For DeSantis, 2023 didn’t go as planned. He still left his mark on Florida.

Ron DeSantis went to bed last New Year’s Eve looking at a favorable path to the presidency.

At least 10 national and key-state polls in December 2022 showed Florida’s governor leading former President Donald Trump in the race for the White House. He was fresh off a landslide gubernatorial reelection. A New York Times columnist called him the year’s ”biggest winner” in American politics. He was about to publish a memoir seen as a preface to an inevitable campaign.

Then 2023 happened.

Whether you want to call the first year of DeSantis’ second term as governor a success or a failure is a matter of perspective. Some things worked; many didn’t. Either way, the year did not unfold the way he and his supporters expected.

He’s far behind Trump in most polls, clinging to second place in a fight with former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley. This month, the primary super PAC supporting his presidential bid, Never Back Down, split with its chief strategist amid a rift with the campaign.

Through it all, DeSantis’ primary campaign message hasn’t changed: In Florida, I got stuff done. He’s spent the year updating his presidential resume in real time, signing legislation that has not only been central to his campaign, but that has transformed the state.

In January, he appointed a half-dozen conservative directors to the board of New College in Sarasota, part of a move to transform academic policy at the traditionally progressive school. By November, New College had a new president, a new mascot and dozens of new teachers, and the state had lowered the college’s graduation and retention rate goals.

Also in January, DeSantis proposed a law that would challenge U.S. Supreme Court precedent by enabling the state to seek the death penalty for child rapists. Earlier this month, the state announced for the first time that it would use that law to seek death in a case in Lake County.

In May, he signed a bill expanding 2022′s Parental Rights in Education law that, among other things, streamlined the process for controversial books to be removed from school libraries. This month, the nonprofit free expression advocacy group PEN America reported that Florida led the nation in book bans during the 2022-23 school year, with nearly 2,000 instances of bans in 37 districts.

And then there was the law that enabled DeSantis to run for president in the first place. Before SB 7050 passed in April in the Legislature, some questioned whether he might have to resign as governor in order to seek higher office. DeSantis erased any question with one signature.

“We defied the experts, we bucked the elites, we ignored the chatter, we did it our way, the Florida way,” he said during his State of the State address in March. “And the result is that we are the No. 1 destination for our fellow Americans who are looking for a better life.”

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He signed plenty of laws whose futures are playing out in court. One is a six-week abortion ban that would go into effect if the Florida Supreme Court upholds a challenge to the state’s 15-week abortion ban. Another prompted a lawsuit from The Walt Disney Co., which said the state violated its First Amendment rights by targeting it for greater oversight following public criticism of DeSantis’ policies. Another law, aimed at penalizing businesses that allow children into drag shows, was blocked by a U.S. District Court, with the U.S. Supreme Court declining to revive it.

Court challenges to the state’s new laws were always likely. DeSantis signed them anyway.

“He built on the foundations of executive power that Jeb Bush left,” said Liv Coleman, a political science professor at the University of Tampa. “It’s just been further consolidation, further enhancement of his priorities, and the Legislature’s basically been entirely compliant.”

DeSantis has also looked far and wide for moments to appear presidential, from trips to the Mexican border in Texas and Arizona to a visit to San Francisco, where he filmed a video declaring the city “is not vibrant anymore; it’s really collapsed.”

In April, DeSantis led a trade mission to Japan, South Korea, Israel and the United Kingdom. As head of a state with an economy roughly the size of Mexico’s, he was welcomed as a future global ally.

“It’s unusual for a U.S. governor to get a visit like that, and to be received so warmly like that,” Coleman said. “I think the Japanese government saw him as a rising contender, and they were eager to embrace him.”

After Hurricane Idalia hit the Nature Coast in August, DeSantis met frequently with local officials. But he declined to meet with Joe Biden when the president visited the area, saying it would be too much of a security issue. (Asked if he believed that, Biden smiled and replied: “Do you?”)

DeSantis’ photo-op moment of the year came in October, when his administration helped coordinate the evacuation of Americans stuck in Israel following a string of terrorist attacks by Hamas. He met arriving families on the tarmac at Tampa International Airport, shaking hands and snapping photos alongside his wife, Casey, and their kids.

“Biden failed those people and we stepped up and got it done,” he said.

Whether DeSantis becomes president or not, the months of his governorship that overlapped with his campaign will not soon be forgotten, Coleman said. It could be a while before the state sees another leader whose ambition might prove so transformative.

“It would take a long time,” Coleman said. “I think he’ll have a long-lasting impact.”

As state changes, campaign unravels

Boil DeSantis’ 2023 presidential bid into a collage of images and sound bites, and the result is less impressive than his legislative resume. Awkward smiles. Intense laughs. Questions about boot lifts. ”Pudding fingers.” Other than Trump, has any Republican presidential candidate this cycle seen their flaws and foibles so scrutinized?

“When I see DeSantis kiss a baby, it looks like a mechanical act,” said Roderick Hart, a professor of government and former dean at the University of Texas’ Moody College of Communication. “Everything he does that tries to adjust to the region just looks transparent and obvious that he’s trying to make an impression, rather than be a genuine guy that has some things to say.”

This isn’t how DeSantis wanted to come across to people outside his home state. For the first few months of the year, he promoted himself to America through a new memoir, in which he wrote he was “geographically raised in Tampa Bay,” but “culturally” identified more with working-class Ohio and Pennsylvania. He spoke and signed copies of his book in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in March and April, well before declaring his candidacy in late May.

But then came a steady string of miscues, starting the night he launched his campaign with a glitchy Twitter forum with Elon Musk. There was the social media video amplified by a campaign staffer that employed Nazi imagery. There was divisive rhetoric about “slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy and shooting Mexican migrants “stone-cold dead.” There were private debate prep strategy documents that leaked into the public, and moments during those debates when he dodged questions from moderators and other candidates.

In general, the more voters have studied DeSantis, the less they’ve found to like. The percentage of GOP voters who view DeSantis favorably has declined from a high of 37% in February to a low of 29% in November, according to Quinnipiac University polling — a distinct if not drastic swing. The percentage of Republicans who view him negatively, on the other hand, increased from 35% in February to 53% in November — a much more significant swing of 18 points. That’s nearly 1 in 5 voters. (Trump’s favorable/unfavorable ratings are virtually unchanged over the same span.)

In recent presidential polling history, DeSantis’ slide from front-runner to also-ran status doesn’t have a clear precedent, said Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy.

“I can’t equate this to anything else,” Malloy said. “You can draw conclusions about Disney and books and universities being shifted. … We’ve never had a situation like this before. DeSantis and Trump are unique.”

DeSantis has scored a few wins. In Iowa, he secured coveted nominations from popular Gov. Kim Reynolds and influential pastor Bob Vander Plaats. This month, he completed a tour of all 99 counties in Iowa, promising at the last stop that he’d consider relocating the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the state.

Those moments grabbed attention, but they haven’t significantly moved the needle — and other candidates are keeping pace. Haley, for example, got endorsements from New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and the powerful, Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity political network. And she’s pried away donors who once backed other candidates, including DeSantis.

“It’s difficult to go from a statewide effectiveness and success to the national scene,” Hart said. “All he wants to talk about is Florida. People in Iowa don’t live in Florida. And I think it’s a tired story. I don’t think he’s made the case to Iowans that he knows what Iowans are about. He tends to repeat the same things he says to Floridians, who are a different animal.”

Even in Florida, a string of prominent legislators, including Sen. Rick Scott, have endorsed Trump over DeSantis.

DeSantis started 2023 fresh off the high of his landslide gubernatorial victory over Democrat Charlie Crist, a feat he often brings up on the trail. But a Victory Insights poll shared with Republican donors this month shows him trailing Trump by more than 40 points in Florida’s presidential primary, which looms in March.

“Not only is this the lowest we’ve seen him since we began tracking this race over a year ago, it’s the lowest support recorded for him in Florida from any pollster at any point in the race,” Victory Insights senior pollster Ben Galbraith said in a statement. “The DeSantis campaign appears to be in free fall.”

Back in April, DeSantis paid his first official visit to the key early primary state of South Carolina. Curious Republican voters lined up hours in advance outside a Baptist church in Spartanburg. When the venue filled, hundreds more filed into an overflow room to hear him speak.

Eight months later, DeSantis held a town hall in Prosperity, South Carolina, about 40 minutes northwest of Columbia. It was a smaller event than that first one, with no spillover crowd, but the audience was engaged, and so was DeSantis.

The governor called for questions, and voters raised their hands, standing to ask without microphones about immigration, fentanyl, the military, even candy-flavored vapes. DeSantis moved along the edge of the stage, leaning into each question and directly addressing whoever asked it.

Stacey Faile asked what he’d tell Republicans and independents who say they can’t vote for him because of his stance on abortion. He answered by calling it “a very contentious issue,” then pivoting to criticism of California Gov. Gavin Newsom before saying he wouldn’t “disturb” South Carolina’s ban on most abortions.

It wasn’t quite the answer Faile was looking for.

“It would be nice to hear him say what his position would be at a national level as president, how he would look at it,” said Faile, 50, who is in favor of abortion restrictions, but knows women who see it differently. “He needs to back off and stick with, every state can go for this issue and make their decisions; it should not be a national problem. That’s what I was hoping he would say. And he didn’t.”

She left the town hall uncertain, wondering whether DeSantis had done enough that day, and all year, to earn her support.

“Usually, by now, I know who I’m going to vote for,” she said. “Not this year.”