After doing a bit better than expected in this week’s Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis is off to South Carolina. And oblivion.

For a seemingly smart guy and accomplished vote-getter, the Florida governor, who supposedly had been fully prepared to battle 2024 front-runner Donald Trump, has proven to be a dud both as a candidate and as a strategist. Through the campaign, he has shown no ability to learn from his mistakes, or from Trump.

Republicans don’t like to nominate rookies. Since 1944, there have been 12 elections where the GOP nominee was not the incumbent. Eight times Republicans nominated a candidate who had previously run nationally, and the other four times included Dwight Eisenhower, a towering public figure in 1952, George W. Bush and Donald Trump — both well-known and highly experienced in the cauldron of media scrutiny.

The only true outsider the Republicans ever nominated was Barry Goldwater, who crashed to the most disastrous electoral defeat since Alf Landon and opened the door to a massive overexpansion of government: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

For the GOP, experience has worked, and inexperience has been a mess. DeSantis and the others showed themselves to be the GOP “B” Team, with former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley perhaps a B-plus.

The road was certainly open for DeSantis in early 2023, as he was running strong against Trump and leading in several GOP state primaries. But once the race was on, DeSantis showed he had no message and no strategy, and that he completely failed to understand what made — and makes — the former president so formidable.

No message

To be fair, DeSantis had a lot to say, but his messaging was a toxic mix of gloom, excessiveness and minutiae. DeSantis’s message was, “America is in decline!” followed by a tedious list of his policy actions in Florida.

Nobody wants to hear........

© The Hill