DeSantis begins to take the gloves off against Trump
October 03, 2023 04:00 AM
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) made an uncharacteristic move during last week’s debate: He called out former President Donald Trump by name.
In what appears to be a new campaign strategy, he denounced Trump’s decision to skip the second 2024 Republican presidential debate.
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“So please spare me the crocodile tears for these people [in Washington]. They need to change what’s going on. And where’s Joe Biden? He’s completely missing in action from leadership,” DeSantis said. “And you know who else is missing in action? Donald Trump is missing in action. He should be on this stage tonight.”
“He owes it to you,” the Florida governor added to applause from the crowd, “to defend his record, where they added $7.8 trillion to the debt. That set the stage for the inflation that we have.”
That’s a sharp contrast from the strategy DeSantis followed for months, in which he rarely mentioned Trump and even more seldom by name while making his case for the White House. DeSantis’s campaign team followed those comments with a weekend dispatch titled “DeSantis cranks up the heat on Trump,” highlighting several additional swipes he’s made at the GOP front-runner.
DeSantis hit Trump again during the California GOP convention, though he reverted to doing so without naming him, by pointing out that The Donald’s leadership turned formerly red states blue.
“I understand that one of my residents was here earlier saying that he turned Florida red,” DeSantis said. “All I will say is that Ronald Reagan made the point there’s no limit to what you can do when you don’t care who gets the credit. I just wished if he was the one that turned Florida red that he wouldn’t have turned Georgia and Arizona blue because that’s not been good for us at all.”
Taking it to Trump directly may be the governor’s latest campaign wrinkle as he tries to get voters into his camp.
The problem, and potentially the cause of the pivot, is that Desantis is treading water at best against Trump. The RealClearPolitics average has DeSantis at 13.6% support to Trump’s 56.7%. DeSantis was 15 points behind Trump in late March; he’s now down 43 points.

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University of Central Florida professor James Clark says attacking Trump is the one card DeSantis has yet to play.
“Surveys show [DeSantis] won both debates, but his numbers did not rise,” Clark said. “He has reset his campaign, changed campaign managers, and laid off staff. He has run out of options; capturing Trump supporters means taking on Trump. He has taken on Disney, tech giants, and the Florida legislature, but he has hesitated to take on the man he has to defeat.”
Clark pointed to a 2020 Trump tweet that cited Ralph Waldo Emerson as saying, “When you strike at the king, you must kill him,” as an apt description of the challenge for DeSantis.
“With Trump trapped in a courtroom, it may be the best, last chance for DeSantis to make a move,” he said.
Trump, meanwhile, appears to be turning his attention to the general election, and there are plenty of people who doubt that DeSantis can still catch him.
Political strategist John Thomas once founded a super PAC called Ron to the Rescue in an effort to draft DeSantis for a presidential run. Today Thomas is supporting Trump.
“It’s too little, too late,” Thomas said of the attacks. “There has only been one way to win the primary against Donald Trump, and that’s directly through Donald Trump. What we’ve seen throughout this primary is that avoiding that obvious fact is going to be to your peril.”
Trump began going after DeSantis in the spring, which the governor’s camp initially either ignored or responded to in a sly, indirect way. The challenge for DeSantis, and for all GOP hopefuls, is to convince Trump supporters to switch their allegiance without alienating them. No one has figured out that dance yet.
The DeSantis camp never embraced Thomas’s PAC and has since denounced it as a scam. Nonetheless, Thomas says his backers got cold feet once DeSantis launched a presidential campaign that seemed to lack momentum and never returned.
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One analyst who is more optimistic about DeSantis is Florida Atlantic University professor Kevin Wagner. He says it’s still too far from voting season to pay too much attention to polls and that there remains plenty of time for momentum to shift.
“Gov. DeSantis still maintains significant support over most of the other non-Trump contenders and may be in a position to benefit should the dynamics of the race change,” Wagner said. “The political landscape could be in a very different place by January.”