Ron DeSantis has officially submitted his presidential candidacy

The fratricidal war between the master and the apprentice will take place. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis officially filed his 2024 presidential candidacy with the US Election Commission on Wednesday. He will therefore challenge Donald Trump in a Republican primary that promises to be knife.

.@RonDeSantis for President was officially born at 2:24 pm on May 24, 2023 per the @FEC.#FlaPol pic.twitter.com/4LyfUFSeRm

— Peter Schorsch (@PeterSchorschFL) May 24, 2023

Access to this content has been blocked to respect your choice of consent

Clicking on ” I ACCEPT », you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I ACCEPT

And to better remunerate 20 Minutes, do not hesitate to accept all cookies, even for one day only, via our “I accept for today” button in the banner below.

More information on the Cookie Management Policy page.

Mediatically, DeSantis is due to launch his campaign during a Twitter interview with Elon Musk at 6 p.m. (midnight Paris time).

On Truth Social, Donald Trump fired a preemptive salvo on Wednesday morning, recalling that he had obtained more presidential votes in Florida in 2020 than DeSantis during his re-election to the post of governor last November. The ex-president appears to have changed his opponent’s nickname from “DeSanctimonious” (lesson giver) to the shorter “Ron DeSanctus,” who “can’t win the presidential election because he voted to obliterate Social Security. (retirements) and even wants to raise the minimum age to 70,” assures the former president. The latter has always taken a much more populist position than the rest of the Republican Party on pensions and senior health, unlike DeSantis.

Air hole in the polls

A former Navy lawyer who graduated from the prestigious universities of Yale and Harvard, Ron DeSantis made his mark in Congress as a representative from Florida between 2012 and 2018. He defeated Democrat Andrew Gillum by a short head to become governor of the Sunshine. state in 2019, before being re-elected in a chair last November.

The contrast with the rout of the Trumpist candidates during the midterms propelled him among the favorites in the Republican primary. But while he was following Donald Trump in the voting intentions, he is now more than 34 points behind the former president (21.1% against 55.5%), according to the average of RealClearPolitics.

At 44, the “anti-Wokism” warrior has already raised a war chest of more than 100 million dollars for his campaign and could take advantage of Donald Trump’s legal troubles. Who warned: “I know more about (DeSantis) than anyone, maybe except his wife” Beware of low blows.