Donald Trump responded with hearty vitriol to what he termed a New York Post “puff” piece on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his presumed rival for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. (DeSantis has not yet declared his intent to run.)
Trump’s scorched earth reply dismissed the publication — “the dying New York Post” — along with other media outlets that Trump implies have abandoned him, including Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. He also takes dead aim at DeSantis, especially for the governor’s alleged tolerance of non-Trump loving Republicans like “Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, and Karl Rove.” For that, DeSantis is called a RINO, a far right slur.
I visited Staten Island to talk about how law & order has been central to FL's success.
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantisFL) February 20, 2023
FL leads the nation in protecting LEOs & our crime rate is at a 50-year low, while NYC saw a 23% surge in major crime in 2022.
Anti-police politicians should stop catering to the woke mob. pic.twitter.com/FpFDy0V4DZ
On Truth Social, Trump asks why the writer of the DeSantis profile doesn’t mention that DeSantis “wants to cut Social Security & Medicare, loves losers like Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, and Karl Rove.” Trump also wonders that the writer failed to mention that DeSantis is “getting CLOBBERED in the polls by me.”
Is that true? A recent poll by Quinnipiac University partly validates Trump’s claim and shows him holding a significant six percentage point lead over DeSantis, 42% to 36%, with no other contender topping single digits. Note: there is no official definition of “clobbering” when it comes to polling.
Quinnipiac gave a list 14 names to Republican and Republican leaning voters. The list contained politicians who have already declared their candidacy or are widely seen as potential candidates in a Republican primary.
With 42 percent of the vote, Trump is way out in front of Ron DeSantis. Yet DeSantis receives 36 percent without yet having declared for the race. Some Republicans — and, according to Trump, some enabling media sources like Fox — are looking for DeSantis to rise.
Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, said in November that “Ron DeSantis is the leader of the Republican Party, whether he wants to be or not.”
The same Quinnipiac poll tells that the Trump-DeSantis rivalry could be closer than six points. “When the potential field is narrowed to only four candidates,” Quinnipiac says, “Republican and Republican leaning voters are split between Trump (43 percent) and DeSantis (41 percent).” That’s more of a buzzer-beater than a clobbering.
Polling is an inexact science and results vary widely from poll to poll. Trump is more of a clobberer at Harvard according to The Hill, which reports that a new “Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll released Friday exclusively to The Hill shows Trump leading DeSantis 46 percent to 23 percent.” Trump doubles the DeSantis support here.
Even without a categorical definition of the word, 46 to 23 is a clobbering, as anyone who has seen a lopsided elementary school basketball game can attest.
