Former President Donald Trump and current Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dueled Tuesday as they held events in the state of New Hampshire ahead of the first primaries, as the campaign spans more than one dozen Republican contenders running for president next year.
DeSantis was on the dais in the city of Hollis just before Trump was to speak 40 miles north in Concord, the state capital. The common target of the two rivals on Tuesday: President Joe Biden, who at the age of 80 is running for a second term.
“If this election is about Biden’s failures and our vision for the future, we’re going to win. If it comes to relitigating things that happened two or three years ago, we’re going to lose,” DeSantis said, standing in front of a “restore sanity” banner.
His comment was in response to a question from a high school student about whether Trump violated the key Democratic principle of the peaceful transfer of power by urging his supporters to disrupt the Electoral College vote count at the US Capitol. on January 6, 2021.
“We are going to evict crooked Joe Biden. He is badly crooked, ”said Trump – who is the first or former president of the United States to face federal criminal charges– at the Tuesday luncheon hosted by the New Hampshire Republic Federation of Women. “He is the most corrupt president we have ever had” and “extremely incompetent as head of the United States of America.”
Trump, 77, has declared that he will not withdraw from the 2024 race, even if he is convicted of a crime. In addition to being charged with more than three dozen felonies in connection with classified documents found at his Florida property, an independent federal prosecutor is also examining his actions to interfere with the 2020 vote count and stop the transfer of power to Biden. of 2021.
In the state of Georgia, a district attorney is considering charges against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election there. Trump also faces charges in New York state related to his role in paying money to an adult movie star. .
Trump, in his New Hampshire remarks, said that every time he is impeached, it is a “big, big, beautiful badge of honor and courage.”
Political strategist Stuart Stevens, a veteran of five Republican presidential campaigns, says “this is the Trump party.” “And I don’t see any reason to believe that the legal problems that he has are changing that. I think in many ways, they are just solidifying it,” he concluded.
Trump has successfully portrayed himself as a victim of political persecution “and he saw his numbers go up when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, so it’s a very strange and unusual situation,” Stevens told the voice of america.
Trump’s lead over DeSantis, 44, who ranks second in voting intention polls, has widened following the former president’s recent federal indictment.
“Because the public is really smart, my numbers went up,” Trump said Tuesday, again accusing Biden, baselessly, of using the Justice Department as a weapon to attack him for political reasons.
“We are not going to allow this election to be stolen from us,” said the former president, referring to next year’s presidential vote. “I would have to work very hard to screw this up,” he said.
Trump leads in the polls
Fifty-one percent of national Republican primary voters in a poll of nbc held June 16-20, they selected Trump as their first choice in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, followed by 22% who chose DeSantis. Former Vice President Mike Pence got 7%, while 5% indicated his preference for former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. No other Republican candidate received more than 4% support.
Another credible poll, the Morning Consult poll, released Tuesday and contacting several thousand Republican primary voters from June 23-25, puts Trump at 57% and DeSantis at 19%.
Trump told the New Hampshire women’s group that he will continue to attack DeSantis as long as his challenger remains in second place, predicting that the governor will soon falter and then target whoever replaces his fellow Floridian in that spot.
“I think everything indicates that Donald Trump is going to be the nominee,” predicted Stevens, who says he left the Republican Party because of his loyalty to Trump.
The most recent entrant to the Republican presidential primary field is former Congressman Will Hurd of Texas.
Hurd, who was a CIA operations officer in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, says in his video campaign announcement: “If we nominate a lawless, self-serving, failed politician like Donald Trump, who lost the House, Senate and the White House, we all know that Joe Biden will win again.
Few other Republicans running are as outspokenly critical of Trump, who would be eligible to serve only four years because he has already served one term.
Christie is seen as Trump’s most outspoken critic, despite his former closeness to him. He now tells voters about the Trump presidency: “he made us smaller by dividing us further.”
With Pence’s notable exclusion, many in the race are likely auditioning for potential running mates, using this primary season as a warm-up, or hoping for a cabinet post in a Republican administration as a consolation prize.
Those with diverse backgrounds who will presumably aim for a second bill in 2024 or the top spot on the 2028 ticket include former Trump ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley. She is one of two Republicans with South Asian roots running. The other is Ohio-born businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. Another prominent candidate is Senator Tim Scott, a black former insurance agent who grew up in working-class poverty.
Another recent entrant is Miami Mayor Francis Suárez, whose Cuban-born father was also mayor of the Florida city.
Suárez, like most of the crowded electoral field, does not directly criticize Trump.
“If you get defined against Joe Biden, that’s a good thing in a Republican primary,” Stevens said. “But I also think that history has shown that when you attack Donald Trump, he attacks you back pretty hard. And I don’t think, maybe Chris Christie is an exception, that the rest of them are looking to get into a street fight with Donald. Trump”.
Debate scheduled for August
For Republican voters, their first chance to gauge many of those running for president will come when the candidates face off head-on on Aug. 23 in the party’s primary season opener in Milwaukee. , in the important Midwestern swing state of Wisconsin.
Stevens, who has spent decades electing Republicans at all political levels, sees the 2024 general election as more than just two parties with differing ideologies: a battle between opposing groups who believe the other poses an existential threat to the nation.
“We’ve never had that before, not since the 1860s” on the eve of the American Civil War, Stevens said. “And I think it’s very hard to guess how that will play out. But I don’t think it plays out in any normal traditional sense.”
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