The beginning stages of a presidential primary revolve around a series of well-known early states: Iowa, New Hampshire, and now South Carolina, though new ones can be manufactured and old ones taken out of circulation. These states confer a tiny percentage of the delegates needed to win the nomination, yet command outsize influence. Their power relies on a series of strange media rituals, in which candidates signal their performance goals and are moved up and down the game board accordingly.
The tricky aspect of the game is that high expectations fuel media hype, yet a failure to meet expectations causes the media to bury campaigns. The Ron DeSantis campaign offers a case study in the fine art of attempting to walk this careful line.
DeSantis selected the Iowa caucus as his ideal launching ground. He received endorsements from Kim Reynolds, the state’s Republican governor, Bob Vander Plaats, the boss of its largest Christian-right political machine, and other influential leaders. His socially conservative message was designed to appeal to the state’s large Evangelical voting bloc. “There may be some differences with me and Donald Trump, and I think that those differences redound to my benefit in a place like Iowa,” DeSantis said last spring.
The public line at the time was not that DeSantis was favored to win Iowa, but that doing so was a necessary condition for his victory. “Even if DeSantis is able to win Iowa, that’s no guarantee he’ll stop Trump,” observed Politico.
Accordingly, every projection of how DeSantis could win assumed he would first carry Iowa. “In order to have a credible chance at taking down Trump, DeSantis will need a decisive win in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation GOP caucuses next year,” proclaimed the conservative (DeSantis-friendly) Washington Examiner. National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry called DeSantis’s local endorsements “obviously a sign of strength in all-important Iowa. If Trump wins there, the fight for the nomination might be all but over.”
As summer dragged on and DeSantis’s polling in Iowa failed to rise, his strategists continued to insist he would win the state. In July, Reuters reported:
Even as he trails Trump by close to 30 percentage points in national polls, DeSantis and his advisers are sticking to a long-haul, Iowa-first strategy. They hope that an upset win in the state would stall Trump’s momentum, according to two sources close to the campaign, who asked not to be identified so that they could discuss campaign strategy.
“A win in Iowa, a second in New Hampshire, we lose a couple candidates before Nevada and South Carolina, and then we are in a bloody, two-person race,” one of the two sources told Reuters, referring to other nominating contests that will follow.
In September, the campaign abruptly and ominously lowered its target. A campaign official told Politico it was only aiming for a “strong second-place showing.” This quote, which was accordingly repeated by numerous campaign reporters at other outlets, reset the game board. DeSantis had traded away some of his immediate hype for a lower and more survivable threshold.
In October, still failing to detect the necessary polling momentum, DeSantis relocated a large portion of his staff to Iowa. The campaign press interpreted this move as an expectation-setting maneuver, albeit at the new, lower bar of a “strong” second place. “DeSantis’ strategists think he must beat Trump or come close in Iowa,” reported the Associated Press. In November, Republican strategist Karl Rove declared that DeSantis “needs to come roaring out of Iowa with either an outright win or a very strong second place finish” with “Donald Trump below where he is today in the Iowa poll at 43 (percent).”
By Christmastime, the campaign had abandoned its hopes for winning the state outright or even finishing a close second. The new bar was that DeSantis would outperform the polls, which showed him trailing by 30 points or more. On December 20, Representative Thomas Massie, a DeSantis supporter, described success in the following terms:
“Ron DeSantis does 5 or 10 points better than the polling, Trump’s under 50% and there’s no close second to Ron DeSantis … I feel like he can be in the 30s. That’s what he’s got to do, by the way … He’s got to reestablish that it’s a two-person race.”
The next day, CBS conveyed a more detailed sense of the latest expectations, which did not require winning, or a strong second, but merely a respectable second place:
Supporters of the governor and GOP strategists say Iowa is not a “must win” for DeSantis’ broader prospects, but they still say that at the very least, DeSantis must come within ten points of Trump in Iowa to continue to have a viable path for the GOP nomination.
“Do I think DeSantis has to win Iowa to be able to move ahead? The answer is no, I do think he will win Iowa. But I think he has to have a respectable, strong showing,” said Iowa State Rep. John Dunwell. “I got my eye on 10 points.”
“He can’t come in second and get beat by 30 points. Nobody can. If Trump wins by 30 points, I mean, how are you going to make the case to your donors and voters that you got second place and got beat by 30+ percent?” said Cody Hoefert, who was the co-chairman of the Iowa Republican Party between 2014 and 2021, is backing DeSantis and said he’d be “shocked” if Trump wins by 30 points, as polling suggests he might.
As we now know, even those goals proved sadly unachievable. Having set a high bar, then lowered it again and again, the campaign splattered on its face.
And yet conventions require candidates to claim in the immediate wake of defeat that they prevailed nonetheless. Candor is understood as a sign of the utmost desperation, the equivalent of conceding defeat.
And so a brave campaign official was trotted out to declare victory to CNN: “They threw everything at Ron DeSantis. They couldn’t kill him.”
The new, retrospective bar for DeSantis was to emerge from Iowa literally still alive. Victory!
