Speaker 1: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis still has not even announced that he is joining
the Republican presidential primary and his candidacy continues to collapse.
Will hold on if it hasn't started.
How is it collapsing?
The answer is recent polling.
You have to see this.
It's actually I don't know that we've ever seen anything like this.
The green line on your screen pointing down is Ron DeSantis is polling.
And I'll give you the numbers if you're just listening today, the purple line near the
top is Donald Trump, which continues to climb.
Something happened right around March 28th, 29/30, that has sent Donald Trump's Republican
polling up and Ron Desantis's Republican polling down.
And this just so happens to have been the moment where we learned Donald Trump would
be indicted and arrested.
Yes, I continue to believe that the arrest and indictment of Trump does nothing for him
if he makes it to the general election in November of 2024.
But it is undeniably clear that it is doing something for him in the Republican primary.
Ron DeSantis now down barely to 20% on average.
In recent polling, he had reached as high as 30 to 33.
And Donald Trump continues to climb, now holding 55% of the Republican primary ballot.
Understanding also that a bunch of the support is among people who aren't even running at
this point in time.
Mike Pence has nearly 6%, but he's not running, at least not right now.
Tim Scott has 2%, has not yet announced the candidacy.
Larry Elder has a one point.
Chris Christie has one point.
Christie may run, Hutchinson just shy of one point and Sununu 7/10 of a point.
So what does this mean?
Well, this means that unless Ron DeSantis can take support from people currently supporting
the failed former President Donald Trump, he has no path to the nomination.
Even if Ron DeSantis scoops up every bit of the non-Trump vote, that only gets him to
45% of the Republican primary ballot, not enough to win that nomination.
So the question then becomes, how can de Santos take voters that are already supporting Donald
Trump?
And the answer may be he can't, that it's really up to Trump to mess this thing up for
himself.
That's one perspective.
The ways that it could get messed up for Trump, for lack of a better term, could include more
arrests and indictments that definitively take him off of the campaign trail.
Some kind of misstep.
But, I mean, listen, he's been found liable of sexually assaulting and defaming a woman,
and his support just keeps climbing among Republican voters.
So I actually don't know what there is that DeSantis could do.
What I can tell you won't help.
DeSantis is the wishy washy approach that he has taken where he'll sort of criticize
the failed former President Trump.
But he really stands for nothing and he won't seriously do it.
This is just one example.
We looked at this earlier this week, and of course, I apologize to those who have seen
this.
Here is DeSantis asked, Do you acknowledge Trump really did lose in November of 2020?
Do you acknowledge that the voter fraud that Trump claims took place didn't actually take
place and DeSantis standing for nothing?
Take a listen to this.
You said there at.
Speaker 2: Events in Iowa over the weekend that the GOP is a culture of losing.
Do you acknowledge the Trump loss in a lot of this really tough stuff?
Right.
Well, I look at the last however many election cycles, 2018, we lost the House.
True, we lost the Senate.
2020.
Biden becomes president or go excuse me.
We lost the Senate in 2020.
Biden becomes president and it's done a huge amount of damage.
Very unpopular in 2022.
And we are supposed to have this big red wave in Florida and Iowa.
I didn't see a red wave across this country.
And so I think the party has developed a culture of losing.
I think that there is not accountability.
And I think in Florida, we really showed what it takes.
Okay.
Speaker 1: I want to play the whole thing and torture you all with Ron DeSantis.
This is not inspiring confidence that is not going to bring over the Trump people who want
to hear him say.
Trump did win and this is not going to bring over the non-Trump people who might want to
hear him say, listen, we lost.
I wish we would have won.
But he lost and I'm running so that we can actually win.
It's not going to convince anyone.
Also, an unforeseen.
Error for Ron DeSantis as he keeps going with this anti-woke stuff, which might play okay
among Florida Republicans.
But when you pull the country, the country is not anti-woke in the way that Ron DeSantis
is acting as they are.
Here is DeSantis yesterday talking about banning gender study.
What this.
Speaker 2: Bill is saying is, you know, some of these niche subjects like critical risk,
the.
Speaker 1: Word is niche, sir.
Speaker 2: Niche is theory.
Other types of deep niche EAI infused courses and majors.
Florida's getting out of that game.
If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley, go to some of these other
places.
That's fine.
Speaker 1: It's fine.
Yeah.
And by the way, I understand that both both niche and niche are acceptable pronunciations
in 2023 for that word that people have.
The country has been polled.
Okay?
And it's not at all evident that just because Youngkin won in Virginia on this, you know,
anti anti-woke campaign platform and because DeSantis did well in Florida, it is not at
all clear that that is going to win you a presidential election or even a Republican
primary nationally, because for the most part, the country, by roughly a 6040 margin is on
the woke side of things.
So to get back to our question, you look at the numbers, you see the DeSantis collapse.
What can turn it around?
DeSantis may believe that simply announcing a run is going to turn this around.
He may be right that announcing that he is running might push him from 20 to 25 in the
Republican primary.
It might push him from 20 to 28, maybe even to 30 in the Republican primary.
But you don't win with that.
And it is not at all clear that he has a path to denying Trump the roughly 50 plus percent
that he needs.
So things not going well for Ron DeSantis, things going very well for Donald Trump in
the Republican primary.
Rumor has it DeSantis, if he is going to announce maybe doing so in the next 7 to 10 days, we
will watch it.
I will, of course, let you know.