The ultra-conservative Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and number two contender among the Republican presidential candidates in 2024, is the most likely to lose in the debate between the contenders in the primaries of this party, called today at six o’clock in the afternoon ( midnight in Spain). The colloquium is organized by the friendly network Fox and will not include Donald Trump, who plans to counterprogram the call with the broadcast on the internet of an interview with one of his sympathizers, the presenter Tucker Carlson, to whom this same network goes lay off in April
Aside from the effect that this double disdain for Fox and the Republican Party has for Trump, an effect that can be close to zero considering the antecedents, tomorrow’s debate is critical for his competitors. Of the dozen who have entered the race, eight will participate in the debate, which will be broadcast from Milwaukee. They are DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and the North Dakota Governor Douglas Burgum.
While for most the appointment represents an opportunity to better publicize their proposals, and themselves, for DeSantis the debate is a litmus test to, or consolidate as number two behind Trump , but very advantageous compared to the rest, or continue to lose positions and start to be seen as one more among the former president’s rivals.
The campaign for the governor of Florida has been going strong since the day it began, on May 24. That day, the candidate was officially presented as a candidate in a broadcast on Twitter, hand in hand with its new owner, Elon Musk, which was catastrophic due to serious technical errors during the transmission.
DeSantis, already an extremist in his own right, strove from the start to be or seem more ultra than Trump. In July, his campaign team released a video in which the candidate boasted of his homophobia, already well known to the public for his statements and anti-trans laws.
But the strategy of seeing who is the most handsome did not give him good results, quite the opposite. Some donors to his campaign began to distance themselves. Hotelier Robert Bigelow, who had already given him $20 million, warned that he would turn off the tap if he did not temper his speech to attract more moderate voters. In fact, Trump’s gap with DeSantis kept growing. From April to today, the distance has doubled, approaching, and even surpassing, forty points.
The positions of Trump’s rivals, among whom the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – who is already close to DeSantis – will be important to the extent that the former president’s legal problems may end up removing him from the race or taking him away hegemony in the party.
The former president will appear tomorrow at the prison in Fulton (Georgia) to be arrested and booked after being charged with 13 mafia acts and falsehoods aimed at reversing his defeat in 2020. On Monday Trump agreed to pay the $200,000 bail that the court imposed on him to be able to continue free after the arrest. The leader will also not be able to continue threatening witnesses and victims of the case. It won’t be easy for him: intimidation seems to be part of his nature.
