It's official. The governor of Florida, Ron De Santis, has officially presented the papers with which he presents himself as a candidate for the 2024 presidential elections. DeSantis will compete with former President Donald Trump. This afternoon he is scheduled to publicly announce his candidacy through a conversation with tycoon Elon Musk on Twitter and an interview by a former Republican congressman on Fox News.
DeSantis' candidacy has been anticipated since his good electoral result in the elections of November of last year, when he was re-elected governor with a large majority. His good showing contrasted with the disappointment of Trumpist candidates in decisive constituencies. Trump, however, took the first step by introducing his own candidacy and has been trying to dissuade DeSantis from competing with him.
Trump and his supporters have criticized him in public, threatened him with secrets, nicknamed him and even begun to issue negative publicity against him before he was even a candidate. Clearly, the former president sees him as his most fearsome rival. His team has tried to denigrate him in recent hours even with the format of presentation of the candidacy, saying that he goes to twitter so as not to have to interact with other people.
DeSantis has tried in Florida a kind of Trumpism without Trump, with very conservative policies, but without the backpack of scandals and court cases of the former president. It can also offer a project for the future and not get caught up in complaints about the 2020 elections, which Trump falsely claims were rigged.
DeSantis is expected to hold fundraisers this week and next week to hold a rally in Dunedin, the West Florida town where he spent his childhood, outside Tampa.
Already entering the race for the Republican nomination are the only black Republican senator, Tim Scott, former U.S. ambassador to the UN and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley; Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchison; the billionaire entrepreneur of the biotechnology world and scourge of the woke ideology, Vivek Ramaswamy; businessman Perry Johnson; political commentator Larry Elder, and politician and businessman Rolland Roberts, son of the West Virginia senator of the same name. Trump's former vice president, Mike Pence, is also expected to compete for the Republican nomination, while others pluck the daisy.
According to the latest poll published Wednesday by CNN, Trump is the first choice of 53% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters in the primaries, about double DeSantis' 26%. But the poll also reveals that broad swaths of Republican-aligned voters are willing to consider either, as well as several other candidates. More than 8 in 10 support or say they are open to considering Trump (84%) and DeSantis (85%), and smaller majorities say they support or would consider former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (61%), Scott (60%) and former Vice President Mike Pence (54%). Haley and Pence are currently the top choice of 6%, according to the poll, with Scott at 2% along with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and five other candidates have 1% support or less.
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