In January 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was largely considered the future of the Republican Party and was the favorite to take down former President Donald Trump.
But on Sunday, DeSantis retreated to Florida after a campaign stop in South Carolina, released a four-and-a-half-minute video on X announcing he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Trump.
A series of four separate indictments allowed Trump to brand himself a political martyr for the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots – and an increasingly disorganized DeSantis campaign riddled with staffing and money issues led to a swift decline for the governor.
When 2023 started, DeSantis had not yet announced he was running for president, but was already standing at nearly 35 percent support, according to a FiveThirtyEight polling average. This was only about 10 points behind Trump, who had already made it public he was again seeking office in 2024.
When exiting the race on Sunday, however, DeSantis stood at just 11 percent support in the national average compared to Trump’s 66 percent. And in New Hampshire on Sunday, two separate polls had DeSantis with only 6 percent support among Republican voters.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis started off 2023 with 35% support for a presidential bid, but ended the year with just 11%. Pictured: DeSantis announced Sunday he was leaving the presidential race after eight moths and endorsed former President Donald Trump on his way out the door
DeSantis struggled to regain ground in polls after four different indictments against Donald Trump over the last year saw the former president surge. One indictment came in March, another in June and two others in August – along with an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that month
But before results could be rendered in the first-in-the-primary Granite state on Tuesday, DeSantis ended his bid and endorsed Trump despite the relentless name-calling from the ex-president over the last year.
DeSantis’ move comes after a second place finish in Iowa’s caucuses on January 15, where he earned 21.2 percent of the vote behind Trump’s dominating 51 percent and ahead of United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haleuy’s 19.1 percent.
The first sign of trouble in DeSantis’ bid came in March, when the first indictment came down against Trump related to the ‘hush money’ payments he made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. The New York indictment included 34 criminal charges for first degree falsification of business records.
Just days after the March incidentment, Trump saw a nearly 10 percentage point jump by the beginning of April. Meanwhile, DeSantis saw a 5 percent drop at the same time.
With some peaks and valleys along the way, DeSantis started to see a downward trend, as did other candidates, while Trump began to climb ever further up.
Then came a second federal indictment against Trump in June in the Southern District of Florida for taking classified documents from the White House after leaving office in January 2017 to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach. The 40 criminal charges allege he mishandled sensitive documents and was involved in a conspiracy to obstruct the government from retrieving the materials.
By July, DeSantis had dropped to under 20 percent support on the national level (19.5 percent) and Trump was up to 53 percent against about a dozen other candidates in the primary race.
DeSantis saw a massive decline from January 2023 to January 2024. He exited the race with just 11% support
August was likely a solidifying month for Trump’s frontrunner status.
The first day of August, a Washington D.C. court levied a four-charge indictment against Trump for the January 6 Capitol attack. It charges the former president with conspiring to defraud the government and disenfranchise voters as well as obstructing the official proceeding of certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Then, just a few days later on August 8, the FBI raided Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago in execution of a search warrant to obtain classified documents he removed from D.C. in relation to the June indictment against him.
On August 14 – not even a week later – a grand jury in Georgia charged Trump with 13 counts on allegations he attempted to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win in the key swing state. Eighteen other co-conspirators were also charged.
All of the happenings in August, especially the raid, infuriated Trump supporters. Polls even showed that Republican voters felt even more emboldened to back him in 2024 after the raid and the two separate indictments related to the 2020 election.
By September, Trump was earning around 60 percent support and DeSantis had dropped to around 11 percent, which is near where he remained in national polls for the rest of the election until he dropped out on Sunday.
A New Hampshire Republican primary poll released on Sunday shows Nikki Haley 19% behind Donald Trump among GOP voters in the state – but 1% ahead of the former president among independent voters. DeSantis was only at 6% and dropped out of the race later in the day
And in January 2024 polls released ahead of New Hampshire’s primary election, Trump holds more than 66 percent support nationally.
Trump and Haley are the only remaining Republican candidates in the primary race. As of Monday, Haley holds 12.3 percent support nationally.
DeSantis’ 25-point drop over the course of a year was not only fueled by what Trump dubs the ‘witch hunts’ against him, but also by eight months of a campaign plagued with problems.
After a glitchy start to his campaign with a crashed Twitter Spaces launch in May, DeSantis couldn’t seem to ever fully recover.
Throughout the campaign there was chatter that he was awkward on the stump, and rumors swirled that he was wearing lifts in his cowboy boots to appear taller.
Early on, DeSantis had impressive fundraising totals, but by July he had cut a third of his staff, 38 aides in total. Additionally, several reports indicated he was bleeding money from his donors and toward the end of the campaign, several high-dollar donors were fleeing.