Four Takeaway from the Florida Democrat-Governor Debate: Predicting a Trump-DeSantis Showdown with the Vote
In March, he signed legislation prohibiting classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades, a law that opponents derided as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. It placed DeSantis firmly in the debate over rights for people with different genders, a topic he has continued to address. In a debate last night against his Democratic challenger, former Gov. Charlie Crist, DeSantis suggested doctors may be killing children by gender-affirming care.
The biggest cheers the Florida governor received, however, came when he recounted how he arranged for Florida to send nearly 50 migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, a stunt that has faced intense scrutiny and legal challenges.
While Lake has remained loyal to Trump, DeSantis has criticized him, saying that he regretted not speaking against the early Covid shutdowns. While Lake has fielded questions about running with Trump, DeSantis seems more likely to run against him in 2024. DeSantis refused to say in last night’s debate whether he would serve a full, four-year term if re-elected. (Here are four takeaways from the debate.)
Youngkin, who was the governor of Virginia last year and won a seat on the Supreme Court, has become an in-demand surrogate for Trump candidates at all levels.
He supports many of the issues that help rally the base. He called for a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy and for the restoration of the rights of gay students. He acknowledges that Biden won the 2020 election, but has campaigned for election deniers, including Lake.
Youngkin has insisted that he is not yet thinking about a presidential run in 2024. His carefully crafted national profile and his New York City meetings with megadonors hint at that.
The intrigue surrounding a potential Trump-DeSantis showdown reached the White House on Wednesday. Asked which of the two Republican rivals would be the tougher 2024 competitor, President Joe Biden remarked, “It’d be fun watching them take on each other.”
A third stop in the former president’s four-city tour has made Donald Trump a leader in his party’s fight for control of Congress. Meanwhile, the Florida governor is headlining his own events in three counties on the state’s opposite coast – Hillsborough, Sarasota and Lee – steering far clear of Trump as he seeks to close out his bid for a second term.
A Republican who asked not to be named said there are two very stubborn politicians in Florida that are at the tip of the spear for the GOP. Both of them command attention but they both have their own political operations. It’s already exhausting to talk about.”
The Colorado Senate candidate, Joe O’Dea, was endorsed by the congressman, who stated that he would fight against Trump.
Trump shared a quote from Megyn Kelly that said GOP voters would remain loyal to the former president, if his opponent in the Republican presidential primary was a woman. CNN reported Friday that Trump could launch his next presidential bid as soon as this month.
Trump suggested that DeSantis was in his debt for having helped him capture the GOP nomination for governor in 2018 and for his job in the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. He implied that DeSantis should pass on a White House bid as a result.
DeSantis described himself as a fighter who stood up against medical experts and criticism during the pandemic to reopen the state and ban coronavirus vaccine mandates, echoing a sentiment in a campaign ad in which DeSantis suggests he was created by God to fight for Florida.
The two candidates might have the same finances if they go against each other in a primary. About $90 million in potential seed funds for a Super PAC has been left by the $200 million raised by DeSantis’ two political committees. At the end of October, Trump was sitting on about $117 million between his three active fundraising vehicles, according to federal election data.
Trump’s pre-election travel is motivated at least in part by his desire to launch a third campaign for the White House, CNN reported this week. Indeed, during a visit to Iowa on Thursday, Trump told voters in the first-in-the-nation caucus state to “get ready” for his return as a presidential candidate. While campaigning in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump also stopped in Ohio to support the Republicans in the senate race against Tim Ryan.
Republicans are encouraged by the results of the governor’s race in Miami-dade county, where he won 55 percent of the vote, which may suggest that he can engage with Latino communities around the country. A Republican candidate had not won the county in two decades. A CNN exit poll showed DeSantis with an 18-point lead over Crist among Florida Latino voters, a reversal from his first campaign for governor four years ago.
The announcement said that Trump delivered a historic red wave in Florida in the midterms and that it molded the state into a stronghold of the “MAMA” movement. “Thanks to President Trump, Florida is no longer a purple state; it’s an America First Red State.”
He said Biden turned it into something worse than gold. “It’s frustrating and a lot of people, the vast majority of Americans, they think that the country has seen its best days. We’re on the wrong track, that is what they think. I think Florida gives a good template for other states to follow.
“If I faced him, I’d beat him like I would beat everyone else,” Trump told Yahoo Finance in October of last year of DeSantis. I think he would drop out.
Well, the “DeSanctimonious” nickname actually hearkens back to how Trump sought to bring down Ted Cruz, his main rival for the 2016 Republican nomination.
“I think he’s going to go down,” Trump said of Cruz in February 2016. I don’t think a man can be a Christian but Ted holds up the Bible and lies about so many things.
Trump is the real man of the people, who would not dare think he is better than anyone. (That Trump has a super-sized ego and routinely casts himself as special seems to go unnoticed in this equation.)
The Greatest Day of the 2022 Midterm Election: Why the GOP Ignored the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views she expresses are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
The results of the 2022 midterm election have not been fully tallied and the crucial question – who will control Congress? – has not been answered. We can start to draw some conclusions on this day after.
First, there was no red wave. Predictions of a huge Republican victory at the polls did not materialize. It was a terrible election for the GOP. In addition, it was a disastrous day for former President Donald Trump, who had hoped a Republican landslide would place him on a glide path to the nomination to become the party’s presidential candidate in 2024.
The challenge to democracy is not over, unfortunately. Many election deniers won. The victors did not do as well as the non election-deniers. In other words, by parroting Trump’s lies about 2020, they pushed away voters who had supported other Republicans.
In exit polls, 28% of voters said they chose their House vote “to oppose Donald Trump.” Only 37% of people said they had a favorable view of the former president before the election. That should worry the party.
The interviewer asked if he should get all the credit if the Republicans win. I should not be blamed if they lose. But the evidence strongly suggests he deserves much of the blame.
Biden and the Democratic Party: Elections Are Not About Democrats, But They Are: The Case For A Democratic Grasado Candidate
The opposition party gained an average of 29 seats in the House of Representatives over the past 100 years. The Republicans needed just five seats this year, a goal that seemed so doable that almost every pollster predicted the party would clear it. But Republicans are struggling to clear that low bar.
They might well do it. Nancy Pelosi may be replaced by Kevin McCarthy but the Democrats will still do well even if Republicans take the House. The party in power under Biden had the best performance since George W. Bush in 2002.
Biden was correct when he said that democracy itself was at stake in the elections. The argument captured the attention of the audience. Biden and the Democrats made that case due to Trump and the election-denying extremists he endorsed.
In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro trounced Doug Mastriano, who played an active role in trying to overturn the 2020 election and ran a campaign rife with antisemitic innuendo against his Jewish opponent. The far right lost in a number of contests, including Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maryland.
Republican Senate candidates who received support from President Donald Trump in their primaries but were defeated by their Democratic opponents in three different states were Mehmet Oz and Adam Laxalt. Herschel Walker will face off against Democratic senator Raphael Nadal in a December runoff after they failed to garner 50% of the vote.
On Tuesday night, that statement came in the form of a 19-point landslide win over Democrat Charlie Crist – the most lopsided victory by a Republican gubernatorial nominee in Florida history and a gap that dwarfed Trump’s own Sunshine State win in 2020. As his resounding performance began to crystalize after the polls closed, a party erupted into ecstasy as the totality and breadth of his performance began to burst into view. DeSantis had turned once-solidly blue counties red, won over a majority of Latino voters and carried on his coattails Republican candidates up and down the ballot and in every corner of the state.
To block Kemp’s reelection, Trump persuaded former Sen. David Perdue to run against him in the primary. That primary vote ended in humiliation for Perdue and for Trump.
“I don’t know if he is running. Trump said in an interview with Fox News digital that he could hurt himself if he ran. “I think he would be making a mistake. I think it would be bad for the party and I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering.
The Dawn of Donald Trump: An Overview of What Biden, DeSantis, and Other Democrats Have in Common with the American Voting Era
Democrats, meanwhile, are pondering who will lead them toward the next presidential election in 2024. Tuesday’s results showed Biden was not wrong – despite what the pundits said – when he said democracy was on the ballot. It paid off, showing again that his political instincts remain sharp. But the election also put the spotlight on some rising stars in the party. Several candidates whose names are not well known in the country stood out as smart, charismatic, committed to democracy, and potentiallyelectable.
Soon, Americans will probably have to begin enduring another season of presidential campaigning by the most disruptive candidate in living memory, a man who has shown only disdain for democracy. It is good to know the nation took a step toward sanity this week, and that democracy did well.
Polls suggest that Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party may be waning and that he is losing support to Ron DeSantis. A University of New Hampshire poll of the first-in-the-nation primary state released last week showed the Florida governor leading Trump 42% to 30% among likely GOP voters in the state. A December CNN/SSRS poll found that about 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents would like to see someone other than Trump chosen as their party’s nominee.
But before declaring this the dawn of DeSantis, remember: It is just as likely the next few weeks will be the high-water mark of his presidential aspirations. The spotlight can very quickly become the hot seat, and DeSantis is both untested as a national candidate and as a Trump adversary. It is likely that those who see an easy pivot from the era ofTrump to the era ofDeSignores are in for another wave of disappointment.
He has married that political style with a strongman persona. He used to target people who were opposed to his policies, for example universities, public health workers and corporations. He has sent police to round up voters with felony convictions who, confused by the state’s efforts to strip their voting rights after voters reinstated them a few years ago, mistakenly voted in recent elections. He has had his way with the Florida legislature, supporting anti-gay laws, a new drawing of the state’s boundaries and punishing Disney after they criticized the state’s “don’t say gay” bill.
Bars and nightclubs were shut down and people were told to follow federal government guidelines on limiting gatherings on beaches in March 2020. He allowed them to open again, despite the advice of federal government health officials. The former president is clearly seeking to get to the right of the Florida governor on this issue, despite DeSantis spending much of the last two years feuding with the Biden administration over the pandemic. It is not a leap that the disastrous handling of the swine flue could be a vote winner for Trump in the general election.
Meanwhile, unlike the national party, the Democratic Party in Florida is in tatters, struggling to field and support candidates and to organize and mobilize voters. Florida has a specific mix of Latino voters that are very diverse, weighted mostly toward immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela who view the Democrats as socialists.
Donald Trump is a Florida resident. The Dump Trump crowd, though bigger at the moment than at perhaps any time since 2016, does not seem to fully understand how deep and unquestioning the cult of personality around Trump still is within parts of the party.
There is no way to deny that Donald Trump was fired Tuesday night. “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. As much as everyone anticipates things and you want to move quickly, he calls the shots now.”
The legislative session will be “as red meat as you can possibly imagine,” a GOP consultant said. “Whatever he proposes, they will pass it, and it will become law.”
The Republican fundraiser said that “anything ‘woke’ they can find to kill within their path, they’re going to do that” and predicted that financial institutions, in particular, would be a DeSantis target this spring.
New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday that right now DeSantis would probably win the Granite State’s GOP primary. Sununu, who told Bash he’s considering his own White House bid in 2024, also took a swipe at Trump’s demeanor and the size of his event, which was an address to party activists rather than one of his seething rallies in a state where he won the 2016 GOP primary.
Bob Vander Plaats, an influential conservative leader in Iowa who spoke to CNN earlier this year, compared the former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to the Florida Republican who was an early favourite in 2016 before his campaign collapsed.
One Republican consultant told CNN that if you go into a presidential primary with Donald Trump and think you will win, then there will be another thing coming.
Did Donald Trump lose in the midterms? Plenty of people declared that he did, from liberal pundits to the Murdoch newspapers — the latter delivering a double whammy from the front page of The New York Post (“TRUMPTY DUMPTY”) and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal (“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser”).
It’s tempting to see the strength of the MAGA forces ebbing at last, the calendar leaf turning over on the Trump era. But how do you declare defeat for a movement that is built around refusing to accept defeat? Mr. Trump and his supporters have been feeding off each other’s worst tendencies for so long, it’s impossible to separate his temperament or strategy from that of the Republican Party.
Dan Cox lost the governor’s race in Maryland by more than 25 points. Mr Cox issued a statement saying that he called Wes Moore after he was declared the winner. Here, softly stated, was the Trumpist version of concession, which was that the other side had won, according to what someone else said. Mr. Cox wrote, “Our internal data demonstrated a massive shift of swing voters our way and a huge turnout of Republicans — neither of which is reported to have occurred.”
The Donald Trump Rally for 118th Congress: A Defiant Candidate in the Prelude to his 2024 Runoff
If Donald Trump announces his third presidential bid on Tuesday, the next phase of his political career will be under attack.
The New York businessman entered the political realm in order to cast himself as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination, to the shock and awe of his primary opponents. This time, Trump takes the plunge as the party’s indisputable frontrunner, but once again, he finds himself in a defensive crouch.
The outcome of the 118th Congress was projected by CNN on Saturday, and it left the Republicans on tenterhooks as Trump prepares to make a big announcement.
“I Endorsed him, did a very big Trump Rally for him telephonically, got MAGA to Vote for him – or he couldn’t have come close to winning,” Trump said of Youngkin in a Truth Social post last week.
Responding to repeated questions about Trump’s impending 2024 announcement, Earle-Sears said, “A true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage, and the voters have given us that very clear message.”
One of the former president’s advisers said that his attention was caught on the fact that Youngkin planned to split from Trump.
He figures there is no point in waiting and thatGeorgia is the priority. If Herschel loses, he’ll be blamed for distracting from the runoff but if he wins, he doesn’t believe he will get any credit for energizing the base,” said a current Trump adviser.
Nobody should be surprised. This is how Trump does primaries,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump administration official who remains close to the former president. “The question you have to ask is whether this format can work for him again.”
“One of our biggest challenges will be the fundraising component but I do think [Trump] has proved that he doesn’t need deep-pocketed donors, per se,” said a person close to Trump, noting the enduring strength of his small-dollar operation.
Some Trump allies said the donor challenges, midterm outcome and questions about his stature has left a dearth of seasoned campaign operatives willing to join his next campaign. The president has instructed his aides to keep his operation lean but some are questioning if it’s out of preference or due to recruitment troubles. CNN has reported before that a group of aides and advisers who have already worked for the former president will assist Trump in his likely campaign. Multiple sources said that his apparatus would dwarf that of his campaign two years ago.
Either way, as Trump works to find his footing on the verge of a presidential campaign that could coast to the party’s nominating convention or encounter any number of unforeseen troubles, allies who have stuck by his side said they are ready for battle one last time.
On the Future of the Republican Party: Chris Sununu, Dean Obeidola, & The Rocky III Cocolyte
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu makes it clear that he does not want to include Donald Trump in the future of the Republican Party.
While winning his fourth two-year term in Granite State, Sununu said that being a country where the best opportunity is the leadership of yesterday is un-American.
The survey found that a majority of Republican-aligned voters would support Trump in the general election if he won the party’s nomination.
Dean Obeidola is a former attorney and the host of a daily show on radio. Follow him on social media. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
It’s hard to know for sure who the “fool” is that Lake was referring to, but my guess would be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who seems to be biding his time ahead of a possible White House run. Trump is trying to repeat as the Republican Party’s presidential standard-bearer, but the current candidate, Ron DeSantis, appears to be the closest challenger to him.
Fans of “Rocky III” will instantly recognize the iconic line that Lake, an election-denying Trump acolyte, borrowed as the same famous phrase uttered by James “Clubber” Lang, a vicious, hard-hitting boxer played in the 1982 film by Mr. T.
A possible Trump vs. DeSantis showdown in the wake of the Clubber Lang movie “Rocky IV”, a recent film about a possible Rubio versus Trump white house candidate
“I had governors that decided not to close a thing and that was up to them,” Trump said. He also took aim at DeSantis’ shifting position on vaccines, saying the Florida governor had “changed his tune a lot.”
In March 2020 in reaction to the rapidly spreading swine flue, the Florida governor issued an executive order closing bars and nightclubs in the state, and urged people to follow the CDC guidelines of no more than 10 people at a beach.
But his recent remarks and pronouncements have veered sharply away from sensible, government-imposed Covid-19 protections in what appears to be a desperate bid to appeal to the GOP’s Covid-denying base voters ahead of an anticipated presidential run.
DeSantis has come out against lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccines and other measures meant to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Many political observers think the about-face was motivated by an impending White House bid.
A face-off is inevitable with Donald Trump, who has yet to formally announce his candidacy. The 40th anniversary of the movie “Rocky IV” was last year, so it could be a sequel to Clubber Lang all over again.
There’s another moment in the film that springs to mind as I consider a possible Trump vs. DeSantis showdown. Clubber Lang lost his boxing title, and he wants to goad him into a fight.
But if the former President is not exactly an underdog in the White House nomination contest, he certainly has been on the ropes of late, with polls showing a certain Trump fatigue among many voters in his party who would rather someone else be the GOP nominee.
At first, Rubio didn’t attack Trump directly. After facing a “do or die” moment when he was in third place behind Cruz and Trump in the delegate count he was able to get some breathing room ahead of a March 2016 primary in his home state of Florida.
He called Trump an embarrassment and a demagogue before finally taking the gloves off. It wasn’t enough, as Marco Rubio dropped out of the race the next day after losing the Florida GOP primary.
Wearing a flight suit and seated in the cockpit of a fighter jet as the “Top Gov,” DeSantis revealed his “rules of engagement,” declaring, “No. 1 — don’t fire unless fired upon, but when they fire, you fire back with overwhelming force.” He said never to back down from a fight.
It is possible that DeSantis is waiting to find out if Trump is indicted in a bid to not have to meet him on the field of battle. Just last week, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis told a judge that “decisions are imminent” in her investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to interfere in the 2020 election in Georgia.
There is an investigation into the January 6, 2021, Mar-a-Lago attack as well as the trove of classified documents found there. While Trump can still legally run for president while under indictment — or even if convicted of a crime — as a practical matter it would likely be devastating to his election prospects.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/29/opinions/trump-ron-desantis-rocky-iii-obeidallah/index.html
What Will You Do if You Don’t Invest Your Life in the Politics of the Future? The Case for Donald Trump: The Case Against DeSantis
You have to fight for it. There could one day be a time when GOP voters mistake the fact that DeSantis is not defending himself and hitting back for weakness.
If he isn’t going to fight, people will ask: if he isn’t no coward, why won’t he fight?
There was also something jarring about a former president who tried to steal the last election – and incited an insurrection to try to cling to power – campaigning and being embraced by supporters as if nothing happened.
There is a strong belief that Trump is owed the Republican nomination and that certain parts of his party are not sufficiently grateful for his tumultuous one-term presidency.
Trump attacked evangelical leaders earlier this month for not supporting his bid for the presidency despite his delivery of a Supreme Court majority that he said showed disloyalty. The comments were a reminder of Trump’s transactional view of politics – and also that a man who dumped aides, staff and Cabinet members at a fearsome clip in office often tends to view loyalty as a purely one-way allegiance.
“He comes to New Hampshire, and, frankly, he gives a very mundane speech. The response we have received is, he read his teleprompter, he stuck to the talking points, he went away,” Sununu told Bash. A lot of people saw it in ’16, but he wasn’t really bringing that fire. I think, in many ways, it was a little disappointing to some folks. Is there anything? I believe a lot of people understand that he is going to be a candidate but he is also going to have to earn it. And that’s New Hampshire.”
It is not yet clear whether Trump is ready to acknowledge that reality. Though his decision to visit an ice cream parlor late in the day in South Carolina was an unusual foray into retail politics and first-person contact with voters.
When many of the election-denying candidates he promoted in swing states lost, it’s possible that Trump’s fury over 2020 turned off voters in 2022, which would have cost the Republicans control of the Senate.
The campaign will be about the future. This campaign will be about issues. Joe Biden has put America on the fast track to ruin and destruction and we will ensure that he does not receive four more years,” Trump said at a small event Saturday in the South Carolina State House.
But he hasn’t abandoned all of his standard rhetoric. On Sunday evening, he called into a rally for one on his favorite election-denying midterm candidates – failed Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, who is still falsely insisting she won in November. And earlier on Saturday, in New Hampshire, the former president – who is facing criminal investigations by the Justice Department and a district attorney in Georgia over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election – could not resist taking aim at institutions that are revealing the true course of events in 2020.
A potential second presidency and campaign by Trump means that he will try to undermine the Justice Department’s effort to hold him accountable for his election-stealing activity.
The weaponization of our justice system is going to stop. There’s never been a justice system like this. It’s all investigation, investigation,” Trump said. And he branded his resistance to such probes as more proof of the very quality that many Republicans embraced in 2016 and that helped propel him to the White House.
“There’s only one president who has ever challenged the entire establishment in Washington, and with your vote next year, we will do it again and I will do it again,” he said Saturday.