Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and the Democrat-Republican Battle for the Pre-Presidential Primal Race

Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis will both hold rallies in Florida on Sunday in preparation for the Republican presidential primary which could take place in the spring.

He will continue going outside the state for political travel to raise money 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 continued to travel up until 10 days before the election.

A Republican official who asked to not be named said that there were two very stubborn politicians in Florida that were at the top of the spear for the GOP. “They both command attention but they both have their own political operations and that’s what you’re seeing. It’s already exhausting to talk about.”

DeSantis recently endorsed Republican businessman and Colorado Senate candidate Joe O’Dea, as O’Dea vowed in October to “actively campaign” against Trump.

Trump wants his early entry into the presidential contest to inject a fresh dose of enthusiasm in the party, because of the failure of the GOP to capture Senate control and win a majority in the House. Although the former president said that he had won 200, many of the Republicans who won last Tuesday ran without opposition, and several of the Senate candidates he endorsed failed to beat their Democratic opponents.

In the first of his three events on Sunday, DeSantis made no mention of Trump or the “Ron DeSanctimonious” nickname, choosing instead to criticize President Joe Biden and the so-called “woke” left.

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 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.

Donald Trump’s Florida Road Trip as an Invitation to the White House and Other Latin-American Regions: Predictions for a Bright Spot for Republicans

As soon as he learns of his expected win on Tuesday he plans to use it to launch a White House bid. He released a video last week that could have doubled as a presidential announcement, and had over $90 million in the bank, as well as 200 million for his reelection campaign.

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. Trump told the Iowa voters to prepare for his return as a presidential candidate. Trump made a stop in Pennsylvania on Saturday, where the Senate race between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman is close, and he will also fly to Ohio on election day to support Republican J.D. Vance.

The Republicans are optimistic that they will win back the one-time Democratic stronghold for the first time in two decades. Investments by Republicans to make inroads in the area’s Hispanic neighborhoods have paid off in recent elections, and the party is seeing a wave of enthusiasm that is turning the state a deeper shade of red. For the first time in Florida’s modern political history, Republicans will hold a registration advantage on Election Day.

The outcome in Florida was a bright spot for Republicans, who otherwise waited for a red wave that never arrived and watched Trump-backed candidates flounder in key battlegrounds. The GOP’s reaction to DeSantis’s candidacy for president and the idea of taking on Trump next year has further fueled his candidacy.

The man said that Biden turned it into something worse than gold. Most Americans think that the country has seen its best days, but it’s frustrating and a lot of people. We are clearly on the wrong track according to them. I think Florida provides a template for other states to follow.

Whether or not he runs for president remains to be seen. But what’s clear is that Trump is already beginning to position himself against DeSantis – even before the 2022 election is over.

The nickname “DeSanctimonious” is named after how Trump tried to bring down Ted Cruz, his main rival for the 2016 Republican nomination.

In that race, Trump insisted that Cruz was sanctimonious – insisting that while the Texas senator portrayed himself as a honest broker and a man of God, he was actually something short of that.

Trump, in this formulation, is the real man of the people, who would never 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.)

Did the midterm election of 2022 see the light? And what did we learn about the GOP? An analysis by CNN’s Frida Ghitis

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She writes for The Washington Post and is a columnist for World Politics Review. The views she expresses are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

The results of the 2022 midterm election have not been fully tallied and the crucial question – who will control Congress? – has not been answered. On this day, we can figure out some initial conclusions.

There was a red wave, but it was not as great as a red tsunami. Predictions of a huge Republican victory at the polls did not materialize. It was a deeply disappointing 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. Deniers won the election. But even those who emerged victorious, performed worse than the non-election-deniers. If they parroted Trump’s lies about 2020, they pushed away voters who had supported other Republicans.

26% of voters said they chose to oppose Donald Trump because of the House vote. And just 37% said they had a favorable view of the former president, the presumed GOP front-runner, at least before this election. That should alarm the party.

Trump told an interviewer that if the Republicans win, he should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” The evidence shows he deserves a lot of the blame.

How Did Mehmet Oz and Kevin McCarthy Win the Midterms? Understanding the Counting of Herschel Walker, Donald DeSantis and Donald Perdue

In the last 100 years, the opposition party’s average gain is 29 seats. This year, Republicans needed just five seats, a goal that seemed so reachable that practically every pollster predicted the GOP would easily clear it, especially given the high inflation rate and Biden’s relatively low approval. But Republicans are struggling to clear that low bar.

They may well do it. Even though Kevin McCarthy may replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, the Democrats will still have a great show if Republicans take the House. Biden presided over the best performance by the party in power since George W. Bush in 2002, the first election after 9/11.

It turns out that Biden was right in declaring that democracy itself was at stake in the midterms. The argument resonated. Trump, and the election-denying extremists he endorsed, helped Biden and the Democrats make that case.

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. In Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, and many other contests, Trump’s election-denying allies lost.

The football star Herschel Walker could still win the runoff in December. People who heard about his past know that he should never have been on the ballot. Trump thought fame would work the same as it did for him. Mehmet Oz had support from him for the Pennsylvania seat. Oz lost to John Fetterman, who after suffering a stroke struggled to regain his verbal prowess, a key skill for a political candidate.

The night got better and better as it went on for one Republican. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection by nearly 20 points, in a night that saw the one-time swing state turn decisively red. As Republican losses piled up, it became clear to everyone on the right that he would not have to share the spotlight and they would have to focus on Florida.

Kemp was going to be reelected but Trump persuaded David Perdue to run against him. Perdue and Trump both suffered humiliation in the primary vote.

Trump will have to convince the Republicans that he would be a good factor at the top of the ballot in favor of vulnerable candidates in tight races. That task comes amid a fraught intraparty debate over the GOP’s bruising midterm outcome, with some Republicans claiming Trump’s involvement – including an eleventh-hour 2024 campaign tease at a rally on the eve of Election Day – did more to hurt the party than help. Others have blamed party leaders for failing to articulate clear policy priorities, pointed to the party’s money gap against Democrats in key races, or lamented the bickering that unfolded all cycle between two of the party’s biggest campaign committees led by Florida Sen. Rick Scott and allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

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. The election put a spotlight on the rising stars in the party. Several of the candidates whose names aren’t well known, stood out as smart, charismatic, and 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. Facing that prospect, it’s good to know the country took a step toward sanity this week, and that democracy fared rather well.

According to a new CNN poll, DeSantis’ favorability among Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters overall outpaces Trump: 74% view DeSantis favorably while 63% have a favorable view of Trump.

As a popular governor in the third-largest state, DeSantis has a lot going for him. But running for President will put him in the spotlight. Michael Binder is an associate professor at the University of North Florida. “He hasn’t been great on a debate stage,” Binder says. He is not particularly comfortable shaking hands in a small group of people. He doesn’t thrive in a stadium full of 20,000 people.”

He has married that political style with a strongman persona. As governor, he has targeted protestors, universities, public health workers and corporations for opposing his policies. 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 bent the Florida legislature to his will, whipping up support for anti-gay laws, a new redistricting map and punitive legislation targeting Disney after the company criticized the state’s infamous “don’t say gay” bill.

Such actions bolstered his popularity in Florida, as did his attention to public opinion. He introduced a gas-tax holiday in the month before the election, and focused on effective Hurricane relief rather than campaigning after the storm. As a result, he appears to have won not only traditional conservatives in the state but also made more headway with Latino voters and voters in more Democratic areas like Miami-Dade. If the dream for many on the right was Trumpism without Trump, DeSantis seems to be the ideal politician to carry them into that future.

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. And Florida has a specific mix of Latino voters that is unlike most other states, weighted heavily toward immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela who respond favorably to DeSantis’s attack on Democrats as socialists.

Then there is the issue of fellow Florida resident Donald Trump. 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’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.”

Even those who have access to him caution that he has not made a final decision, and they say that he is in a tight circle as he considers his options. The governor’s brain trust is notoriously small. It consists of himself and his wife, Casey. But sources said the DeSantises also are hyper aware that he has a window to make a 2024 move, and though it widened after Tuesday, it might not stay open forever.

Running out of business: The story of Ron DeSantis and the next four years of Trump campaigning in the Oval Office, where he lost his first election

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 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.

Despite the fact that it can cause a presidential buzz, DeSantis stayed away from early nomination states and stayed mostly in the middle of the road. Stephen Stepanek, the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, said DeSantis’ political operation turned down multiple requests to address voters there and the state GOP has had “virtually no contact with the governor.” Despite the hype around DeSantis, Stepanek predicted it will be difficult for the Florida governor to overcome Trump in the nation’s first primary in New Hampshire. The launch point for him winning the GOP nomination was his victory in the New Hampshire primary.

Bob Vande Plaats, the influential conservative leader in the early nominating state of Iowa, told CNN that he brings up Scott Walker whenever people mention Ron DeSantis.

“If in fact you go into a presidential primary with Donald Trump and think you’re going to kick his ass, you got another thing coming,” one Republican consultant in Florida told CNN.

Should Donald Trump announce his third presidential bid on Tuesday, as is widely expected, he will begin the next phase of his political career under siege.

On the brink of a campaign launch that elicits both enthusiasm and dread from different corners of his own party, Trump’s quest to return to the Oval Office could face untold obstacles in the months to come, even with his loyal base firmly intact. He has spent the days since the midterm elections fending off criticism from fellow Republicans over his ill-fated involvement in key contests, furiously lashing out at two GOP heavyweights who could complicate his path to the White House if they mount their own presidential campaigns, and fretting that he or associates could soon be indicted by federal investigators in two separate Justice Department probes.

On Saturday, CNN projected that Democrats will retain control of the Senate in the 118th Congress, an outcome that has fractured Republicans and left the party on tenterhooks as Trump readies his “big announcement.”

The Associated Fox News Report on the Campaign for the First Pre-Kamiokande Reionization of the U.S. Senate

Three sources familiar with the matter said the former president believed Youngkin was supportive of comments his lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, made during a Fox Business appearance last week. She told the network she would not support Trump if he runs for president a third time.

When a leader becomes a liability, a true leader understands, according to Earle-Sears. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage, and the voters have given us that very clear message.”

Sears later declined to tell The Washington Post whether Youngkin knew prior to the interview that she planned to split from Trump, a detail that caught the former president’s attention, according to one of his aides.

“If Glenn Youngkin decides to run for president, that’s his choice. John Fredericks, who chaired Trump’s campaigns in the state in the past, said that the Trump campaign will mount a massive effort to win the delegates going to Milwaukee.

“I know there’s a lot of criticism and people saying, ‘Just focus on Georgia,’ but he figures there’s no point in waiting. If Herschel wins, he won’t be credited with revitalizing the base, and he will probably be blamed for distraction from the runoff,” said the 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. Though the president has told allies he wants to keep his operation lean, much like his 2016 presidential campaign, some have privately questioned whether it’s out of preference or due to recruitment troubles. CNN has previously reported that Trump’s likely campaign is expected to be helmed by three current advisers – Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita and Brian Jack – with assistance from a group of additional aides and advisers with whom the former president is already familiar. Overall, his 2024 apparatus is expected to dwarf in comparison to his reelection campaign two years ago, multiple sources said.

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.

But for anyone who looks, there are some obvious signs that he’s preparing to run. The Courage to be Free is an autobiography due to be released early next year. The publishers says the story is about a governor who has fought and won battle after battle, defeating not only opposition from the political left, but a barrage of hostile media coverage proclaiming the end of the world.

At a recent news conference, DeSantis said, “We really showed, I think, how it’s done in the state of Florida,” and went on to say he received the highest percentage of the vote for a Republican governor in the history of Florida. During the Reconstruction era, the first Republican governor in Florida, Harrison Reed, was elected by a larger margin. Florida, once considered the nation’s largest swing state, is firmly in the Republican column after a resounding victory by Ron DeSantis.

If DeSantis decides to run for president while remaining governor, it will likely require a change to Florida law. If a state officeholder wants to run for a federal office, they must resign their positions. Republican state senators, including Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, don’t care about the law. The legislature will repeal it. Passidomo told reporters that if a Florida governor wanted to run for president he should be allowed to do it.

Chris Sununu made it clear that his vision for the future of the Republican Party does not include Donald Trump.

Sununu, who just won a fourth two-year term in the Granite State by fifteen percentage points, said it’s “un-American” to “be a country where the best opportunity for our future leadership is the leadership of yesterday.”

Why does he care if he wins the presidency? A survey of republikans who are aligned with Jeremy Corby

A majority of Republican voters who are aligned with him would back him in the election if he wins the party’s presidential nomination, according to the survey.