Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, still yet to officially declare his entry into the race to be the Republican presidential candidate for 2024, has told donors only he or Joe Biden can win the 2024 election on a call where he invited the New York Times to listen.
“You have basically three people at this point that are credible in this whole thing,” DeSantis said on the conference call organized by his anti-Trump ‘Never Back Down’ super PAC.
“Biden, Trump and me. And I think of those three, two have a chance to get elected president — Biden and me, based on all the data in the swing states, which is not great for the former president and probably insurmountable because people aren’t going to change their view of him,” the Floridian claimed.
DeSantis also claimed a voter in Iowa had told him “we liked [Trump’s] policies but we didn’t like his values,” but that in his own case they said, “we like your policies but also know that you share our values.” The Governor ludicrously argued that the “corporate media wants Trump to be the nominee.”
Backroom Boy.
DeSantis and his allies have been privately lobbying against Trump since late 2019.
While for some it originally appeared as though Trump was turning on a former ally who had done him no wrong, revelations of DeSantis’s efforts to undermine the former president out of the public eye explain why he recognized the Governor’s betrayal early, and acted accordingly.
In terms of DeSantis’s claims to be a more viable candidate than Trump, Rich Baris of Big Data Poll summed it up as “the same electability argument used by [John] McCain, [Mitt] Romney and Jeb [Bush], largely informed by the same pollsters,” adding: “Republican voters didn’t believe it in 2016 and they don’t now.”
He added: “8%-12% of 2020 Biden voters routinely tell us they have changed their minds and would vote for Trump in a rematch… DeSantis’ concern should be the 18% of Trump voters who say they will only vote FOR Trump.”
The narrative that DeSantis has broader appeal than Trump also appears to be based on not necessarily reliable numbers. The National Pulse recently revealed how the much-publicized pro-DeSantis, anti-Trump polls are conducted by an organization with clear ties to the DeSantis campaign and questionable links to the likes of Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and even George Soros.