How DeSantis went from 40% support before Trump was indicted to just 5% when he withdrew from the presidential race

In January 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was largely considered the future of the Republican Party and was the favorite to take down former President Donald Trump.

But on Sunday, DeSantis retreated to Florida after a campaign stop in South Carolina, released a four-and-a-half-minute video about X in which he announced he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Trump.

A series of four separate indictments allowed Trump to brand himself a political martyr for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots — and an increasingly disorganized DeSantis campaign riddled with personnel and money problems led to a rapid decline for the governor.

When 2023 began, DeSantis had not yet announced he was running for president, but he already had nearly 35 percent support, according to a FiveThirtyEight polling average. This was only about 10 points behind Trump, who had already made it public that he would seek office again in 2024.

However, upon leaving the race on Sunday, DeSantis was at just 11 percent support in the national average, compared to Trump’s 66 percent. And on Sunday in New Hampshire, two separate polls had DeSantis with just 6 percent support among Republican voters.

DeSantis has struggled to regain ground in the polls after four different indictments against Donald Trump over the past year sent the former president on the rise. One indictment came in March, another in June and two more in August — along with an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that month

But before results could be delivered in the first Granite State on Tuesday, DeSantis ended his bid and endorsed Trump despite the ex-president’s relentless name-calling over the past year.

DeSantis’ move comes after a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses on January 15, where he received 21.2 percent of the vote, behind Trump’s dominant 51 percent and ahead of United Nations Ambassador Nikki’s 19.1 percent. Haleuy.

The first sign of trouble in DeSantis’ bid came in March, when the first charges were filed against Trump in connection with the “hush money” payments he made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. The New York indictment included 34 criminal counts of first-degree falsification of corporate records.

Just days after the March incident, Trump saw a nearly 10 percentage point increase in early April. Meanwhile, DeSantis simultaneously saw a 5 percent decline.

With some peaks and valleys along the way, DeSantis began to see a downward trend, as did other candidates, while Trump began to climb higher and higher.

Then in June, a second federal indictment came against Trump in the Southern District of Florida, alleging he took classified White House documents after leaving office in January 2017 to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach. The 40 indictments allege he mishandled sensitive documents and engaged in a conspiracy to prevent the government from recovering the materials.

By July, DeSantis had fallen below 20 percent support nationally (19.5 percent) and Trump had risen to 53 percent against about a dozen other candidates in the primaries.

DeSantis saw a huge decline from January 2023 to January 2024. He left the race with just 11% support

August was likely an endorsement month for Trump’s front-runner status.

On the first day of August, a court in Washington DC filed charges against Trump for the attack on the Capitol on January 6. It accuses the former president of conspiring to defraud the government and disenfranchise voters, and of obstructing the official process for the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Then, just a few days later, on August 8, the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home to execute a search warrant to obtain classified documents he had removed from D.C. in connection with the indictment of him in June.

On August 14 – less than a week later – a grand jury in Georgia charged Trump with 13 counts over allegations that he tried to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in the key swing state. Eighteen other co-conspirators were also charged.

All of the events in August, especially the raid, enraged Trump’s supporters. In fact, polls showed that Republican voters felt even more emboldened to support him in 2024, following the raid and the two separate indictments related to the 2020 election.

By September, Trump was earning about 60 percent support and DeSantis had fallen to about 11 percent, close to where he remained in the national polls for the rest of the election until dropping out on Sunday.

A New Hampshire Republican primary poll released Sunday shows Nikki Haley trailing Donald Trump 19% among Republican voters in the state — but 1% ahead of the former president among independent voters. DeSantis was only at 6% and dropped out of the race later in the day

And polls from January 2024, ahead of the New Hampshire primary, show Trump with more than 66 percent support nationally.

Trump and Haley are the only remaining Republican candidates in the primaries. As of Monday, Haley has 12.3 percent support nationally.

DeSantis’ 25-point decline over the course of a year was fueled not only by what Trump calls the “witch hunts” against him, but also by an eight-month campaign plagued with problems.

After a faltering start to his campaign that included a crashed Twitter Spaces launch in May, DeSantis never seemed able to fully recover.

Throughout the campaign, there was talk that he was sitting awkwardly on the stump, and rumors circulated that he wore lifts in his cowboy boots to appear taller.

Early on, DeSantis had an impressive fundraising total, but by July he had cut a third of his staff, a total of 38 assistants. In addition, several reports indicated that he was hemorrhaging money from his donors and by the end of the campaign, several donors fled with top dollar.