Inevitably, after Ron DeSantis dropped out of the 2024 presidential race three weeks into the election year and endorsed his bitter chief rival, his failed campaign was already as legendary as Jeb Bush’s expensive and disastrous 2016 effort. Like Bush, DeSantis started fast, had a lot of elite GOP support and almost limitless money, and proceeded to steadily lose altitude like a damaged aircraft until the final crash. Like Bush, DeSantis could not figure out how to beat Donald Trump despite outspending him significantly. How much did DeSantis spend? Well, the New York Times has added it all up, and it’s breathtaking given the very poor return on investment:
It cost more than $160 million for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to come in second place in a single nominating contest. That astounding sum makes Mr. DeSantis’s failed presidential bid among the most expensive in modern Republican primary elections. But the details of where the money went, laid out in filings to the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday, show just how free-spending Mr. DeSantis and his allied super PACs were. They directed at least $53 million through firms controlled or owned by Jeff Roe, the powerful Republican strategist who served as the top adviser to Never Back Down, Mr. DeSantis’s main super PAC. They spent $31.3 million on television advertising time. They spent at least $3.3 million on private airfare, between the campaign and Never Back Down.
About $130 million of the overall $160 million was spent by Never Back Down, and a lot of the criticism of Team DeSantis stemmed from its heavy reliance on a super-PAC with which it could not smoothly coordinate. But even more criticism was aimed at how NBD spent all that jack — particularly its renowned door-knocking operation in early caucus and primary states. Even former Jeb Bush operative Tim Miller thought it was hilarious:
What is all this “canvassing” getting them aside from embarrassing stories about “stoned” supporters acting stupid in people’s doorbell cameras? It’s sure not slowing the Trump juggernaut. … If the Never Back Down PAC had spent every dime that has thus far gone to TV ads and canvassers on sculpting a giant golden idol alongside I-80 in central Iowa that depicts DeSantis kicking an immigrant child in the ass, there is no available evidence that their candidate would be worse off than he is today.
Republican political strategists Curt Anderson and Alex Castellanos were even more brutal in a Politico op-ed:
The myth: An army of paid doorknockers would fan out across the country, even in states beyond the early primaries, and deliver the nomination to DeSantis. It’s hilarious. If you ever believed that it was possible to affect the trajectory of a presidential campaign with underemployed losers going door to door in between puffs of strawberry-flavored vapes, you are vaping an intoxicant yourself. …
Anyone near a campaign recently knows how this works: In 2023, no one in America wants a stranger coming to their door for any reason. And if they were given the choice between door knockers who were selling politicians or membership in a cult, it would be a close call.
Other critics of the DeSantis campaign have zeroed in on the candidate’s own shortcomings in the retail politics that are so necessary in Iowa. But on the other hand, there was nothing inherently wrong with the campaign’s grand strategy of portraying DeSantis as a more reliable MAGA standard-bearer and general-election winner than Trump, or with its ground-heavy approach to Iowa, which in many respects was a better-funded version of what worked for Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016. So perhaps some of the wastage was attributable to DeSantis’s target rather than his clumsy choice of weapons or inadequate ammunition.
DeSantis was not, after all, the only Trump rival to blow through a lot of money with little to show for it. As the Times noted in its piece on RDS, backers of Tim Scott spent over $50 million before he dropped out well before Iowa, and Vivek Ramaswamy (who was mostly spending his own money) spent over $30 million to win three delegates. Another self-funder, Doug Burgum, blew through over $40 million between his campaign and his super-PAC before he quit in early December. And while we don’t have anything like a final tally for surviving Trump challenger Nikki Haley, her campaign and super-PAC had spent just south of $80 million prior to the voting in New Hampshire, where she was heavily outspending Trump.
There’s an old joke about a struggling dog-food company holding a board meeting in which, after hearing about how the company uses the finest ingredients and the best packaging and the most sophisticated marketing campaign, one listener sums up the problem: “Dogs don’t like it.” As in 2016 and 2020, Republican voters don’t like what Trump’s rivals are selling this year. It’s likely there wasn’t a campaign treasury deep enough or candidate attractive enough to deny them the leader they wanted.
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