Gov. Ron DeSantis at the St. Petersburg College Midtown Center in St Petersburg on July 24, 2024. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
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Ron DeSantis says there’s no doubt Republicans would have preferred to have faced Joe Biden this November in the presidential election, but he believes Kamala Harris is the best Democratic candidate from a GOP perspective to run against Donald Trump, saying that her “tenure as vice president has been disastrous.”
Speaking at St. Petersburg College’s Midtown Center in South St. Petersburg on Wednesday, the governor said the GOP must be prepared to contend with the mainstream media’s embrace of the likely Democratic standard bearer, after they “knifed [Joe Biden] in the back.”
“The media turned on Biden after that debate,” DeSantis said, referring to Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 CNN debate in Atlanta, which the governor later labelled “the most consequential debate in history.”
“If you had said, ‘Biden wasn’t up for the job,’ three months ago, they would say you’re a conspiracy theorist,” he said.
“Then, once it was made bare for the whole world to see, they immediately said, ‘Hey, this guy’s gotta go.’ So, they knifed him in the back, and they’ve been going after him. But they’re not doing that because they’re trying to help Trump. They’re doing that because they want the Democrats to have a better candidate so that they can beat Trump. And so, they are going to elevate Harris if she ends up being [the nominee] in ways that people like me are going to be, are you kidding me? But that’s what’s going to happen. So, Republicans have to be prepared.”
DeSantis joined with other conservatives who in the past 24 hours have blasted the mainstream media for what they claim is blatant reversal in documenting Harris’s involvement as Biden’s alleged “border czar.” Numerous news organizations — such as the Wall Street Journal — have reported this week that what Biden actually did was task his VP with addressing what the administration called “the root causes” of immigration from Central America.
“She was put in charge of the border — the media was running with that in 2021, ‘Harris will be the oversee of the border,’” he said. “Now they’re saying that she wasn’t overseeing the border, and these are the same reporters who wrote four years ago, are now writing the opposite! They’re running interference for her because, of all of the failures, that border ranks near the top of the failures of the Biden-Harris administration. And so, she was there.”
Whether she was the “border czar” or not, Harris will need to defend the Biden’s administration’s record on the border, which does not poll well with the public.
A YouGov poll published this week shows Donald Trump with a 15-point lead over Harris on who Americans think would do a better job handling immigration, 45%-30%. That’s the biggest advantage that Trump has over Harris of the 10 issues listed. The next highest lead for Trump over Harris is on inflation, where he leads her 43%-29%. The other issues where Trump leads are crime, foreign policy, and guns.
That same survey shows Harris leading Trump on health care, education, the environment, abortion rights, and LGBTQ issues.
Crime
DeSantis derided Harris on a variety of other issues, such as crime, and said she’s had an about-face on that issue. “Now she says that she’s a [former] prosecutor, she’s tough — she was raising funds to bail out the rioters during the BLM riots in 2020. Are you kidding me?”
In 2020 Harris wrote a post on Twitter (now X) urging people to “chip in” to support the Minneapolis Freedom Fund “to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
Harris served as district attorney in San Francisco from 2003 to 2010 and was California’s attorney general from 2010 to 2016. While Republicans say they look forward to picking apart her record as being soft on crime, the fact is that when she ran for president in 2019 and 2020 she was criticized in some circles as not being progressive enough when the push for criminal justice reform was at its apex.
That was most notably documented in a 2019 New York Times op-ed by law professor Lara Bazelon, whose piece was entitled, “Kamala Harris was not a ‘progressive prosecutor.’”
DeSantis speculated that if Harris somehow falters on the campaign trail between now and when the Democratic National Convention begins on Aug. 19, the Democratic Party establishment might try to move her out as he contends it has done with Biden.
“I also think it’s possible that you know, if Harris falls on her face over the next few weeks, I think it’s absolutely possible that they go a different direction at the convention,” he said. “Remember, these delegates can vote for who they want to. They’re pledging now, but if some of the powers that be say, no, we need to go in a different direction, so I think that it’s going to be a very interesting three or four weeks in the political scene.”
The Phoenix had asked DeSantis if he was willing to speculate about which purported possible running mate for Harris might be a problem for the Republicans in the general election. He said he wouldn’t bite but did say he thought it was disturbing that one candidate listed as a potential running-mate — Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro — he had heard on CNN might be a considered a problematic pick because he is Jewish.
“I’m just thinking to myself: What is this country come to or what is this Democrat Party come to, when in order to win an election, they have to virtue signal to the Hamas caucus? That is unacceptable. And if you have to virtue signal to the Hamas caucus to win an election, you should not win that election.”
CNN’s John King did say on Sunday night that Shapiro’s Jewish faith could create “risks” for Harris in putting him on the ticket.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that online election betting markets have “pegged Shapiro as one of Harris’ top picks.”
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