Ron DeSantis Wants His Supporters To Ignore Recent GOP Polls: Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida going up against former President Donald Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, told reporters that he is undeterred by a recent NBC News poll that shows his campaign losing support to former President Donald Trump.
DeSantis, one of the Republican Party’s most prominent governors and the most capable challenger to former President Trump, told NBC News during a visit to the southern border in Eagle Pass, Texas, that he believes he is the strongest candidate for the Republican Party in 2024.
“I think if you [at] look the swing states, [President Joe] Biden beats Trump in the swing states and I beat Biden handily in the swing states — that’s ultimately the election right there,” DeSantis said.
The Florida governor may have a point – the Republican Party wants to win in 2024, but Trump’s backers remain steadfast in their support, even as he faces multiple indictments and criminal trials
DeSantis told the outlet, which revealed in a new national poll that he has just 22% support compared to Trump’s 51% among party voters, that the race is a “marathon, not a sprint.”
While there is still a long way to go in the GOP primary, the comment bore similarity to words spoken by Senator Ted Cruz during his failed attempt to win beat Trump in 2016 – and DeSantis likely knows this. Beating Trump is difficult when so many of his voters would rather vote for him as a third-party candidate than vote Republican at all.
DeSantis Is A Better Candidate
NBC News’ polling found that the Florida governor is right to describe himself as the party’s best candidate. The survey found that swing state votes prefer DeSantis to Biden, with 50% of voters leaning towards his campaign and 46% opting for Trump.
DeSantis told NBC News that the “most important thing” for the party is winning.
“If you don’t win, it doesn’t matter. And then once you win, who has the record of delivering? And I think we did that in Florida is good as anybody,” he said.
DeSantis could win over the swing voters that Trump may have lost – whether through fault of his own or the obsessive hysteria from the Democrats over his candidacy – but polls keep showing that Trump will easily lose against Biden next year.
In May, a Quinnipiac University poll suggested that Trump could win the GOP primary even in a head-to-head race against DeSantis, with 61% to the Florida governor’s 32%. In the election, however, pollsters said that Biden would beat Trump 48% to 46%.
Ron DeSantis may, then, be right – but he’ll have to convince GOP voters to trust the pollsters. And he probably can’t do that.
Jack Buckby is 19FortyFive’s Breaking News Editor. He is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
From 19FortyFive
Joe Biden Is Starting To Scare Everyone
