DeSantis defends his 2024 campaign message: ‘It’s the right thing to do’
Mabinty Quarshie
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Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) defended his 2024 presidential campaign against unrelenting criticisms of its current strategy during an interview with Fox News on Monday evening.
DeSantis has struggled to distinguish himself from former President Donald Trump‘s unrelenting dominance of the GOP primary field, prompting more 2024 challengers to join the race and mega-donors to gripe that the campaign may need new leadership. DeSantis’s campaign recently let go of 38 staffers in the wake of second-quarter reports showings that the campaign spent $1 million on payroll-related expenses. Team DeSantis is now focusing on a messaging reset in the past week.
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“Well look, at the end of the day, I’m the leader. You put out a commander’s intent and you delegate for people to do it. Then you evaluate, and if it’s not up to what you want, then you just make adjustments,” DeSantis told host Brett Baier. “I think at the end of the day, no one’s going to care about what happened in early July, six, seven months before the primaries. What they want to know, the voters here in New Hampshire, is OK, why you?”
Multiple Republican strategists have stressed that DeSantis does in fact need to nail down specific messaging that resonates with voters if he hopes to snatch the nomination from Trump, the current front-runner in the race.
Trump currently leads DeSantis 54% to 17%, a 37 percentage point gap according to a New York Times-Siena College poll released on Monday. The former president has also beaten DeSantis in most other national and state polls, often by double digits. Yet DeSantis told Baier that Trump would lose if he were to face President Joe Biden next year. “I think that there’s too many voters who just aren’t going to vote for him going forward,” DeSantis said.
The interview comes on the same day DeSantis unveiled his “Declaration of Economic Independence” speech in Rochester, New Hampshire, where he railed against China’s global influence, President Joe Biden‘s embrace of electric vehicles, and the Washington, D.C., elites. In addition to slamming “corporatism.” DeSantis said he would restore the American middle class through initiatives such as ending environmental, social, and governance investing, reforming the nation’s educational system, and reining in congressional spending.
DeSantis also pushed back against criticisms from longtime consultant Ed Rollins and other experts that focusing too much on “woke ideology” and the culture wars was hurting his campaign.
“When I hear about ‘Oh, culture war,’ standing up for the rights of parents, standing up for the well-being of children, that’s not some quote, ‘culture war’; that is central to the lives of tens of millions of people throughout this country,” DeSantis said. “It is the right thing to do to stand with our kids. It is the right thing to impose indoctrination in the schools, and I totally reject being in Iowa, New Hampshire that people don’t think that those are important.”
https://twitter.com/DeSantisWarRoom/status/1686140484547190784
The governor was also asked about his recent spat with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), Vice President Kamala Harris, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) over Florida’s educational standards over African American history and slavery. The governor’s campaign publicly attacked Donalds and Harris over criticism of Florida’s education standards, which stated that enslaved African Americans benefited from the skills learned through slavery.
“We didn’t pick the fight, Brett. Kamala Harris got on a jet at taxpayer expense and flew to Florida to lie about the African American history standards that were developed,” DeSantis said. “You can’t bend the knee to the Left’s lies. When the Left lies and creates these phony narratives, you’ve got to push back. They’ve been doing this to Republicans for years and years. Republicans bend the knee, and it’s just one thing after another.”
Baier chastised his fellow 2024 rivals and Donalds against implicitly siding with Harris over the disagreement. “What Republicans should have done is pushed back against her. Say you are operating in bad faith. These guys down in Florida, they didn’t have an agenda,” DeSantis said. “They were just trying to shoot straight. We know what the Left does. Republicans, you cannot take that bait. You’ve got to fight back against these people.”
With less than a month until the first Republican National Committee primary debate of the election cycle, attention will be focused on DeSantis to reassure his supporters that his campaign can last until past the Jan. 15 Iowa Caucuses.
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Trump has indicated he may skip the debate given his opposition to the RNC’s loyalty pledge, which requires all candidates on the debate stage to agree to support the eventual 2024 Republican nominee, though Trump also suggested that he could select a running mate from those who are on the debate, to which DeSantis told Baier, “You got to earn this nomination. Nobody’s entitled to it. You got to go work. And I think the debates are part of that process.”
“We look forward to being able to speak directly to the American people and I think it’ll be a very worthwhile endeavor,” he added.