The race to be the top loser in the GOP primary process just lost a competitor.
Comments
Breaking news: Ron DeSantis Drops Out of Presidential Race and Endorses Trump.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida suspended his campaign for president on Sunday, just two days before the New Hampshire primary election, and endorsed former President Donald J. Trump.
It marked a spectacular implosion for a candidate once seen as having the best chance to dethrone Mr. Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee in 2024.
Weird timing, but it was inevitable.
Apparently not an adequate strong man.
The pic in The Guardian looks like a stand-up comedian whose joke bombed.
However, I’m still unsure where the Christie and Haley votes go. Do they go to Trump, or do they go thrid party or stay home.
I am sure the majority of them will go to Trump once he’s the nominee. The question is whether the minority who don’t will be enough to impact the general election.
I think a lot of the effect of the non-MAGA Republican vote is baked in at this point. You should always be skeptical of polls taken during a primary that claim they won’t vote for a certain candidate in the general. Those types of polls have always overstated things, even before Trump, but in the Trump era in particular we’ve seen how easily people are able to rationalize their vote for a guy they acknowledge is unfit.
That’s not to say Trump has had no effect in pushing away Republican-leaning voters. Some left in 2016, some in 2020, and possibly the insurrection may have furthered it along. But I don’t think there’s going to be any sort of mass defections anytime soon. Even Democratic overperformance during 2022 and 2023, while a good sign in itself, only reinforced how stagnant and polarized the electorate really is, with gains only possible around the margins.
In the Trump – Haley/Pelosi thread I linked an NYT story about the campaign against DEI, which is largely organized through the Claremont Institute and funded by the chair of the Institute, who is apparently the largest donor to individual GOP campaigns. While looking at the above @Flat Earth Luddite: link I stumbled on an old story on the guy, Thomas Klingelstein. Claremont is a big player in DeUseless’ efforts to bring that old time religion to education in FL and Klingelstein has been a major donor to DeUseless.
If the country is turning rightward it’s because at least since Goldwater rich a-holes have been dumping tons of money into movement conservatism. Given the amounts of money, their failure to completely take over is a testament to the awfulness of their political ideas. But they’re still spending away.
@CSK: It always looked like he’d just hit the last note on the ending guitar solo from Running on Empty to me. Or maybe he’s playing Air Guitar Hero.
Trump just described it as a “great honor” to receive DeSantis’s endorsement.
@CSK: I saw and heard this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AigHoHWktO0
DeSantis closes out his campaign with a bogus Churchill quote.
The NY TImes reports DeSantis goof as: “DeSantis Appears to Misattribute a Quote to Churchill.” Not sure what they are trying to convey with their choice of words. “Appears to…” seems to suggest “maybe CHurchill was in a room by himself somewhere and might have said such a thing so we really can’t dismiss it out of hand,” but the International Churchill Society debunked the quote a few years ago:
“We base this on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers.”
Conservatives have a weird habit of citing fabricated quotes.
@Barry:
I’m sorry Ron, but you can not terminate your campaign early. You must carry it to term.
(((ding ding ding))) We have a winner.
By the way, you owe me a quart of grapefruit juice.
I laughed so hard that I gagged up some of my juice.
@Jack:
Florida is doing great.
By any measure unrelated to the economy or sinkholes, absolutely. Those People still don’t have coat hangers!
