Ron DeSantis officially running for president
Republican gubernatorial candidate for Florida Ron DeSantis with his wife Casey DeSantis speaks to supporters during an election night watch party at the Convention Center in Tampa, Florida, on November 8, 2022. Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially filed paperwork Wednesday to launch his 2024 presidential campaign, setting the Republican contender on a collision course with former President Donald Trump in the race for the GOP nomination. DeSantis is set to personally announce his run during a Twitter Spaces conversation with Elon Musk at 6 p.m. ET on Wednesday. The long-anticipated move marks the culmination of years of buzz around DeSantis, 44, whose resistance to Covid-era lockdown rules and willingness to engage in polarizing cultural fights have quickly made him a Republican darling. It also makes official DeSantis' simmering rivalry with Trump, burying their once-close relationship as some in the GOP look to replace the former president as their party's standard bearer. Trump has already pummeled the governor with relentless attacks for months. Trump and his allies have assailed DeSantis' record, his political abilities and even his personality, while amplifying negative news about the governor. One pro-Trump PAC even cut an ad depicting an anecdote about DeSantis eating pudding with his fingers, which the governor has denied. Read more: DeSantis brings history of business battles to presidential campaign Trump's aggression may have paid off. Polls of the potential primary field have showed DeSantis, once Trump's close competitor, consistently losing ground for months, even as the governor toured key battlegrounds and racked up policy wins with his state's GOP-held Legislature. A Quinnipiac University poll released earlier Wednesday underscored the governor's slide: Republican and GOP-leaning voters chose Trump over DeSantis by more than a two-to-one margin, 56% to 25%, in a matchup of the hypothetical primary field. That result showed Trump extending his gains and DeSantis losing ground from a previous Quinnipiac survey in late March.
A long-expected campaign
The move was hardly a surprise: DeSantis has been eyed as a 2024 presidential contender even before the end of the 2020 election cycle. While he has been mostly tight-lipped about his presidential ambitions, the governor in recent months has published a political memoir, hosted events for donors and conservative groups, embarked on a multi-state speaking tour and released campaign-style videos touting his achievements in Florida. In the meantime, his allies have been hard at work mounting a well-funded political operation that has acted as a de facto campaign for the governor's impending presidential bid. The super PAC Never Back Down, founded by former Trump administration official Ken Cuccinelli, has already raised tens of millions of dollars as it encouraged DeSantis to run for president. A person familiar with the group's activities confirmed to CNBC that it is expecting to work with an overall operating budget of at least $200 million. That figure, first reported by The New York Times, could include more than $80 million that DeSantis' allies are expected to try to move out of the governor's old state-level political committee — a controversial transfer that has divided campaign finance experts. A Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer, DeSantis was elected to the U.S. House in 2012 and became a founding member of the conservative Freedom Caucus before resigning to run for governor of Florida in 2018. Trump endorsed DeSantis in that gubernatorial primary, giving DeSantis a polling bump and leading him to cut an ad featuring his family embracing an array of Trump's political slogans and catchphrases. DeSantis' closeness to Trump went beyond just his rhetoric, with critics noting that the governor's body language and hand gestures seemed to mirror Trump's at times. DeSantis handily won the primary and went on to narrowly defeat Democrat Andrew Gillum in the general election.
Stark divisions
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Source: CNBC
