Republican gubernatorial candidate for Florida Ron DeSantis together with his wife Casey DeSantis speaks to supporters during an election night watch party on the Convention Center in Tampa, Florida, on November 8, 2022.
Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially filed paperwork Wednesday to launch his 2024 presidential campaign, setting the Republican contender on a collision course with former President Donald Trump within the race for the GOP nomination.
DeSantis is about to personally announce his run during a Twitter Spaces conversation with Elon Musk at 6 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
The long-anticipated move marks the culmination of years of buzz around DeSantis, 44, whose resistance to Covid-era lockdown rules and willingness to have interaction in polarizing cultural fights have quickly made him a Republican darling.
It also makes official DeSantis’ simmering rivalry with Trump, burying their once-close relationship as some within the GOP look to interchange the previous president as their party’s standard bearer.
Trump has already pummeled the governor with relentless attacks for months. Trump and his allies have assailed DeSantis’ record, his political abilities and even his personality, while amplifying negative news in regards to the governor. One pro-Trump PAC even cut an ad depicting an anecdote about DeSantis eating pudding together with his fingers, which the governor has denied.
Read more: DeSantis brings history of business battles to presidential campaign
Trump’s aggression could have paid off. Polls of the potential primary field have showed DeSantis, once Trump’s close competitor, consistently losing ground for months, whilst the governor toured key battlegrounds and racked up policy wins together with his state’s GOP-held Legislature.
A Quinnipiac University poll released earlier Wednesday underscored the governor’s slide: Republican and GOP-leaning voters selected Trump over DeSantis by greater than a two-to-one margin, 56% to 25%, in a matchup of the hypothetical primary field. That result showed Trump extending his gains and DeSantis losing ground from a previous Quinnipiac survey in late March.
An extended-expected campaign
The move was hardly a surprise: DeSantis has been eyed as a 2024 presidential contender even before the tip of the 2020 election cycle. While he has been mostly tight-lipped about his presidential ambitions, the governor in recent months has published a political memoir, hosted events for donors and conservative groups, launched into a multi-state speaking tour and released campaign-style videos touting his achievements in Florida.
Within the meantime, his allies have been hard at work mounting a well-funded political operation that has acted as a de facto campaign for the governor’s impending presidential bid.
The super PAC Never Back Down, founded by former Trump administration official Ken Cuccinelli, has already raised tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars because it encouraged DeSantis to run for president. An individual accustomed to the group’s activities confirmed to CNBC that it’s expecting to work with an overall operating budget of at the very least $200 million.
That figure, first reported by The Latest York Times, could include greater than $80 million that DeSantis’ allies are expected to try to maneuver out of the governor’s old state-level political committee — a controversial transfer that has divided campaign finance experts.
A Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer, DeSantis was elected to the U.S. House in 2012 and have become a founding member of the conservative Freedom Caucus before resigning to run for governor of Florida in 2018.
Trump endorsed DeSantis in that gubernatorial primary, giving DeSantis a polling bump and leading him to chop an ad featuring his family embracing an array of Trump’s political slogans and catchphrases. DeSantis’ closeness to Trump went beyond just his rhetoric, with critics noting that the governor’s body language and hand gestures looked as if it would mirror Trump’s at times.
DeSantis handily won the first and went on to narrowly defeat Democrat Andrew Gillum in the final election.
Stark divisions
As governor, DeSantis’ populist rhetoric and deal with divisive social issues quickly gained him a national status.
In the course of the coronavirus pandemic, DeSantis pushed faster than other states to lift public health-related lockdown measures, arguing that the closures had harmed Florida’s economy. Those and other moves coincided with an influx of latest residents to the state, but drew the ire of health experts and native officials, especially when Covid cases later surged.
DeSantis also courted controversy when he joined GOP efforts to protest President Joe Biden’s border policies by flying planeloads of migrants to the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard.
Meanwhile, his support for a controversial bill limiting discussion of sex and gender in public schools, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by critics, has morphed into an ongoing fight with Disney that has lasted well over a yr.
Disney, certainly one of Florida’s largest employers, publicly opposed the bill, joining critics who argued its vague language may lead to the targeting and marginalization of LGBTQ teachers and children. DeSantis and his allies responded to Disney’s criticism by targeting Walt Disney World’s long-held special tax district and vowing to finish the “corporate kingdom.” Disney has since sued DeSantis and others in federal court, accusing the governor of orchestrating a campaign of political retribution against the corporate.
In a state where population is growing but Democratic registration has fallen, DeSantis’ resistance to Covid safety rules and his perceived left-wing political foes were mightily rewarded. He trounced his Democratic opponent, former Rep. Charlie Crist, in Florida’s 2022 gubernatorial election, winning by greater than 20 percentage points.
This time, he did it with virtually no help from Trump.
Polls consistently show Trump and DeSantis are by far the 2 best names within the possible Republican primary field, though recent surveys show Trump pulling away from the pack.
With DeSantis’ profile on the rise, Trump’s view of the governor has soured. Shortly after the November midterms, Trump wailed at “Ron DeSanctimonious,” certainly one of several wonky nicknames for DeSantis, together with “Ron DeSanctus” and, reportedly, “Meatball Ron.”
Trump has been damaged by his loss to Biden, the fallout from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and the underperformance of lots of his handpicked candidates within the midterms. Yet despite those bruises — and his escalating legal woes, including his indictment in a Manhattan hush money case and being found responsible for sexual abuse and defamation in one other case — Trump is the Republican Party’s current top alternative for 2024.
