Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’

It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.

When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.

Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying:“Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.

Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”

A year ago, DeSantis had stormed to re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points in what not so long ago was a swing state. He was beating Donald Trump in some opinion polls. He was drawing attention, donor money and headlines such as “DeFuture” in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post newspaper.

The argument seemed compelling: DeSantis could offer the former president’s Maga (“Make America great again”) politics in purer, perfected form, unencumbered by Trump’s age, chaos