A song came to mind as we enter the bound-to-be-consequential but patently unpredictable election year of 2024. The chorus goes like this:
[Lyrics omitted]
Fans of 1970's classic rock will undoubtedly recognize the Eagles' "Best of My Love" words, a song obviously written to describe the end of a brief but passionate relationship. It's highly doubtful, at least, that the band members who penned the lines ever considered the tune as applying to politics. (Here's a video of the single, should you choose to reminisce.) From personal experience, the song isn't as easy to sing around a campfire as the group's "Take It Easy" or "Peaceful Easy Feeling" or "Tequila Sunrise", but it works in other ways, too.
The winding down of political relationships is exactly what's happening in Iowa and New Hampshire these days, as the Hawkeye State's caucuses and Granite State's primary are now basically two and three weeks away, respectively. The surviving GOP candidates certainly must wake up every morning wondering… what's going to happen today? It's impossible to prophesy, which is fitting for this entire year, really. Is it slippin' away, though?
One Republican candidate in particular is taking the final campaign phases seriously. In a lengthy report titled "Two Minute Warning: On the Road in Iowa With Ron DeSantis", the always reliable Philip Wegmann wrote at Real Clear Politics recently:
[Quotes from article omitted]
And work hard DeSantis has done. He entered the GOP race late and decided to announce his candidacy on Twitter, a stunt that went remarkably wrong when the platform crashed before the candidate had a chance to say anything. It was an inauspicious beginning for the Florida governor, who likely surmised that his wildly efficacious Florida experience would translate to the national campaign trail.
It hasn't.
DeSantis's failure to catch proverbial fire isn't necessarily his fault, as he pointed out to Wegmann in the report that is definitely worth reading in its entirety if you have time. Gov. Ron has been swamped by the tsunami of news coverage surrounding Donald Trump's legal woes, which has only served to rally the former president's troops around him and weave them into a tighter knot than there was to begin with.
But it isn't necessarily just Trump that's credited with DeSantis's (somewhat) underwhelming 2023 campaign narrative. It's really just simple human nature. For a conservative Republican electorate quite conditioned to Trump after eight years of the career real estate developer/tabloid celebrity/reality TV star, DeSantis's comparatively mild-mannered spiel just couldn't keep up. It's not that people disliked Gov. Ron, in most cases they just liked Trump better as a figurehead of the type of political leader who fits these impossible times.
[Article continues discussing the Republican primary race dynamics]
