On Wednesday, 24 May, the United States Federal Election Commission officially registered Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida, as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. According to analysts, he is considered to be Donald Trump’s number one competitor in the race.
The 44-year-old politician publicly announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday evening in Washington, D.C. However, due to a technical glitch, his speech on the Twitter platform was unavailable to the wider audience for a longer period of time. At the same time, Ron DeSantis’s first campaign video appeared, in which he stated that he is running for the presidential position.
Governor Ron DeSantis, who was re-elected to the governorship last November, mentioned in a conversation broadcast on social media his goal of bringing back common sense to politics and maintaining the American middle-class lifestyle. He also highlighted Florida as an example for voters to consider.
In recent weeks, the Governor of Florida has delivered speeches in several important states for the Republican primaries, most recently in New Hampshire, where he discussed the direction of Florida’s politics. In his speech in Iowa a week and a half ago, Ron DeSantis, in an apparent jab at Trump, stated that governance
is not about entertainment, self-promotion, or communicating through social media,
but about delivering results.
According to recent public opinion polls conducted in the past four weeks and summarised by RealClearPolitics, Donald Trump remains by far the most popular politician within the Republican Party. He is supported by 56 per cent of Republican voters, while the Governor of Florida has a 19 per cent support. The third most popular Republican politician is Mike Pence, the former Vice President, with 5.6 per cent, but he has not indicated his intention to run and has made no recent references to it.
Among the Republicans officially running for the presidential nomination, Nikki Haley, the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, has 4.3 per cent popularity; Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, is supported by 3.6 per cent, while Senator Tim Scott, who officially announced his candidacy on Monday, has 1.8 per cent support so far.
The Hungarian Connection
The policies and values of Governor DeSantis have been likened to those of the Hungarian prime minister. The Florida Governor also met with the Hungarian President recently.
In April 2022, Vox ran a piece opining that DeSantis ‘is inventing American Orbánism’.
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