DeSantis booked his ticket out of Iowa – but is he still on the road to nowhere?

Minutes after his second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses was confirmed, Ron DeSantis came onstage in a hotel ballroom to declare that everything was going according to plan in his campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination.

“They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us,” the Florida governor told a crowd of supporters who had made liberal use of a nearby cash bar on Monday evening, in the hours they waited for him to speak in West Des Moines.

“They were predicting that we wouldn’t be able to get our ticket punched here, out of Iowa. But, I can tell you because of your support, in spite of all of that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa,” DeSantis said.

Ticket to where? The Florida governor did not say, and there are few indications he is primed to win, or even repeat his second-place finish, when New Hampshire Republicans hold their primary next week.

While DeSantis’s first runner-up status in Iowa is good enough for his campaign to continue, he finished 30 percentage points behind the victor, Donald Trump, and just two points ahead of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor whose campaign is hoping for a win in New Hampshire.

DeSantis’s strategy called for victory in Iowa, and the governor campaigned in all 99 counties, won the endorsement of the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and was supported by more than $33m in advertising.

None of that was enough to keep Trump from an overwhelming victory, and with the former president leading the polls of the other states that will vote in the coming weeks, it’s not clear where DeSantis can regain momentum.

“I don’t see much good for him in the short