“Why not look the people of the state of Florida in the eye and tell them that if you are re-elected, you will serve a full four-year term as governor?” Charlie Crist, the challenger to Ron DeSantis, launched in The first debate of Florida’s gubernatorial campaign. Faced with the question of his opponent, the current governor of Florida froze, as if paralyzed, before embarking on his immigration file, pretending that the question had not existed.
Indeed, the question is an important one for Florida voters heading to the polls on Tuesday: Will Ron DeSantis make it to the end of a new four-year term if he is re-elected? Or will Ron DeSantis challenge his old mentor, Donald Trump, by lining up in the 2024 presidential race?
Donald Trump’s first serious competitor
If you haven’t yet specified your national intentions, Ron DeSantis has earned the stature of Donald Trump’s potential challenger for the Republican field. Despite the absence of a major general poll pitting the two men at the moment, Donald Trump almost always comes out on top in “straw polls.” These polls, “done at home” by the local federations of the Republican Party, give Donald Trump the lead in voting intentions in the event of primaries within the party.
Almost always, but not always. Upsizing recently: Ron DeSantis is now the favorite candidate for Florida Republicans, according to a poll, a real one. If he takes advantage of his local roots, Donald Trump also has his base in the “Sunshine State”, more precisely in his luxurious residence in Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach.
“Both among Republican supporters and among voters in general, he is competitive with Donald Trump. If Trump runs again, he is in the background, but if Trump doesn’t run again, he is by far the best placed, ”explains Marie-Christine Bonzom, a political scientist, journalist and former BBC correspondent in Washington.
An outsider position that allows Ron DeSantis to establish himself as a presidential heavyweight already in everyone’s mind on the eve of the midterm elections. To tickle Donald Trump, whose 2016 campaign manager said he was likely to announce his candidacy “between Midterm Election Day and Thanksgiving” (that is, before November 24)?
Obvious friction has arisen between the two men, while Donald Trump had supported with great fanfare his “cookie”, the affectionate nickname given to Ron DeSantis, in 2018. Since then, radio silence. And the governor didn’t ask for it either, as he could have done before.
A sign of the division now taking place between the two men: a meeting organized by Donald Trump in support of Marco Rubio, the Republican candidate for senator for a new term in the midterm elections, will take place on November 6 without Ron DeSantis. , still head of the local. executive. According to the Politico news site, the governor had not been invited but was not planning to come.
What is at stake this time, is an endorsement by Ron DeSantis of the Republican candidate for the Senate in Colorado that Donald Trump had called “stupid” for his moderate position on abortion and firearms. In this state that is quite loyal to the Democrats, winning on a very conservative line seems complicated, but Donald Trump does not hesitate to cast opprobrium on those who dare to dilute their conservatism for electoral purposes. They are called “Republicans in name only” (“Republican in name only”, “Rino”).
“On paper, everything is fine”
Ron DeSantis has a lot of what it takes to be a prominent politician on the other side of the Atlantic. “On paper everything is fine,” summarizes Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist specializing in the United States and co-author of The Great Days That Changed America. Descendant of Italian immigrants, Ron DeSantis is the son of a nurse mother and his father installed television audience analysis boxes in private homes. “Working roots” that he does not cease to claim and that participate in his narration, he who also likes to say that he began his career “earning 6 dollars an hour.”
An image to qualify: “He is overqualified even if he is the man of the people. He did Yale in history and Harvard law: he is really the elite, what we call in the United States, theivy league”.
“He has a pedigree very close to that of Clinton and Obama”, he graduated from the same schools, compares Marie-Christine Bonzom.
On a personal level, “he has a family: a wife and three children. He also has a politician’s physique with beautiful teeth and beautiful hair, ”adds Nicole Bacharan, thus recalling two means to ensure economic credibility in American politics.
But one of the most radically different formal aspects is the fact that Donald Trump no longer has any mandate while Ron DeSantis is a “executiveaccording to the formula consecrated and remembered by Marie-Christine Bonzom: “Donald Trump is a former leader: he can no longer influence the affairs of the United States, he is no longer in business. Ron DeSantis directs an important state with 22 million inhabitants and a budget of 200 billion dollars. Not even all governors are in this situation.
“Ron DeSantis can also rely on a real military career, he was deployed to Iraq, he was decorated, he will be an asset that he can present,” underlines Marie-Christine Bonzom.
In particular against Donald Trump, who explained that he had been exempted from military service after a favorable draw: supporting evidence, the New York Times revealed in 2016 that the then-presidential candidate had actually lied, having excused himself four times for being a student, before finally being discharged on the basis of a medical certificate whose legitimacy is questionable.
Ron DeSantis’s last great asset: his age, 44 years old. Far from the 76 years of Donald Trump or the 79 years (80 on November 20) of Joe Biden. He remains one of Florida’s youngest elected governors, at just 40 years old.
“Trumpism without Trump”
Ideologically, Ron DeSantis is one of the spearheads of the new conservative wave, of which the election of Donald Trump was the most striking manifestation. As such, he is engaged in the “culture war” waged by his camp against progressives and minorities of all stripes.
In particular, it lowered the time limit for an abortion from 24 to 15 weeks. It also sanctified the carrying of weapons and prohibited references to the plurality of sexual orientations and genders in public schools. On this occasion, he made Disney and its amusement park in Orlando one of his favorite targets when the company affirmed its support for LGBT+ people in the face of local political power.
“Ron DeSantis presents himself as an acceptable Republican playing Trumpism without Trump,” summarizes Marie-Christine Bonzom.
Disney, Florida’s largest employer with 77,000 employees, until recently benefited from a tax status that saved several hundred million dollars each year. But faced with criticism from the company, the governor had it withdrawn. A way of affirming that he takes social issues very seriously, to the point of getting angry with the economic engine of his state.
Notoriously supportive of the wall between Mexico and the United States promised by Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis is fiercely anti-immigration and likes to remind us: In September, he chartered two planes to take asylum seekers, mostly Venezuelans, on board and transfer them. to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, an island in the state of Massachusetts, popular among Democratic apparatchiks as a vacation spot: the Obama couple has owned a mansion there since 2019, like the historic ones on the island, the Clinton couple and other celebrities claim to be progressives like billionaires Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey.
Governor’s argument: “if you believe in open borders, [vous devez] bear the weight of the opening of borders”.
Clearly, the “elites” must “assume the migrants” that they allow to enter the territory. Results of the operation: twelve million dollars of public money spent for the movement of some fifty people and an open investigation for exceeding the prerogatives of the administration from Florida.
A media maneuver that earned him the outrage of all Democratic figures, including President Joe Biden, who considered that the governor was “making people’s lives a political game.” This didn’t stop the two men from putting aside their divisions to appear alongside victims of Hurricane Ian, which killed 107 people in Florida.
Because if he uses it to gain notoriety, Ron DeSantis does not limit his political action to his escapades and knows how to present himself as a responsible politician. “He is able to get people talking about him, but his goal is not to create chaos by firing a right swipe and a left swipe like Donald Trump might. He is someone who has a very clear vision of what it means to be conservative today, ”Nicole Bacharan analyzes.
Ron DeSantis should be re-elected in Florida against Charlie Crist, while he is currently 9 points ahead of him in the latest polls. He could use this victory as a launching pad into 2024 and will likely look into a potential Donald Trump candidacy announcement. Then the moment of the election will come: “If Trump runs, it will be the decision of his life: he can do it at the national level as well as defeat him, but he is still young,” considers Marie-Christine. “Trump, he doesn’t have any more time.”
Source: BFM TV
