DeSantis Privately Says Trump Won’t Win 2024 Presidential Race

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Gov. declared Ron DeSantis of Florida announced his presidential candidacy on Thursday afternoon, telling donors and supporters at a rally that only three credible candidates are in the race and that only he can win the Republican primary and general election.

You have basically three people at this point who are credible in this whole thing, Mr. DeSantis told donors on the call, organized by the super PAC that supports him, Never Back Down. Biden, Trump and me. And I think out of those three, two have a chance to elect president Biden and I, based on all the data in the swing states, which is not good for the former president and probably won’t be resolved because people’s views on him. .

The call, overheard by a New York Times reporter, comes as the governor is expected to officially enter the presidential race next week, according to three people familiar with his intentions.

Mr. is expected to file. DeSantis filed papers declaring his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission ahead of a big fund-raising meeting with donors in Miami on May 25 meant to act as a demonstration of his financial strength. He must formally enter the race before he can solicit donations for his presidential campaign.

He is also likely to release a video to coincide with his official entry into the race, and a blitz of events in the nominee’s first states will follow in the coming weeks, according to one of the people. The Wall Street Journal first reported that Mr. DeSantis would file the papers next week.

During the call with the donor, Mr. DeSantis is fighting Disney, which on Thursday pulled out of a $1 billion office development project in Orlando. And he spent some time discussing cultural topics on the call, which included many business officials who did not favor his aggressive stances on those issues.

He said the attitude of Republican voters is equivalent to, We’ve got to win this time. And while he praised Mr. Trump’s policies, he said Mr. Biden had already done away with many of them.

The corporate media wanted Trump to be the nominee, Mr. DeSantis said, adding that journalists, other candidates and two presidents had targeted him with criticism.

Mr. DeSantis quoted a voter he spoke with at an event in Iowa as saying, You know, Trump is a man, we like his policies but we don’t like his values. And to you, we like your rules but we also know you share our values.

And Mr. DeSantis described his efforts to help the party, noting that Mr. Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly attacked him. There are some that kind of raise money just for themselves, he said, an unmistakable jab at Mr. Trump, who was criticized during the midterm elections for sitting on a large pile of money in his political action committee and not doing enough to help others. .

He also touted his successful visit to Des Moines last weekend after Mr. Trump canceled his own rally in the area, citing a tornado watch.

Proud of Mr. DeSantis talked about the Florida legislative session and the state budget, walking through a list of things he’s happy to have done on environmental and education issues. He described a great body of work and said he would not give up on any issues on the left.

He didn’t ask questions and was the only one who spoke on the call. But he suggested that his ability to respond to what he described as months of attacks was about to change, a veiled reference to being a candidate.

When we say we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it, and do it, Mr. DeSantis said of his approach to the state, an indirect contrast to Mr. Trump, who some Republicans criticized for unfinished business during his presidency.

Mr. suggested Mr. DeSantis Trump has leaned heavily on executive action rather than helping push measures through Congress, and pointed to his own work in the Florida legislative sessions as a contrast.

Mr. DeSantis, who was a Navy officer during the Iraq war, said he would be the only veteran in the race. And he made a difference in another part of the record of Mr. Trumps, one that goes back to the time of Mr. DeSantiss was a congressman elected the cycle after the Tea Party wave of 2010, when the focus was on limiting government spending.

Certainly with the Trump administration, there is not the emphasis on spending cuts that there was during the Tea Party era, he said. The comment is remarkable given that a week earlier, Mr. Trump argued in a CNN town-hall event for letting the country default on the debt ceiling. The House Republicans and Mr. Biden is in a one-week deadlock on whether to raise the debt limit.

At another point, Mr. DeSantis was blunt, saying, I think voters want to move on from Biden, adding, They just want a vehicle they can get behind but there are a lot of voters who don’t see Trump as that vehicle.

Mr. also said DeSantis talked about the release of his book, The Courage to Be Free, and his book tour, including the book being on the New York Times best-seller list for several weeks.

He gave his supporters statistics, saying he sold 95,000 copies in his first week, compared to 60,000 for Barack Obama’s book before he became president and 80,000 for Hillary Clinton’s memoir before she became a candidate in the 2016 cycle. . (Those numbers are roughly in line with the actual totals.)

His sales volume is not normal for elected office people who write books, he said, adding, For us to exceed both of those, I think, is really, really significant.

Mr. DeSantis, however, was dealt a potential political blow with Disney’s Thursday pullout of the Orlando development project, which would have brought more than 2,000 jobs to the region. The move highlighted the continuing fallout from his targeting of Disney after the company’s chief executive at the time criticized a Florida law restricting the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools.

Mr. Trump is running about 30 percentage points ahead of Mr. DeSantis in national polling averages, but the Florida governor will be the strongest Republican challenger to join the field so far. Mr. DeSantis told people on the call that he did not put much stock in those polls, saying he had started as an underdog in previous races and that polls ahead of his 2022 re-election bid showed more small margin of victory than he ended up with.

He is likely to start with more money in an outside group than any Republican primary candidate in history. He has more than $80 million expected to move from his state account to his super PAC, which has also raised more than $30 million, in addition to having tens of millions more in donor commitments, according to people familiar with the matter. in fund-raising.

Mr. DeSantis also has a long streak of conservative policy victories that he shepherded through Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature after his landslide re-election last year. And he got a large number of endorsements from state legislators in Iowa and New Hampshire, which could be influential in primary elections, as well as from those in his home state.

However, the confrontation with Mr. Trump, who Republicans fought after he was impeached in New York, is a tall order. While the former president harassed him every day, Mr. DeSantis had to engage in a delicate dance.

To win, he must appeal to the large number of Republican primary voters that Mr. Trump but may be willing to move on from a candidate who lost in 2020 and continues to repeat false statements about that election. Doing so requires Mr. DeSantis to differentiate himself from Mr. Trump without criticizing him so aggressively that he risks offending those Trump-friendly voters.

It is possible that Mr. DeSantis made his plans last minute, and it’s still unclear where or when he might hold a formal rally announcing his candidacy.

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