resources into Iowa, the first state to hold a presidential nominating contest, DeSantis finished almost 30 points behind former president Donald Trump, and he barely beat former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley for second place. DeSantis’ decision, less than a week after his deflating loss to Trump in Iowa despite an enormous investment there, caps a stunning fall from grace after DeSantis had been widely seen as Republicans’ most promising alternative to Trump ahead of the general election in November. DeSantis nodded toward Trump’s primary dominance — and attacked Haley — in an exit video he posted on social media.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

- Winston Churchill pic.twitter.com/ECoR8YeiMm

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) January 21, 2024

“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” DeSantis said in the straight-to-camera video, delivered in a cheerful tone. He continued: “I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee and I will honour that pledge. He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear: a re-packaged form of warmed-over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.” What does this mean for Haley and Trump? The decision leaves Trump and Haley – who served under Trump as UN ambassador – as the two major candidates in the race. This is the scenario Trump’s foes in the GOP have long sought, raising the stakes for this week’s contest as the party’s last chance to stop the former president who has so far dominated the race.

“There’s two people in this race,” Haley told CNN.

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“That’s what we wanted all along, and we’re going to keep going.” Chris Ager, the state committee chair of New Hampshire’s Republican Party, told the BBC “the race has been moving toward a one-vs-one between Trump and Haley for a while”. “This makes it so,” he added. But Trump, who has maintained an iron grip on the Republican electorate despite facing four criminal prosecutions, remains the prohibitive favourite. At a Sunday evening rally in Rochester, New Hampshire, Trump, who spent much of last year attacking DeSantis, praised the governor and said he was looking forward to working together to defeat President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. “I just want to thank Ron and congratulate him on doing a very good job,” Trump said at the outset of his remarks. “He was very gracious, and he endorsed me. I appreciate that, and I also look forward to working with Ron.” Trump described DeSantis as “a really terrific person.” Trump accused Haley of forming an “unholy alliance” with liberals, never-Trumpers and RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, to try and win the New Hampshire primary, and repeated a false claim that registered Democrats were allowed to vote in the Republican primary. Trump holds a double-digit lead over Haley in New Hampshire, according to polls, and his campaign hopes a second consecutive win will make his eventual nomination all but inevitable. He also has a commanding lead in South Carolina, which votes on 24 February. A Haley loss in her home state, where she served as governor from 2011 to 2017, would likely doom her campaign. [caption id=“attachment_13578652” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Nikki Haley is trailling Donald Trump in New Hampshire. AP[/caption] Still, her candidacy remains a long shot. At a campaign event in Seabrook, New Hampshire, Haley drew cheers when she announced that DeSantis had dropped out. “He ran a great race, he’s been a good governor, and we wish him well,” she told a room packed with supporters and media. “Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left.“ “For now, I’ll leave you with this: May the best woman win,” she added. As per Al Jazeera, Haley said the US was “not a country of coronations.” “So far, only one state has voted. Half of its votes went to Donald Trump, and half did not … Voters deserve a say in whether we go down the road of Trump and Biden again, or we go down a new conservative road,” she added. What do experts say? This seems to be good news for Trump. DeSantis’ supporters appear more likely to switch allegiance to Trump than to the more moderate Haley. In Iowa, APVoteCast surveys of caucusgoers suggested DeSantis’s supporters were much more likely than Haley’s to consider themselves conservatives who would back Trump no matter what if he wins the nomination and faces President Joe Biden in November. If that trend holds in New Hampshire, then Trump could expect at least some boost from DeSantis dropping out, and whatever he gets could stretch out his margin and frustrate Haley’s ability to claim any momentum. Indeed, Trump’s aides have said they expect DeSantis’ support around the country will shift heavily to Trump. New Hampshire GOP strategist Mike Dennehy told Politico,  “DeSantis dropping out virtually eliminates any chance Haley has at keeping Trump under 50 percent.” “There’s a chance now that Trump could get 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire,” Dennehy, who worked on John McCain’s 2000 and 2008 campaigns added.

The polling seems to bear this out.

The outlet quoted a University of New Hampshire/CNN poll released yesterday as showing DeSantis voters would massively favour Trump over Haley. A huge 62 per cent of the Florida governor’s voters would cast ballots in favour of Trump, while just 30 per cent would do so for Haley. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10 Boston daily tracking poll showed a similar outcome. Around 57 per cent of DeSantis’ supporters went for Trump as a second pick compared to 33 per cent for Haley, as per the report. While DeSantis was at around six or seven per cent in New Hampshire, every vote counts on this point. “In all of our tracking polls, [Trump has] been at or above 50 [percent] and his lead has only grown since Monday,” Suffolk University polling director David Paleologos told Politico. “In a two-person scenario, if he doesn’t get to 50 percent he doesn’t win. That doesn’t seem likely at this point.” “In our last track, the small subset of DeSantis voters broke to Trump 57 per cent to 33 per cent,” Paleologos told Financial Times. “She will not be the nominee,” key DeSantis supporter Representative Chip Roy, R-Texas, told AP. “She will not be the president of the United States.” Around two-thirds of DeSantis backers in New Hampshire cite Trump as their second choice, said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. Representative James Spillane, of Deerfield, said he had initially backed Trump, switched to DeSantis and will now vote for Trump. “I had a suspicion this morning, and I had talked to some friends of mine saying the way I was hearing things shake out, I thought this was going to happen, and I was right,” he said. “Unfortunately, DeSantis is not going to be able to make it forward. However, in the future, hopefully we can have a viable way forward in 2028.” David Kochel, a Republican strategist who has worked on five presidential campaigns, said DeSantis’ exit was unlikely to change the basic contours of the campaign, given that his support had cratered. “The race needs a big dynamic shift, and I don’t feel that DeSantis dropping out is that big a deal as he didn’t have that much going on in New Hampshire, and he didn’t even have that much going on in South Carolina,” he said. Another Republican consultant, Ford O’Connell, who has ties to both the Trump and DeSantis camps, said he expected most DeSantis voters to “come home” to Trump.

“Without question, Trump is the beneficiary of DeSantis ending his campaign,” he said.

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With time running short, Haley has sharpened her attacks on the frontrunner in the final days before the election, blaming Trump for Republican electoral losses in 2020 and 2022 and criticising his praise for authoritarian leaders. Trump noted Sunday that he won New Hampshire’s 2016 primary by about 20 points. He did not mention that he lost the battleground state twice in general elections to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. With inputs from agencies