Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has suspended his 2024 presidential campaign and endorsed former President Donald Trump.
DeSantis announced in a video posted to social media ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
The governor quoted Winston Churchill, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that count.”
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
– Winston Churchill pic.twitter.com/ECoR8YeiMm
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) January 21, 2024
Bloomberg had reported just minutes before that he would drop out and endorse Trump in the coming days.
The report cited “people briefed on the campaign’s conversations.”
“Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his top aides are having internal discussions about when and how he should drop out of the 2024 presidential race, according to people briefed on the campaign’s conversations.”
The report continued, “New polling from CNN and the University of New Hampshire shows DeSantis earning just 6% of the state’s Republican vote, whereas Trump has 50% and Haley has 39%.”
Many on social media noticed that DeSantis had cleared his campaign calendar over the weekend.
DeSantis came in second in Iowa, after Trump, and before Haley — but the former South Carolina governor is expected to perform better in New Hampshire, which is more liberal.
A poll conducted ahead of the Iowa caucuses by NBC News, the Des Moines Register, and Iowa pollster Selzer & Co. found that Haley supporters in Iowa are twice as likely to vote for Joe Biden as they are Donald Trump, should she not win the Republican nomination.
The pollsters asked likely Iowa caucus-goers, “If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in the general election in November, would you vote for him, vote for Joe Biden, vote for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., or vote for some other third-party candidate?”
Across the board, just 11 percent of Republican caucus-goes across the board said they would flip and vote for Biden if Trump was the nominee. Looking only at Haley supporters, that number jumped to a whopping 43 percent.
Just 23 percent of Haley’s supporters said they would vote for Trump over Biden.
In contrast, 64 percent of DeSantis supporters said that they would vote for Trump if he was the nominee.
NBC News reports, “These new findings from the latest NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of Iowa further illustrate the degree to which Haley is bringing in support from independents, Democrats and Republicans who have been uneasy with Trump’s takeover of the GOP. Fully half of her Iowa caucus supporters are independents or crossover Democrats, according to the survey results. Overall, Haley took 20% for second place in the survey, compared to 48% for Trump.”
