Governor Ron DeSantis's (R-FL) 2024 Presidential campaign went to Nevada over the weekend, attracting diehard supporters at the 8th annual Basque Fry event in Reno. If Gov. DeSantis has one major advantage over his biggest rival, former President Donald Trump, it would be his COVID policy record, as NBC News suggested in a recent article.
One supporter interviewed by NBC, Greg Cesarz, called Gov. DeSantis "a badass" and wants him "to turn our country into Florida."
As NBC described, Nevada's highly-unpopular COVID lockdown policies, which closed many small businesses and left thousands of service workers jobless, drove former Governor Steve Sisolak (D) out of office.
Another supporter similarly said he approved of DeSantis's COVID policies "because he looked at the actual science."
On the other hand, Trump claimed earlier in June that DeSantis was "lying" about his record, "as he personally oversaw mass vaccinations and imposed radical lockdowns."
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo called Trump's criticism of DeSantis's handling of COVID "all blubber" in an April interview with The Floridian.
"It’s all blubber; one of the things that I’ve learned being a public official that’s different than my prior role as a professor…is that individuals – one strategy is to make stuff up and to make a change to what happened and what people think happened,” stated Surgeon General Ladapo.
While DeSantis may have diehard fans in a completely different state, his campaign still has a steep hill to climb in the polls.
A recent Harvard poll showed Trump ahead of DeSantis by 34 percentage points (67% to 33%) this month, no doubt spurred by Trump's indictment over the supposed classified documents found at Mar-A-Lago that many believe was politically motivated.
At the same time, other polls have suggested DeSantis is starting to catch up to Trump, with polling data from Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida narrowing the gap by approximately twenty percentage points, with DeSantis only eight points behind Trump in Florida.
Similarly, national average support for Trump only rose 1.5 points after his indictment, from 30.8 percent to 32.3.
