Bluegrass Outcomes
By 
For those not paying attention, Daniel Cameron won the Kentucky GOP primary going away. Surprisingly, Ryan Quarles placed second, several points ahead of Kelly Craft. That wouldn’t be very interesting at all, except:
Whereas Trump endorsed Cameron – the early front-runner – last June, DeSantis issued an eleventh hour blessing of Craft on Monday, even as the wealthy former U.N. ambassador faced a significant deficit in public polling… “He’s subservient to his political consultants,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, of DeSantis. Jeremy Hughes, a Nevada-based Republican consultant, said it was an embarrassing miscalculation for both DeSantis and Craft’s consultants, who have also worked for Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz backed Craft in the race, headlining two pre-election rallies in Kentucky alongside her. “It was a totally stupid pay to play move by her consultants. Axiom ran Kelly’s campaign and are running Desantis’ super PAC. Ted Cruz has sold himself out to whatever Axiom tells him to do and Ron seems to be on the same path,” Hughes said. “And Kelly said she was voting for Trump, so that makes it even more embarrassing.”
Stephen Voss cautions against an interpretation that pits Trump vs. Desantis…
The interesting questions are about Desantis’ judgment. As Stephen points out, we don’t actually know when Desantis made his endorsement of Craft (could have been last month) and certainly we don’t have any good reason to think that the Desantis endorsement moved the dial in any direction. But that Desantis determined to intervene on behalf of a candidate who wasn’t looking all that great and ended up losing badly… you can’t love what that has to say about his strategic thinking or that of his staff.