Edited by Deepali Verma
Ron DeSantis,who was considered to be Republicans’ best shot at moving past Donald Trump, ended his White House bid two days prior to the New Hampshire primary, leaving Nikki Haley as the former US president’s sole challenger for their party’s nomination.
“It’s explicit that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” DeSantis, 45, remarked in a video posted to X, signalling his support for Trump.
“My endorsement stands with him because we can’t revert back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear: a re-packaged form of corporatism that Nikki Haley is a representative of,” added the Florida governor.
Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, stands as the last Republican in the race trying to deny Trump the nomination. This year’s winner of the Republican nominating contests will take on President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, in the general election scheduled for November.
The Haley campaign event that took place in Seabrook, New Hampshire, where the state’s voters prepared to head to the polls for the primary, the former South Carolina governor was lauded when she announced that DeSantis had dropped out.
“I’ll leave you with this: May the best woman win,” remarked Haley.
An advantage that lies with Haley is that Republican donors now have a singular candidate to support if they want to try and stop Trump, potentially permitting her campaign to go beyond the Feb. 24 primary in her home state of South Carolina.
However, it is expected that Trump may be gaining the most, at the end of the day.
In New Hampshire, close to two-thirds of DeSantis supporters cite Trump as their second choice, said Andrew Smith, who is the director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
Another critic within the system of the Republican Party has been silenced and has given Trump his support. Trump can argue that the party is coalescing around him, and most DeSantis followers are likely to go in the direction of their candidate’s lead and back Trump rather than the more moderate Haley.
Haley’s odds remain steep as she will be facing instant pressure to drop out if she doesn’t perform adequately in her home state of South Carolina.
DESANTIS CAMPAIGN ERRORS
The previous year, DeSantis had been popular as a top contender for the 2024 Republican nomination and a natural heir to Trump owing to his combative style and deeply conservative views. He led several head-to-head polls against Trump.
His support, however, has seen a decline over the last several months, because of his flawed campaign strategy, drop in his lack of ease with voters on the campaign trail, and Trump’s so far unshakeable hold on much of the party’s base.
Over 70% of Republicans share a favourable opinion of Trump, as per most opinion polls. This puts DeSantis in a position where he had to appeal both to the voters that still admired Trump along with those who passionately disliked him.
DeSantis registered failure on both counts. His articulation failed to convince most Trump supporters why he was a better option, while Republicans in order to ditch the former president split their votes between multiple candidates.
Major donors threw their support behind DeSantis early on and they began to rebel as early as the summer.
His campaign sickened as he was suffering from other problems.
Several DeSantis allies point out that the governor waited too long to become a candidate, finally throwing his hat into the ring in May, which came well after six months after Trump had done so, leaving him exposed to blistering attacks by Trump.
DeSantis’ formal launch of his White House run in May 2023 was a glitch-filled disaster on X, an inauspicious start for a campaign predicated on the governor’s executive competence.
The campaign hired an increasing number of workers burning through cash at an escalated rate and then outsourced much of the traditional work of a campaign to an outside super PAC, which accepted donations of unlimited size, but failed to coordinate with the campaign itself.
