The Donald Trump-DeSantis Showdown: Predictions for the upcoming Republican-run Senate race and their impact on campaign finance
A strategy that is likely to delay any announcement is that the next few months will be spent cementing his status as a rising GOP star by pushing his hardcore conservative agenda through the Republican-run state legislature. If he does get into the race, DeSantis can expect the same kind of ruthless destruction of his records and reputation that Trump did against his competitors, like former Florida governor, Jeb Bush.
Like Walker, DeSantis’ agenda has won over conservative editorial boards and Beltway think tanks. He likes confrontations and displays a similar style to Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who won many GOP voters over. He is close to Florida’s JJ Bush and has built a machine that raises money for him.
“There’s no way to deny Donald Trump got fired Tuesday night,” Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican who has been critical of Trump, told “CNN This Morning” on Thursday. “The search committee has brought a few names to the top of the list and Ron DeSantis is one of them. I think Ron DeSantis is being rewarded for a new thought process with Republicans and that solid leadership.”
“Build anticipation,” one longtime Republican fundraiser with knowledge of DeSantis’ operation said. “I think DeSantis controls the time frame. Everyone anticipates things. He calls the shots now as you want to move quickly.
The intrigue surrounding a potential Trump-DeSantis showdown reached the White House on Wednesday. The President remarked that it would be fun to see the two Republicans go against each other.
The legislative session will be “as red meat as you can possibly imagine,” a GOP consultant said. They will pass it, and it will become law.
The Republican party is going to kill anything they can find in their path, and the financial institutions will be one of them.
In the meantime, DeSantis will continue to build out a political operation that has already proved it can raise money at an impressive clip. His reelection effort brought in more $200 million between his two political committees, according to state campaign finance reports, pulling money in from deep-pocketed donors and grassroots Republicans alike to shatter national fundraising records for a gubernatorial campaign. There were $66 million in unspent cash as of November 3. CNN has previously reported that the political team of Republican candidate for president Rondales had explored the idea of moving the unused money into a federal committee to help the campaign. That remains the plan, sources confirmed.
He is expected to continue to travel outside the state to raise funds and grow his brand. After avoiding public events outside Florida for most of his first term, DeSantis in August took the calculated gamble to hold rallies in support of Republican candidates in some of the country’s most contested races for governor and US Senate. He traveled until 10 days before the election.
However, DeSantis stuck largely to midterm battlegrounds and avoided early nominating states where appearances can set off presidential buzz. The chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party said the state GOP had not had a chance to talk to the governor. The first primary of New Hampshire is where Stepanek predicted it will be hard for the Florida governor to beat Trump. Trump’s victory in the 2016 New Hampshire primary served as the launching point to him winning the GOP nomination.
“When people bring up DeSantis today, I bring up Scott Walker,” Bob Vander Plaats, an influential conservative leader in the early nominating state of Iowa, told CNN earlier this year, drawing comparisons to the former Wisconsin governor who was an early favorite in 2016 before his campaign stalled.
If you go into a presidential primary with Donald Trump, you are going to be in for a rude awakening, one Republican consultant told CNN.
In the final few days of the cycle, Trump lashed out at DeSantis and privately chastised him for disloyalty. He nicknamed DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimonious” at an event Saturday in Pennsylvania and held a rally in Miami two days before the election without inviting the home-state governor.
I don’t know if he is running. I think he could hurt himself really badly if he runs, said Donald Trump in an interview. “I think he would be making a mistake. I think the base would not like it – I don’t think it would be good for the party…I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering.”
Trump claimed that he received more votes than DeSantis in Florida. Presidential races usually have much higher turnout than midterms and Trump’s margin of victory over Biden was about 3 points.
It was odd that the former president who tried to steal the last election was embraced by his supporters as if nothing happened.
There is also a clear sense that Trump believes he is owed the Republican nomination and feels that certain sections of his party are not sufficiently grateful for his turbulent one-term presidency.
Trump’s musings about loyalty also recall his attack on evangelical leaders earlier this month, whom he said showed “disloyalty” by refusing to support his 2024 bid so far despite his delivery of a generational conservative Supreme Court majority. Trump is often viewed as a one-way loyalty when it comes to politics, and his comments were a reminder of that.
New Hampshire: Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign is about the future, not the politics of naivete. The misfortune of DeSantis
The arrival of the COVID disease increased DeSantis’ national prominence. In the first months, he largely followed guidance from the Trump White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He shut down Florida’s beaches, bars and nightclubs. The schools were not open.
While DeSantis is a formidable potential candidate on paper, he would have to develop the capacity to defend himself from Trump’s fearsome debate stage broadsides, as well as a rhetorical nimbleness that he hasn’t yet shown. He’d also have to fend off Trump without alienating the parts of the GOP base that retain almost mythical devotion to the former president.
He is in New Hampshire and gives a very boring speech. Sununu said that the response he had received was that he read his speech and then went away. “So he’s not really bringing that fire, that energy, I think, that a lot of folks saw it in ’16. I think, in many ways, it was a little disappointing to some folks. … So I think a lot of folks understand that he’s going to be a candidate, but he’s also going to have to earn it. That is New Hampshire.
Trump is not ready to acknowledge that reality, despite the fact that he said something about it. His decision to visit an ice cream parlor late in the day in South Carolina was something he had never done before.
It was suggested Saturday that Trump’s anger over the 2020 election may have turned off voters in two years’ time, when a number of candidates he supported in swing states lost.
“This campaign will be about the future. The campaign will be about issues. Trump said at a small event Saturday in the South Carolina State House that he will ensure that Biden does not get four more years.
He has not stopped using his standard rhetoric. On Sunday, he called into a rally for one on the failed Arizona candidate, who is still claiming to have won the election. The former president was in New Hampshire on Saturday when he took aim at the institutions that are revealing the true course of events in 2020.
Trump signaled that he would use his campaign and potential second presidency to try to thwart Justice Department efforts to enforce accountability over his election-stealing activity.
We intend to stop the weaponization of our justice system. There’s never been a justice system like this. Trump said that it was all an investigation. He branded his resistance to such probes as more proof of the very quality that many Republicans in 2016 embraced and that helped propel him to the White House.
He said that if you vote next year, he will challenge the entire establishment in Washington, and that he will do it again.
The Challenge of Running for the Offices of the Florida State Senator: Commentary on Sununu, the Florida Governor, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
As Florida state legislators met to give Ron DeSantis new powers over Disney World, Chris Sununu took a shot at it.
Sununu is considering a bid for president, and said he is a principled free-market conservative. “For others out there that think that the government should be penalizing your business because they disagree with you politically, that isn’t very conservative.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a right-of-center First Amendment group that argued for White nationalist Richard Spencer’s right to speak on a Florida campus, has joined DeSantis in opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs. Nevertheless, the group has repeatedly criticized Florida’s heavy-handed approach to forcing conservative beliefs on universities and is suing the state over the Stop WOKE Act, a DeSantis-backed measure that legislated how professors teach certain topics.
Will Courley, FIRE’s legal director, said that freedom of expression could not be censored. “You cannot trade one orthodoxy for another. What we’ve seen recently in Florida is a troubling willingness to do just that.”
The Florida governor said at last year’s NationalConservatism Conference that “corporatism is not the same as free enterprise, and I think too many Republicans have viewed limited government to basically mean anything is best for corporate America.” “My view is, you know, obviously free enterprise is the best economic system, but that is a means to an end.”
The record of DeSantis is almost sure to be well received by Republicans in the primary, but there is a sense of concern with regards to race among some Republicans who support the governor.
Being perceived as racist is not a good place for him to be in the long term according to a Republican supporter of her husband’s race.
The supporter said that the governor could lose some voters if he fought over the African American studies courses and the College Board.
But Republicans voters have yet to be introduced to many potential contenders for the party nomination. Meanwhile, outside groups such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity have signaled they intend to get involved in the primary.
Frayda Levin, a member of the Club for Growth’s board of directors, said there is great interest in DeSantis but she is increasingly concerned that he has become “too heavy-handed” in his pursuit of hot-button social issues. DeSantis is one of six Republicans invited to a Club for Growth donor summit in Florida as the conservative organization distances itself further from Trump. Former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley are also invited.
The girl is a libertarian and kind of live-and-let-live kind of girl. She said she has no problem with candidates espousing strongly held personal beliefs on social issues but said she objects to DeSantis “putting the power of his state behind his socially conservative views.”
According to Larry Hogan, a Republican, DeSantis was talking to the cruise lines when he wasn’t demanding businesses do things. Hogan has remained critical of the Florida governor as he weighs entering the mix for the Republican nomination.
South Dakota Gov. Noem compared her record against Florida’s Ron DeSantis to that against Covid19 because of ideological differences. Noem said Friday it was her state, not Florida, that “set an example of freedom” by refusing to shut down at all. Florida, which DeSantis has called a Citadel of Freedom, closed schools, bars and theme parks and restricted other economic activity early in the pandemic.
DeSantis has built his political persona around protecting freedoms. His spending plan was dubbed the freedom first budget and this year’s budget was renamed the framework for freedom. The slogan “Vacation to Freedom” was pitched while he was speaking and the applause line was “Freedom over Faucism”. He stood triumphantly at a podium with a sign that said, “Freedom Lives Here.”
But his approach has often included more government programs (creating an office to pursue voter fraud and a new program to conduct missions to surveil, house and transport migrants from border states to Democratic jurisdictions), more regulation (dictating bank lending practices) or flexing government power in unprecedented manners (ousting an elected state prosecutor).
DeSantis’ allies have pushed back against the growing chatter. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contended on Twitter recently that the governor was using his power as an elected leader – a job he was reelected to with a historical 19-point victory in November.
DeSantis last month appointed Rufo to the board of New College, a small liberal arts school that the governor has targeted for a drastic overhaul to become a more conservative university.
“The complaint about using ‘state power,’ meaning constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of public universities, i.e., state institutions funded by taxpayers, is ridiculous,” Rufo tweeted. They said people couldn’t regulate the state.
Donald J. DeSantis and the 2018 Florida Midterm Elections: The First Step is to Take a Defeasible Action
There is apprehension among allies, but DeSantis has never lost their support. Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund owner of Citadel and a major DeSantis donor, said he was “troubled” last year by the governor’s move against Disney.
Editor’s Note: Justin Sayfie has served in the administration of three Republican presidents and was a top adviser to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Sayfie is a partner at the lobbyist firm Ballard Partners and the publisher of SayfieReview.com. The views expressed here are his own. CNN has more opinion.
The 2018 midterm elections were terrible for the Republican Party. The GOP lost 41 seats in the House of Representatives, and Democrats beat GOP candidates by more than 10 million votes — the largest raw vote margin in a House midterm election ever. Democrats gained governorships in that year.
Despite those anti-Republican hurricane-force headwinds, Republican Ron DeSantis beat Democrat Andrew Gillum in the Florida governor’s race by 0.4%, or roughly 32,000 votes out of more than 8 million votes cast.
He became a hero to millions in the early 2020s when he filled a leadership vacuum during a time of global crisis and uncertainty.
In Florida vulnerable older adults witnessed how he prioritized their health and safety by prohibiting the transfer of patients with the coronavirus from hospitals to long-term care facilities. Parents of kids in Florida saw how he focused on keeping the schools open so their students did not fall behind. Small business owners watched how he battled to get and keep businesses open so they could keep feeding their families.
During the Pandemic, his governance style earned him respect from everyone around the country, but it also became a template for other battles he has fought.
The first step is to take decisive action. This step follows a counterintuitive political principle that DeSantis gets: It’s more important for a leader to be decisive than for the decision itself to be popular. Voters do not want weathervanes for leaders. They don’t like a leader who constantly puts their finger in the wind and never gets things done because they prefer a leader who takes bold action.
In September, DeSantis flew migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, where three municipalities had adopted sanctuary policies limiting local law enforcement from enforcing federal immigration laws. Local officials from those sanctuary provinces as well as the editorial board heaped disdain on a decision that was being seen as using national concern to fail at border enforcement.
More than 50% of Americans believe that the country is in the midst of an invasion at the southern border, according to a poll conducted in August. Almost 4 of 10 Democrats say that increasing deportations is very or somewhat important, according to a survey. This widespread bipartisan dissatisfaction on border enforcement provided a vast political space for DeSantis’ decision to relocate migrants.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/opinions/ron-desantis-florida-recipe-success-sayfie/index.html
The Voices of the Silent Majority: How President Biden and Emma Weyant Used to Attack DeSantis during the 2024 Florida Superbowl
DeSantis also supported a bill that prohibited classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity to kindergarteners and other young students. Disney, a global entertainment conglomerate, opposed it and the hosts of the Academy Awards made fun of the bill on national television.
While Hollywood stars and celebrities disapproved of the bill, a New York Times-Siena College poll in September found that Republicans were united in opposition to such classroom instruction in first through fifth grades. More interestingly, 71% of independent voters strongly or somewhat opposed classroom instruction of gender identity to children in elementary school, the poll found.
Lia Thomas was declared the victor of the women’s 500-yard freestyle final by the NCAA, and in turn, Florida native Emma Weyant was declared the winner. Just like the other issues DeSantis has taken on, Republicans and independent voters were strongly in favor of DeSantis’ position, while Democrats were split almost evenly, according to a NPR/Ipsos poll.
In today’s “cancel culture” environment, DeSantis has uniquely channeled the emotions of what former President Richard Nixon called the “silent majority.” It has become more politically potent because those who consider themselves part of this group even if they are a minority, feel more silenced than ever.
One may be tempted to believe that such a strategy has limited appeal – but consider the following: In 2020, although Trump beat Biden in Florida, Biden beat Trump by 11 points among independent voters. Yet two years later, DeSantis won back this important bloc of nonpartisan voters, winning a majority of independents and besting his Democratic opponent by 8 points among independents.
It’s a recipe that has worked brilliantly in Florida – an incredibly diverse, multicultural and fast-growing megastate. Anyone who doesn’t think it can work elsewhere may belatedly regret such skepticism in 2024.
Florida Is Where The Wake Goes To Die: A Conversation with Dan Jolly during his First Two Terms in the Governing Attorney General
“I’m going on offense,” DeSantis told the audience at the conservative Club for Growth event at The Breakers Palm Beach resort. “Some of these Republicans, they just sit back like potted plants, and they let the media define the terms of the debate. They let the left define the terms of debate. They take all this incoming, because they’re not making anything happen. And I said, ‘That’s not what we’re doing.’”
“Literally, how many other governors does anyone even care about? I mean, when you go to California, they got all these problems there. Their governor is worried about me, and what we are doing in Florida. … It is absolutely incredible, according to DeSantis. I just know that game. If they’re not shooting that means you’re not getting anything done. That they are coming after me because I am standing up for people I represent, I view that as positive reinforcement.
During his first term as Florida governor, he became well-known nationally through his frequent appearances on Fox News taking a hardline conservative position on issues ranging from education to public health.
“We fight the woke in the schools, he said. We fight in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die!”
As governor, DeSantis has waded forcefully into the culture wars. In his first term he signed a law criminalizing peaceful protests after George Floyd’s death. Later, his “Stop Woke Act” restricted what schools and businesses can say about race. A “Parental Rights in Education Act,” dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by opponents, limits how teachers discuss sexual orientation and gender identity.
He’s taken aim at programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in the schools. He’s signed a law banning abortions after 15 weeks. And he pushed through new Congressional maps that eliminated two African American voting districts. Many of these measures are now held up by legal challenges in the courts.
With his efforts to control even local policies, he’s left behind the commitment to limited government he once had as a member of the Freedom Caucus. Former Congressman David Jolly says, it’s a lesson he took from Donald Trump. Jolly says, “What Donald Trump brought to the party was to really crush that orthodoxy of small government and instead say the ends justify the means. Anything that can be done to achieve conservative results.
The man who was elected used Trump to build his name recognition, but moved on after being elected. The Hall Fame of hockey player Wayne Gretzky famously said, “I skate to where the puck is going”, which is a similarity to that of DeSantis. He skates to Donald Trump very fast, after he saw that the party was going to be for Trump.
A Theoretical Analysis of the Florida Vaccine Crisis: The Case of Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Founder and President of COVID, Bill DeSantis
When the vaccine became available, he championed it in almost daily news conferences and in a live broadcast where a 94-year-old World War Two veteran received his shot on Fox News.
But shortly after that appearance, in February 2021, DeSantis’ approach to COVID began to change. He’d already ordered all schools reopened for in-class instruction. Businesses and the government were banned from making facemask and vaccine mandates.
With his hiring of a new surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, DeSantis completed his transition from vaccine proponent to vaccine skeptic. He endorsed recommendations by Ladapo that healthy children under 18 not be vaccinated. Ladapo and DeSantis have also said men age 18 to 39 shouldn’t receive the mRNA vaccine. Nationally-recognized public health experts say that recommendation is wrong and based on a faulty analysis.
Bill Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health says DeSantis politicized the public health crisis. Hanage claims that his policies led to an increase in deaths in Florida. Florida is the only state with more deaths since vaccines were available than before, says Hanage. The only one of them.
In analyzing data compiled by John Hopkins University, Hanage found that in Florida, 60% of the total deaths occurred after vaccines were available. In the other places, the number of deaths after vaccines became available are 40% of the total or less.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1160724251/florida-governor-ron-desantis-president
The 2016 Florida Reionization Battle: Why the Governor’s Maps Are Unconstitutional, or Why he Decides to Go to the Next Level
The governor’s maps were challenged in court as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders after Republican legislative leaders pushed through them. But the maps remained in place for November’s election, and helped Florida Republicans pick up four additional seats in Congress.
The lawmaker says that she was completely dumbfounded, blind-sided. It was the first time anyone could recall a governor in Florida taking control of redistricting.
Thompson says it’s clear that the motivation for Targeting black voters is clear. “I think he has an interest in making sure that only certain individuals vote. She says that those people are supportive of his agenda. “And then making it difficult for anyone who does not support his agenda, making it difficult for them to vote.”
Congressman Aaron Bean says those policies aren’t intended to target groups, but instead stand up for conservative principles. Bean doesn’t expect DeSantis to soften his hardline stance in a campaign for president. “I believe that should he go to the next level, which I think he will,” Bean says, “he will push forward an America-first agenda, a common-sense agenda, a freedom agenda.”