Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida suspended his campaign for president on Sunday and endorsed former President Donald J. Trump, marking a spectacular implosion for a candidate once seen as having the best chance to dethrone Mr. Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee in 2024.
His departure from the race just two days before the New Hampshire primary election leaves Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, as Mr. Trump’s last rival standing.
Mr. DeSantis’s devastating 30-percentage-point loss to Mr. Trump in the Iowa caucuses last Monday had left him facing a daunting question: Why keep going? On Sunday, he provided his answer, acknowledging there was no point in soldiering on without a “clear path to victory.”
“I am today suspending my campaign,” Mr. DeSantis said in a video posted after The New York Times reported he was expected to leave the race, adding: “Trump is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden. That is clear. I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honor that pledge. He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear.”
Mr. DeSantis had flown home to Tallahassee late Saturday after campaigning in South Carolina. He had been expected to appear at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Sunday afternoon, but it was canceled.
Even before Mr. DeSantis made his announcement, Mr. Trump had begun speaking about his candidacy in the past tense. “May he rest in peace,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DeSantis at a Saturday evening rally in Manchester.
Last week, Mr. DeSantis had started signaling that he might be looking to exit the race, casting his eyes forward to the 2028 election and conceding that Mr. Trump had won an overwhelming victory in Iowa.
Chaos punctuated the last days of his campaign, just as it had the first, when he kicked off his campaign with a widely mocked and technically marred livestream event on Twitter. Over the weekend, Mr. DeSantis’s schedule was in constant flux, as he flew between New Hampshire and South Carolina with little notice, postponing events and finally canceling his appearances on the Sunday morning political shows.
Mr. DeSantis’s endorsement of Mr. Trump was as quick as it was perfunctory. The Florida governor offered no rationale for supporting Mr. Trump other than the former president had support from most Republicans in the polls — and that he wasn’t Ms. Haley. Mr. DeSantis also couldn’t resist taking one last shot at his party’s front-runner, recycling criticism of Mr. Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
In throwing his support to Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis seemed to be trying to unite the conservative wing of the party behind the former president while ignoring the fact that he was bending the knee to a man who had ridiculed him as if it were a blood sport.
After announcing his run for president in May with lofty expectations, Mr. DeSantis and his campaign proved a costly flop, spending tens of millions of dollars in concert with well-funded outside groups to little apparent effect.
Mr. Trump’s constant mockery — about everything from Mr. DeSantis’s facial expressions to his choice of footwear — degraded his image as a confident conservative warrior. Over the course of his campaign, Mr. DeSantis’s national poll numbers fell by roughly half, a seeming indictment of both his skills as a candidate and his strategy of trying to run to Mr. Trump’s right. A vaunted turnout and canvassing machine paid for by his super PAC, Never Back Down, hardly seemed to make a dent in the race.
At points, it felt as if Mr. DeSantis was careening from one embarrassment to the next, as his campaign dealt with setbacks like mass layoffs and the fallout from producing a social media video that featured a Nazi symbol.
In Iowa, his brash promise to win proved empty. Instead, he barely beat Ms. Haley, whose more moderate image seemed a poor fit for the state’s socially conservative Republicans. Pouring resources into Iowa starved Mr. DeSantis’s efforts in New Hampshire and South Carolina, two of the other early nominating states, where his poll numbers cratered. His loss of support from both voters and donors meant that there was little point in continuing on to more inevitable defeats.
While he had started his race in a relatively strong position, polls now showed Mr. DeSantis in a distant third place in New Hampshire, drawing around 6 percent of the vote.
Both Mr. DeSantis and his allies seemed to be running perilously low on money. No pro-DeSantis ad had run on New Hampshire television since before Thanksgiving.
On the night of his defeat in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis had tried to spin his performance into a positive, saying that as the second-place finisher he had “punched his ticket” out of the state.
As it turned out, that ticket was valid for less than a week.
