On Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida went out on a limb. On Tuesday, it snapped.
A day after he swooped into the Republican major for Kentucky governor with a last-minute endorsement — a transfer that turned the race into an apparent proxy battle between himself and former President Donald J. Trump — Mr. DeSantis watched his chosen candidate lose in a landslide to the Trump-backed rival.
To make issues worse for Mr. DeSantis, a Republican he had endorsed conceded to a Democratic opponent within the mayor’s race in Jacksonville, the most important metropolis in his state.
Mr. DeSantis’s preparations to enter the 2024 major are intensifying. He has held a collection of personal dinners in Tallahassee with prime donors, and on Tuesday he took a direct shot at Mr. Trump over his dodging whether or not he would signal a six-week abortion ban.
However on Monday, Mr. DeSantis made a last-minute endorsement and robocall for Kelly Craft, a former United Nations ambassador below Mr. Trump and a member of a Republican megadonor household.
The transfer confounded Kentucky Republicans and people working for her rivals: Whereas Ms. Craft spent heavily on the race, polls had instructed she was headed for defeat to Daniel Cameron, the state’s lawyer normal, an ally of Senator Mitch McConnell who had garnered Mr. Trump’s endorsement in June 2022. Representatives for Mr. DeSantis declined to remark.
“Kelly shares the identical imaginative and prescient we do in Florida,” Mr. DeSantis stated in a recording that was despatched to Republican voters on the eve of the first.
It ended up being removed from shut. With almost 90 p.c of ballots counted, she was in a distant third, incomes simply 17 p.c of the vote to Mr. Cameron’s 47 p.c.
“Let me simply say,” Mr. Cameron stated in his victory speech, “the Trump tradition of successful is alive and effectively in Kentucky!”
His alternative of phrases was telling: As Mr. DeSantis nears the announcement of a presidential marketing campaign, his stump speech has usually known as on the Republican Social gathering to finish its “tradition of dropping” in the course of the Trump period. On Monday, the phrase was splashed throughout the entrance web page of The Des Moines Register after the governor campaigned in Iowa over the weekend.
The Trump workforce cheered Mr. Cameron’s line. The truth is, one in every of Mr. Trump’s prime advisers, Chris LaCivita, had presaged it lower than an hour earlier than Mr. Cameron spoke. When the race was known as, Mr. LaCivita wrote on Twitter, “a lot for the #alwaysbackdown tradition of successful.”
By no means Again Down is the title of the primary tremendous PAC backing Mr. DeSantis. One in all that tremendous PAC’s prime strategists is Jeff Roe, whose consulting agency additionally labored for Ms. Craft.
The unsuccessful election-eve endorsement of Ms. Craft was just like the last-minute backing that Mr. DeSantis gave to Harmeet Dhillon within the race to guide the Republican Nationwide Committee in January.
Mr. DeSantis known as for “new blood” the day earlier than that vote. The incumbent, Ronna McDaniel, received simply the subsequent day.
In the meantime, Mr. DeSantis’s night time didn’t get higher in Jacksonville, the place Daniel Davis, the Republican endorsed by the governor, misplaced to Donna Deegan, a Democrat, for an open seat. Mr. DeSantis had supplied little assist to Mr. Davis past his endorsement, not visiting the town to marketing campaign. Early outcomes confirmed Ms. Deegan main Mr. Davis with roughly 52 p.c of the vote.
Jacksonville has had Republican mayors for many of the final 30 years.
