Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

As long as Trump is still in the race, running your campaign message as "Trump is great, Trump won the election in 2016 and 2020, he is being railroaded, even though I definitely think he won in 2016 and 2020 I also think he might be unelectable and you should vote for me because I am almost as great as Trump" is going to be a losing strategy.

DeSantis also doesn't really have a compelling reason to be the race or have a distinctive platform. If you asked someone to sum up DeSantis' campaign message in less than 5 words, could anyone do it? Could you get 80 out of 100 people to give you the same answer when you asked them?

Say what you will about them personally or how they ran their campaigns, but Trump, Obama, Bernie Sanders, George W. Bush, Howard Dean, and John McCain all had very clear messages and narratives around why they were running to be President.

DeSantis is just "I'm almost as good as Trump and people might not remember me in 6 years, so I gotta do this now."