Ron DeSaster

Dead Bounce Ron and the High Roller / Private Jet Doom Loop https://t.co/r9ZIMNZNbr via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 24, 2023

Important points by Josh Marshall, here, concerning Dead Bounce Ron and his most enthusiastic supporters:

As we continue to watch the ignominious collapse of Ron DeSantis’s campaign (predicted many months ago by yours truly but not like I’m focusing on that or anything), there’s a curious bit of backstory I’m reminded of. But before we get to that I wanted to flag this weekend New York Times article. It’s so passively devastating I think DeSantis’s estate might have a plausible wrongful death claim against the authors…

My takeaway…: The campaign appears to be trapped in a sort of people-hating, private-jet-taking death loop. We learn from the article that Ron and wife Casey really, really like flying on private jets, which of course cost a ton of money. I confess that I’m not a huge fan of flying. But if I were, a private jet would probably be pretty cool. But it’s also not hard to see their extreme attachment to private jets as part of or at least a symbol of not liking being around regular people. Maybe not liking being around anybody at all. Some people just want the privacy to unwind with a handful of pudding…

One of the ways the campaign has burned through a ton of money is the travel on private jets. The campaign also remains highly dependent on high-end donors rather than small donors. Unlike with online small donors, you’ve got to attend fundraisers in person to collect those checks. Which means a lot more travel. On private jets. Which means a lot more spending.

It all comes back to the fact that normal people (who don’t max out their federal limits with a single check) aren’t giving the campaign enough money. And maybe that’s not a huge surprise because the DeSantises don’t like being around those people, which is why they’re addicted to private jets. Thus we get back to the root of the problem…

When Ron was still riding high I spoke to some Republican insiders and others who talk to the insiders who won’t talk to me. The thing that came through most consistently was that these folks were excited about DeSantis because he was the neo-Jebbite candidate in the race. A Jebbite candidate clothed in a MAGA suit to succeed in the post-Trump era, to be sure, but still a Jebbite candidate. I imagine that this would seem odd to a lot of people since whatever ones feelings about Jeb Bush I don’t think most people ever thought of him as scary or evil. The fact that DeSantis was, like Bush, a Governor of Florida just cemented the equation. It also gave him a footing with many of the same Florida high-roller donors, or at least same kind of Florida high roller donors…

Of course, DeSantis’s billionaire backers were happy to go along with whatever kind of campaign he was going to run – as long as he was successful. But he wasn’t. And that’s the key to the campaign’s still-unfolding free-fall. There was never a real DeSantis constituency, aside perhaps from some Incel/mass shooting message boards. What there was was a pretty big move-on-from-Trump constituency.

It wasn’t a majority certainly and it wasn’t Never Trump or anti-Trump. But there was a substantial minority of Republicans interested in moving on from Trump’s baggage and the mounting evidence of his electoral weakness — if it could be done. What DeSantis did do last Fall was consolidate almost all of that move-on constituency based on the mistaken belief that he could pull it off. Once that impression started to falter there was no real support for the guy himself to hold on to. And here we are — on a private jet to nowhere.

It's very important for DeSantis that the GOP primary be seen as a two-person race. In two early-voting states, it isn't. https://t.co/dcxrwNwaEu

— Philip Bump (@pbump) July 24, 2023

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Dead Bounce DeSasterPost + Comments (112)