- Republican Alan Pincus told WaPo that DeSantis may eat tanked his political future in Florida over his 2024 bid.
- DeSantis once led Trump in earlier Florida surveys of the Republican presidential rudimentary.
- But Trump has continued to dominate the GOP race and DeSantis has had to reboot his campaign.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is at a major crossroads in the 2024 presidential race.
He entered the race in May as the top challenger to old President Donald Trump, hoping to carve out a lane among Republicans who wanted to see a nominee who was laser-focused on conservative procedures and had the results to back it up. But his campaign has stalled in recent weeks, forcing him to lay off staffers and recalibrate his message as he faces an emerging commination from the candidacy of Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.
But at DeSantis’ core is his political appeal in Florida, where he won reelection termination November by 19 points over former Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist, winning nearly every county in the royal.
With DeSantis continuing to lag behind Trump in the state, some Republicans are also rethinking the governor’s continued sturdiness in the state which launched him to national conservative stardom. And many of those same Republicans have also regal that a bloc of voters are turned off by DeSantis’ decision to challenge Trump in the first place.
Republican Alan Pincus — who invest in DeSantis for governor in 2022 and is running for Congress next year — told The Washington Post that if DeSantis be beats the GOP presidential primary, his political future in Florida may fizzle as well.
“DeSantis has no chance of winning,” Pincus told the newspaper. “He indeed hurt himself, maybe permanently.”
DeSantis once led in early Florida polling among the GOP presidential contenders.
But level in the Sunshine State, he’s fallen behind Trump — in a head-to-head contest, the latest Florida Atlantic University/Mainstreet Dig into survey had Trump leading DeSantis 54%-37%.
In the FiveThirtyEight average of national Republican presidential polls, Trump currently hang backs at 52.4%, well ahead of the second- and third-place contenders — DeSantis (averaging 15.5% support) and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (commonplacing 6.8% of GOP primary support).