You can’t blame a guy for trying.
It’s official … Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will be announcing his candidacy for president Wednesday. The wait is finally over.
Sources tell Fox News that DeSantis will announce his candidacy during a scheduled conversation with Elon Musk at 6 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
It’s certainly a unique way to announce your candidacy, and probably a smart approach.
DeSantis needs to make waves somehow.
Considering that Elon Musk has almost 150 million followers, he’ll get the largest audience possible for his announcement.
He’s also wise to connect with a tech-info based audience. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson announced his candidacy in an interview with ABC News on traditional television. It didn’t make a ton of waves.
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A formal announcement from DeSantis will come next week with a speech in Dunedin, Fla., near Tampa.
Right now, DeSantis is swimming upstream. Four polls in a row have former President Donald Trump at over 58% in the primary. DeSantis is polling similarly to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Democratic side.
Over the weekend, DeSantis hosted a telephone conference with his top donors. He made one simple pitch. That he was the best candidate to defeat President Joe Biden and that Trump won’t cut it.
Well, the next day, a poll from the Richard Barris firm zeroed in only on the rust-belt states for the general election. It had Trump at 45% to JOe Biden’s 38%. And with DeSantis as the GOP nominee, Biden wins with 37% to DeSantis’s 35%.
Trump made sure to make note of this poll on TruthSocial, as he continues to hound his soon to be official opponent:
Trump has been going easy on his other opponents, in an effort to bring more into the race. DeSantis’s main problem is that there are non-Trump options other than him. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott might have stolen a bit of DeSantis’s thunder after getting a good amount of positive media coverage following his uniquely upbeat announcement speech.
Still, DeSantis has a record that appeals to the party faithful. His plan is to run to Trump’s right. You can see the crystallization of that plan when looking at DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban. A handful of weeks ago, when he signed it, he did so at 11:00 at night on a Friday, at a time when he thought it wouldn’t make too many waves media wise.
But this week, DeSantis has brought up his six-week abortion ban unprompted and said he was “proud to sign it.” He didn’t seem to be proud earlier in the month, but that quote signals that the Florida Governor keeps changing his electoral approach. Something wasn’t working.
The question is, has he righted the ship in time? Or will Tim Scott or Vivek Ramaswamy come sailing past him (only single digits separate DeSantis and a third place finisher)? Or are all these candidates just the Titanic colliding with the iceberg of Trump?
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