Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has no chance of beating Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
One recent poll put support for Trump in the primary race at 53 per cent, more than twice DeSantis' tally of 26 per cent and miles ahead of mainstream Republican war-hawks Nikki Haley and Mike Pence — Trump's former vice-president — on six per cent apiece.
Another survey put Trump on 58 per cent and DeSantis on just 16 per cent, although that was before South Carolina senator Tim Scott entered the race this week.
Dan Lazare told Sputnik that DeSantis' run for the presidency "doesn't make sense to me".
"I don't buy it," he said. "I just can't see DeSantis pulling out ahead."
"He's out front on the unpopular issues like like gay rights and abortion, where Trump is a little bit better," Lazare said, but "he's very bad on foreign policy. He's a hawk on foreign policy big time."
DeSantis had briefly criticised the Biden administration's blank-cheque policy on military aid to Ukraine for its proxy conflict with Russia, the journalist noted, but quickly fell back into line with the Republican establishment.
By contrast, "Trump has got this kind of figured out," Lazare said. "He knows the how weak Biden is on this question. He knows how vulnerable he is and he knows how to hit him."
Trump's recent 'town hall' Q&A appearance on CNN — the station he dubbed the "Fake News Network" — showed that "he's a much savvier, much cleverer politician than DeSantis," Lazare said. "I think the Republicans are stuck with Trump."
DeSantis is "in a difficult spot," since he "can't attack Trump on the E. Jean Carroll verdict, he can't attack Trump on the government papers. He can't attack him for any of these things because the Republican base will go wild and will accuse DeSantis essentially of trying to suck up to the Democrats."
The writer agreed that that the Florida governor's only hope for the Republican nomination was the attempts by Democrat prosecutors to disqualify him via a felony conviction.
"I think the more the more the Democrats prosecute Trump, the stronger he gets," Lazare argued. "The Democrats have been prosecuting Trump more or less for the last six years, and it hasn't gotten them anywhere. It's only played to Trump's strong point."
However, Mitch Roschelle, a Florida resident himself, told Sputnik that DeSantis was still in with an outside chance.
"I wouldn't count out Ron DeSantis at this point. There's any number of things that can happen," Roschelle said. "When you have somebody ahead of you in the polls by that much who has a gazillion, that's a technical term, looming indictments and court cases and stuff, why not think about the number two spot? Because any one of those can land and you have a completely different dynamic."
The podcaster also ruled out a Trump-DeSantis ticket for the 2024 elections, citing an obscure constitutional rule that the president and vice-president cannot hail from the same state — with New York-born Trump making his home on his Mar-a-Lago resort.
He argued that the launch of the DeSantis campaign on Twitter — which was plagued with technical problems — was "a test of the demographics."
"I don't agree that Trump owns the younger Republicans," Roschelle said. "I think the younger Republicans came into being energized about politics and right wing politics just at the time that Donald Trump was the guy. But I think I think that that space is potentially up for grabs."
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