Photo courtesy of @rondesantisfl on instagram
BY MIKE POLCE, STAFF WRITER
The 2024 presidential election is 11 months away, meaning voters should start thinking about which candidate they want to support.
To many Republicans in 2020, Donald Trump sounded like the ideal person to run this country, and many Republicans still feel this way.
According to FiverThirtyEight, Ron DeSantis leads Trump by 5% in head-to-head polls for the 2024 GOP primary. However, when another candidate’s name is put into the poll, Trump leads DeSantis by 10%.
I think it’s fair to say that the GOP primaries will be a toss-up between the two (if they decide to run). DeSantis is the much better option.
The Florida governor would have a much better chance than Trump at defeating Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. He is younger, smarter and more “presidential” than Trump.
Trump dug his own grave, and I don’t see DeSantis making that same mistake. Whether it was antagonizing people on Twitter, calling women “fat” and “ugly”, claiming that the election was stolen or keeping the reality of the coronavirus hidden from the American people, it is safe to say Joe Biden didn’t win the 2024 presidential election Trump just lost it.
It was an experiment gone wrong. The American people were tired of politicians lying, persuading and conniving their way into the presidential office, so they decided to elect a billionaire businessman.
Yet, it wasn’t Trump’s policies that got him in trouble. It was his inability to reunite the country in times of indifference, which is arguably the biggest ability you look for in a president.
If the 2020 election taught us one thing, it is that the country should be run by politicians, not ego-driven businessmen in search of power and authority.
DeSantis offers you all of the things you love about Trump, such as his economic and political policies. However, he also refrains from the things you hate about Trump, such as his inability to keep a calm and collected demeanor when handling critics.
The Republican Party absolutely dismantled former President Barack Obama during his time in office, but Obama maintained his composure and went on to win the presidential election for the second time in 2012.
If Trump handled his criticisms the way Obama handled them, he might still be in office. But Trump was not trained in that field of diplomacy. He handled critics the same way most of us would handle critics, and that is what lost him the election.
According to the Florida Department of State, “Ron DeSantis was first elected to Congress in 2012, as the U.S Representative for Florida’s Sixth District.” In 2019, he was elected as Governor of Florida. This means by the time of the 2024 election, DeSantis will have 12 years of political experience, something Trump lacked.
Even right-wing poster child Ben Shapiro thinks that Republican voters should refrain from voting for Trump in the GOP primaries. He recently tweeted, “There is a reason Democrats are eager to keep Trump at the center of the conversation: Half of the independents say Trump is a major factor in their vote, and they’re breaking 4-1 for the Democrats. Republicans shouldn’t play that game. If they do, they’re cruising for a bruising.”
Whether you hate him or you love him, Republicans should not vote for Trump in the 2024 GOP primaries because DeSantis is the better and more well-rounded Republican candidate.
polcema20@bonaventure.edu
