Great expectations suspended

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 23rd of January, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: the rise and fall of the Ron DeSantis campaign.

In May of 2023, DeSantis launched his campaign on a Twitter livestream that didn’t go so well. Nearly 8 months later, DeSantis returned to the platform now called “X” to suspend the campaign, and endorse Donald Trump.

DESANTIS: It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance. They watched his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance, and they see Democrats using lawfare to this day to attack him.

REICHARD: Joining us now to talk about where things go from here is Hunter Baker. He’s provost at North Greenville University in South Carolina. He’s also a regular contributor to World Opinions.

Hunter, good morning.

BAKER: Good morning. Glad to be with you.

REICHARD: Glad you’re here. When DeSantis launched his campaign, he promised to fix problems like the border crisis, illegal drugs, and the economy. He was coming off of big midterm wins in Florida. At the same time, Trump was trying to explain why Republicans didn’t fare well in the midterms elsewhere and also facing several indictments against him.

Given all that, Hunter, why do you think DeSantis wasn’t able to gain more traction?

BAKER: Well, it’s really counterintuitive. When he started, I think people thought he is going to be able to knock the king off. DeSantis had had an incredible win in Florida. People forget that President Obama won Florida twice. And so to take a state that President Obama won twice, and then to win yourself a second term with something like 58% of the vote is unheard of. It’s unbelievable. And so the fact that he was able to do that, it made everybody think if he can do that, then he can solve the national equation and win as well. And at one point, he did poll fairly closely to Donald Trump and two things happened. Trump began to attack DeSantis, calling him DeSanctimonious and he, this is the counterintuitive part: Trump was indicted and the more legal troubles he had, the more his coalition rallied to his side, almost as if to say you will not deny him to us. And so you can just see it, right, that the poll numbers begin to spread, the greater Donald Trump’s legal troubles seemed to be.

REICHARD: So the lawfare tactics seemed to backfire?

BAKER: Well, from from DeSantis’s perspective, from Nikki Haley’s perspective, I mean, it may be the case that there are some folks on the left who may be thinking, we want to face Donald Trump in a national election. And this is in part a way to accomplish that. And they might really prefer to face Trump versus a Ron DeSantis or a Nikki Haley, for example.

REICHARD: Let’s talk about the timing. All the indications going into the weekend were that DeSantis was skipping New Hampshire to prioritize South Carolina. What factors do you think went into his decision to quit early?

BAKER: Well, I went to a major pro-life event in South Carolina a few weeks ago, really expecting to see a lot of DeSantis support, and then maybe Haley support because she had been the governor. But it seemed like there was already, even in that environment, a considerable amount of Trump support, and certainly people there thought that Trump would prevail in South Carolina. So I think that DeSantis thought to himself, I’m gonna go to South Carolina, I’m going to see what kind of support I think I have and whether I can do something there. And I think that he must have concluded that the prospects were not good, and that he needed to wrap up the campaign. And honestly, DeSantis really put everything into Iowa. I think that the entire plan was to win Iowa, to show that Donald Trump was beatable, and to go from there, and it did not happen. And my understanding is that something like half of the people who had pre-committed to DeSantis in Iowa did not ultimately go for him in that contest. If they had, we might be looking at a totally different situation.

REICHARD: When DeSantis endorsed Trump, he not only made clear that he wants Trump to win, but went further and argued why Nikki Haley should lose.

DESANTIS: He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear -- a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism -- that Nikki Haley represents.

REICHARD: Hunter, what do you think is the old Republican guard of yesteryear he’s referring to…and is that really the biggest concern Republicans face now?

BAKER: Well, when you’re talking about the old guard, you’re talking about the Republican party that was primarily a smaller government party; a party that was generally a free trade party, which is kind of a different direction than Donald Trump has gone; a party that probably was generally favorable to legal immigration, and maybe encouraging more of that; and a party that was socially conservative. I think I think the deal that Donald Trump made was that he thought, You know what, I can pick up the social conservatism, at least the pro-life part of it, and then I can combine it with an economic populism with regard to things like immigration and free trade that he thought would be a more appealing package, and he was able to make a whole new coalition out of that. Oh, and also being less inclined to get involved in the foreign affairs of other nations. Trump has talked a lot about the U.S. being a normal country, and not doing things like these grand invasions in the Middle East. And that also has appealed to a lot of people. And that’s, you know, that’s kind of a different brand than the Republican Party has had. You know, at one point they were flush with victory in the Cold War, and they thought we could do anything overseas. And that turned out not to be the case.

REICHARD: Well, tonight is Nikki Haley’s chance to stand out as the alternative to Donald Trump. New Hampshire has open primaries, and that means Independent and undeclared voters can vote in the Republican primary. And that means Haley could cobble together Republicans and Independents who don’t want Trump to be the nominee.

Hunter, what do you expect to see tonight?

BAKER: Well, she does have the support of New Hampshire’s very popular Governor Chris Sununu. Certainly they convinced Chris Christie to get out of the contest for exactly this reason, to try to bolster her chances. First of all, I don’t think she will defeat him. But second, even if she does, I think it’ll be kind of a boomlet. I think that he will go on to win South Carolina convincingly and and to win other places convincingly as well. So, I think I’m with a lot of the other analysts who think that this thing is over and it’s over faster than we thought it would be.

REICHARD: Anything else you’d want to add to this topic?

BAKER: Just that Donald Trump is in an entirely different place than most of us thought he would be. After the end of the election in 2020, I think a lot of us thought that he had ended badly, that the family’s brand was in disgrace, and that there was no future and that was totally incorrect.

REICHARD: Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University in South Carolina. Hunter thanks so much.

BAKER: Thank you.

EICHER: Before we move on, if you’re interested in following the results of the election tonight, WORLD’s got you covered. Check out our election center at wng.org. You’ll find the latest returns along with a list of useful articles about the election. We have a link in today’s program notes.

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