Ron DeSantis has made “very large, critical errors” in the Republican presidential primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, the biggest of which is the Florida governor’s attempt to “out-Trump Trump” and appeal to the hard-right GOP base.
“The dynamics of these races change from day to day,” the New York progressive congresswoman told MSNBC. “I think that Governor DeSantis has made some very large, critical errors.
“You can’t out-Trump Trump, right? And that’s what he’s really been trying to do. His attacks on teachers, on schools, on LGBTQ+ Americans, I think, go way too far in the state of Florida. And I think that they are a profound political miscalculation and an overcompensation.”
DeSantis is a clear second in polling regarding the Republican nomination but lags as much as 30 points behind Donald Trump.
The former president is the clear frontrunner despite an unprecedented 71 criminal indictments, a $5m civil penalty after being held liable for sexual assault and defamation, and the prospect of more charges to come regarding attempted election subversion.
DeSantis, a former US congressman, won a landslide re-election in Florida last year. He has pursued a hard-right agenda, including signing a six-week abortion ban, loosening gun controls and attacking the teaching of race and LGBTQ+ issues in public schools.
But he has struggled to make an impact on the campaign trail, observers suggesting he lacks the skills to truly connect with voters, even in a Republican primary, let alone in a general election.
On Sunday, DeSantis told Fox News: “The media does not want me to be the nominee. I think that’s very, very clear. Why? Because they know I will beat [Joe] Biden. But, even more importantly, they know I will actually deliver on all these things.”
Head-to-head polling shows Biden and DeSantis in a tight race. Recent surveys from Emerson and Yahoo News gave Biden leads of six and three points respectively. NBC News found the two men in a tie.
DeSantis listed hard-right priorities he said he would pursue in power: “We will stop the invasion at the border. We will take on the drug cartels. We will curtail the administrative state. We will get spending under control.
“We will do all the things that they don’t want to see done, and so they’re going to continue doing the type of narrative.”
Ocasio-Cortez was not convinced.
Speaking on Sunday to the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC host, she said: “He may be trying to win a base, but that base belongs to Donald Trump.
“And he has sacrificed, I think, the one thing that others may have thought would make him competitive, which is this idea that he would somehow be more rational than Donald Trump, which he isn’t.”
