Gov. Ron DeSantis’ departure from the GOP race this week gives Republicans yet another chance to learn a vital lesson. Somehow, though, we just don’t seem to be getting it.
In the late spring of 2023, I was talking to a friend who had just taken a job with Never Back Down, the DeSantis super PAC. He was explaining to me that the DeSantis team had essentially given control of their entire operation to Axiom, a massive GOP consulting firm. “It’s over,” I replied, “he just lost.”
When another friend (who now works for the Trump Campaign) learned what DeSantis was doing, he couldn’t stop laughing.
In the popular imagination, political consultants are the talented practitioners of a kind of institutional dark arts, transforming bland, untalented politicians into effective electoral prizefighters. If only! Today, Republican consultants only know how to turn unique, exciting candidates into gray, unoriginal vessels for establishment corporatespeak. Like demented alchemists, consultants excel at turning gold into lead. Not a very good trick, really. The real magic, however, happens when they sell that lead for gold.
Sure enough, Axiom took one of the best GOP governors in the country and drove his campaign (and at least some of his reputation) into the ground, even as they got rich doing it. When all is said and done, DeSantis 2024 will end up next to Jeb 2016 and others on the long (and growing) list of Republican candidates who paid tens of millions of dollars to consulting firms just
