Trump’s camp has dismissed Florida’s governor as a cheap imitator of his policies. But both men differ on a number of fronts that could prove key in ’24.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made his campaign “Twitter official” Wednesday night, kicking off his 2024 bid for president with a glitchy but well-covered audio announcement with Elon Musk and entrepreneur David Sacks.
Already well known nationally and with tens of millions of dollars in the bank well before his formal announcement, DeSantis will likely be a top contender for the Republican nomination with staying power that will last well into the height of campaign season.
But his campaign will also put him on a direct collision course with Donald Trump, the clear front-runner in the GOP race. The former president has dismissed DeSantis as nothing more than a tribute act to the Make America Great Again movement, a candidate who has cribbed everything from Trump’s bombastic rhetoric to his baggy suits and flamboyant hand gestures.
“We don’t have time for cheap imitations being pushed by the Never Trump RINO establishment,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted shortly after DeSantis’ announcement, using the acronym for Republican in name only. “Donald Trump is the America First warrior we need back in the White House in 2024.”
While they may share mannerisms, both candidates will need to develop a compelling pitch to not only win a plurality of the Republican vote but also to keep their brand intact with enough independents to remain competitive in the general election. Here’s where the two men stand on some defining issues and where either one might be vulnerable.
Abortion rights were the defining issue of the 2022 midterm elections, eclipsing independent voters’ concerns about topics like crime and the economy and tempering what many believed would be a Republican sweep in the House and Senate races.
Abortion is also likely to play a key role in the 2024 Republican primaries—and it could set Trump and DeSantis apart from each other early.
Arguably, nobody was more responsible for the nation’s spate of anti-abortion legislation than the former president, whose 2016 victory led to the appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices and the revoking of the constitutional right to an abortion last June.
After the midterms, however, Trump’s stance on abortion bans shifted. He has chastised Republicans who supported the most draconian bans on abortion during their campaigns, saying they were making a mistake. DeSantis, who recently signed a six-week ban in his state, was among them.
“If you look at what DeSantis did, a lot of people don’t even know if he knew what he was doing,” Trump told media startup The Messenger in an interview earlier this month. “But he signed six weeks, and many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh.”
While Trump has shown some willingness to support a national 15-week ban, he has largely dodged the issue when confronted on it. This has prompted some anti-abortion activists to openly question their support of the former president, even in the early stages of the midterms.
DeSantis, meanwhile, is leaning into his position—and hitting Trump for his.
“I think that, as a Florida resident, you know, he didn’t give an answer about ‘would you have signed the heartbeat bill’ that Florida did,” DeSantis said about Trump in a news conference earlier this month. “It had all the exceptions that people talk about. The Legislature put it in. I signed the bill. I was proud to do it. He won’t answer whether he would sign it or not.”
Within the conservative movement, DeSantis’ education policies in Florida are considered the gold standard and an expression of the GOP’s culture wars in action.
While states like Virginia were arguably the birthplace of the “parents first” movement, DeSantis has escalated the fight in the Sunshine State, from kindergartens to the state’s university system.
