DeSantis Holds Strong After Primary Defeat: Is a Comeback Brewing?

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Most defeated presidential candidates skulk away and stay silent, at least for a while as they try to regroup. Not Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). Since exiting the 2024 Republican primary, the Florida governor has remained very much in the public eye.

DeSantis announced hundreds of millions of dollars in new toll relief for Florida commuters. He signed a new anti-squatting law that was hailed as both tough on crime and a defense of property rights. He has said that under his leadership, the state has rescued some 200 Floridians from the instability in Haiti while trying to avert a migration crisis at home. And many DeSantis supporters took a victory lap after the state’s settlement with the Walt Disney Company.

It is a return to form for DeSantis, who used his Florida record to propel himself to the top tier of this year’s Republican presidential field. But he proved no match for former President Donald Trump, so he suspended his campaign after a distant second-place finish in Iowa. Trump is now the presumptive nominee for the third straight election cycle.

DeSantis’s decision to keep himself a viable national Republican leader suggests he hasn’t given up. Based on past history, DeSantis would be a front-runner for the post-Trump GOP nomination.

After all, Republicans from 1948 to 2012 nominated a string of White House hopefuls who had sought the presidency unsuccessfully, some multiple times. Under this participation trophy tradition, DeSantis could spend the next few years burnishing his credentials with the Republican base, through the end of his eight-year, two-term Florida governorship in January 2027 and into the 2028 nomination fight. That timing would set him up nicely since the GOP nod will be open whether former Trump wins or loses this November in his rematch against President Joe Biden.

But nothing’s for sure in presidential politics, and much less so since Trump, in 2016, won one of the biggest upsets in American political history over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. To gain the GOP nomination that year, Trump had already beaten a swath of repeat Republican candidates — and some prominent first-run ones, too, such as then-rising star Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL). And DeSantis’s desultory performance in the early 2024 GOP nominating contests doesn’t exactly exude political strength.

DeSantis, 45, ended his presidential campaign on Jan. 21, two days before the New Hampshire primary. DeSantis in bowing out of the presidential race endorsed Trump for the Republican nomination, unlike former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who ended her own campaign shortly after Super Tuesday.

DeSantis, a central Florida coast House member for nearly six years before winning the Sunshine State’s governorship in 2018, headed back to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee after ending his presidential bid. But a repeat of his Florida-centric strategy from the past few years won’t be easy.

The recent annual Florida legislative session was quieter than in previous years when state lawmakers helped enact a series of laws on education, “wokeness,” and other cultural touch-tone policies aimed at bolstering his looming presidential bid.

The governor’s loss at Trump’s hands inevitably hung over the 2024 legislative session, with Republican legislators, holding commanding majorities in the state House and state Senate, largely pushing the agenda.

“Last year, it was all about DeSantis’s running for president. That was the subtext to each bill,” Florida state Rep. Mike Beltran, a Republican, said in an interview. “Ron DeSantis is salty about what happened. That comes through in a few subtle ways here and there.”

A second DeSantis run could still work

Florida political experts think DeSantis could have a chance for the 2028 Republican nomination.

“You can reintroduce yourself multiple times to Americans, and Americans accept it,” said Jamie Miller, a former executive director of the Florida Republican Party who has also worked on campaigns in Mississippi, North Carolina, and West Virginia. “He’s a young guy. Maybe he’ll be able to put together what was the Trump coalition and build a winning coalition for 2028.”

Still, Miller said, DeSantis would have to find a new funding model for another presidential campaign. He relied far too heavily on super PACs, financed by big-dollar donors, and didn’t get much support from small-dollar donors. That’s in line with the oft-noted social awkwardness DeSantis frequently displayed on the campaign trail during his 2024 presidential bid.

“He had major money from super PACs, but he was never able to show real support from small donors, giving $18 or even $180,” Miller said.

Moreover, “so much of it depends on whether Trump wins or loses,” Miller said. “If Biden wins a second term, he will be so much older, at age 86, and voters may clamor for a younger person. So, DeSantis absolutely can be viable in 2028.”

Florida Atlantic University political science professor Kevin Wagner thinks so, too.

“History has shown us that when political leaders decide to run for president, it is hard to drop that ambition,” Wagner wrote in an email. “Joe Biden is an example of a politician who ran unsuccessfully and still managed to eventually win the presidency.”

Added Wagner, who also is a dean at FAU, in Boca Raton, “As governor of Florida, he can bolster his reputation and build a record to showcase to potential voters on the national stage once Donald Trump is no longer competing with him for the same voters. He can also use this time to build a campaign organization in the early primary states which would limit the ability of other GOP candidates to compete in 2028. It is also a time to build fundraising networks.”

DeSantis staying in the spotlight

DeSantis never disappeared. He’s made regular Fox News appearances in recent weeks. And on the eve of the Feb. 24 South Carolina Republican primary, where Trump was trying to finish off Haley, DeSantis spoke in the state capital of Columbia on the need for lawmaker term limits.

Trump, of course, looms large in DeSantis’s pre-2028 plans. So far, it’s been an up-and-down relationship.

A little more than a day after dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Trump, DeSantis killed any effort by Florida lawmakers to have taxpayers foot the bill for the former president’s legal costs. In a Jan. 22 X post, DeSantis reposted a Politico story headlined, “Some Florida Republicans want taxpayers to pay Trump’s legal bills.”

DeSantis commented: “But not the Florida Republican who wields the veto pen.”

The quip showed a lighter side that often seemed lacking on the presidential campaign trail but is now blossoming. Two days after exiting the presidential race, DeSantis posted a selfie video with his young son Mason predicting the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers would face off in the Super Bowl. The prediction proved prescient, as Kansas City went on to claim the football championship.

Back in the adult world, DeSantis on Jan. 31 won big in court when a federal judge in Tallahassee dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Walt Disney Company over the state’s dismantling of the entertainment giant’s special taxing district. Disney had claimed DeSantis violated the company’s freedom of speech when he asked state lawmakers to dissolve the Reedy Creek board that managed the 25,000 acres that encompass Walt Disney World in central Florida.

Still, not everyone is impressed by DeSantis’s efforts to stay in the political spotlight.

“He used up all his political capital last year. He’s got nearly three years left, but he’s a lame duck now,” said Beltran, who in the 2024 race endorsed Trump over his home-state governor.

This year, “he didn’t really have a legislative agenda. He did everything he wanted to last year. Then he went and ran for president,” said Beltran, a rising star Florida Republican representing part of Hillsborough County, in the Tampa Bay area, and areas to the south, including some of Manatee County.

GOP nominations won after previous losses

Republicans long turned to familiar faces when choosing nominees, including Thomas Dewey, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Each can offer lessons for DeSantis about political perseverance as he eyes a 2028 comeback bid.

Dewey had been the 1944 Republican nominee. The New York governor and former mob-busting Manhattan district attorney had run gamely against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, earning 99 electoral votes, the Democrat’s worst showing in his four White House races. Republicans turned to Dewey again in 1948 but lost to Democratic President Harry S. Truman in one of the biggest upsets of American political history, before Trump’s 2016 win over Clinton.

Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960 famously lost a close White House race to John F. Kennedy. Eight years later, he was back as the 1968 Republican nominee — “tan, rested, and ready” — and this time he won, beating Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

The 1968 Republican nomination fight saw a late-game effort by California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who had only been in office a year and a half. But Nixon had the race sewn up by the Miami national convention, and Reagan bowed out gracefully. Reagan led a harder-charging presidential bid in 1976, almost nabbing the nomination from President Gerald Ford, vice president for eight months before assuming the presidency after Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal.

Reagan finally claimed the Republican nomination in 1980 — and of course the presidency. He chose as his running mate the Republican primary runner-up: former Texas congressman and frequent executive branch job appointee George W. Bush.

After eight years in Reagan’s shadow, Bush won the Republican nomination and the White House in 1988. The next open-race Republican nominee, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, had already sought national office several times by the time he finally prevailed in 1996. But the Kansas Republican fell far short against President Bill Clinton, the Democratic incumbent.

Four years later, Sen. John McCain was an underdog for the Republican nomination against Texas Gov. George W. Bush, whose father had lost the White House to Clinton in 1992. McCain won an early upset victory in the New Hampshire primary but found it hard to keep up the momentum against Bush, the GOP establishment pick. After falling short, McCain kept up his national profile and finally won the Republican nomination in 2008, only to fail badly against Democratic rival Barack Obama.

One of McCain’s vanquished 2008 GOP nomination rivals, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, came back to win the 2012 party nod after a protracted fight. But Romney proved no match for Obama, losing badly. Though he got some measure of political redemption by winning a Senate seat from Utah in 2018, which he’s leaving after a single, six-year term after clashing with the Trump wing of the party.

Of the bunch, Reagan offers the most hopeful lessons for DeSantis. Counted out repeatedly and then considered too old for the presidency by many, a problem DeSantis doesn’t face, Reagan kept his eyes on the White House even as his early bids flamed out.

Of course, there’s a less inspiring group whose experiences overlap with that of DeSantis. Recent governors such as Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker were widely touted in Republican circles and ran for president in the 2012 and 2016 cycles, respectively. Neither made it anywhere near the Republican nomination.

DeSantis is more in the latter category, said Beltran, who graduated from Harvard Law School three years after DeSantis. (The Florida governor went to Yale University for undergrad, while Beltran is a University of Pennsylvania alumnus.)

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However, there’s still time for that to change.

Beltran said, “He could get the magic back, but for now, he’s lost it.”

David Mark is the managing editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.