DeSantis Campaign Reduced to Telling Donors He Has Shot at Winning the U.S. Virgin Islands
AP Photo/Michael Dwyer
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign is going so poorly, his team has had to resort to telling donors he has a shot at winning the U.S. Virgin Islands caucus.
After getting trounced by former President Donald Trump in Iowa, DeSantis has faced growing calls from erstwhile allies like The Wall Street Journal and Fox News host Laura Ingraham to drop out of the race.
He’s been deluged by a brutal firehose of obituaries for “the worst campaign in history” that “could go down as one of the most colossal bonfires of cash in American political history” for torching hundreds of millions of dollars only to lose every single one of Iowa’s 99 counties – and they savaged DeSantis personally as “an aloof not-ready-for-primetime candidate who didn’t know what he didn’t know and was arrogant about it;” who offered a failed message of being “just like Trump, but awkward, shorter and less interesting;” was “woefully underprepared for the rigors of retail politicking, often coming off as awkward and robotic in his interactions with voters;” and a candidate plagued by “fake smiles and fake laughs and all around weird behavior” who “always chooses cruelty over kindness, dog whistles over empathy, divisiveness over grace.”
“At best, DeSantis is in full-on survival mode now. At worst, he’s living in fantasy land,” wrote NBC News’ Matt Dixon, one of many reporters who have followed DeSantis’ political career for years and cannot see a viable path forward for him, with Trump continuing to dominate the polls and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley nearly beating his much-touted Iowa ground game and far more competitive with the ex-president in New Hampshire.
The latest RealClearPolitics polling average shows Trump capturing nearly 47% of New Hampshire GOP voters and DeSantis slinking along in the single digits, a distant fourth or fifth behind Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy, who already dropped out and weren’t even included in the last round of polling.
In fact, the situation has gotten so dire for the Florida governor, reported Puck’s Tara Palmeri, that his campaign team has resorted to grasping at the smallest of Caribbean straws to keep donors on the hook.
DeSantis is “on track to get humiliated in New Hampshire next Tuesday,” wrote Palmeri. “Despite having spent several days in the state this week, I’ve struggled to find a single DeSantis supporter. Voters I’ve talked to here do not care for his six-week abortion ban, or his culture warring with Disney and Florida’s school librarians.”
The DeSantis campaign is left with a desperate gambit of “carpet bombing” South Carolina with ads attacking Haley, hoping to whittle away her numbers in her home state, “even though there’s no path for DeSantis to win there either,” noted Palmeri, and “[t]hose close to the governor fear that his quixotic plans will also hurt his political brand for the long term” because “it will look like DeSantis’s ego is too big to accept the results.”
Nonetheless, in a call with donors the morning after his disastrous Iowa caucus performance, DeSantis’ team “presented a plan that would take them through Super Tuesday,” March 5, which Palmeri described as conceding that “he’s not currently expected to win any upcoming state” but still “tout[ing] his chances at winning the U.S. Virgin Islands.”
The small island territory will hold its caucus on February 8, with the power to award just four delegates. The Virgin Islands would normally have had 9 delegates to award, but was stripped of half by the RNC for scheduling its caucus before March 1. To put that in context, Iowa awarded 40 delegates on January 15, New Hampshire will award 22, and South Carolina will award 50, out of a total of 2,284.
