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The questions is if he'll end up like Rudy Giuliani. There was a time when he was also considered a sure thing and ended up falling hard after the debates. Scott Walker too to a lesser extent.
Remember when Chris Christie was the 2016 frontrunner lol
Wasn't Marco Rubio as well before Christie dismantled him?
At one time or another pretty much everyone except Jindal, Kasich, Santorum and Perry was in first place in at least one poll.
Also major funding from the likes of Thiel among others in the right wing VC circuit. He certainly has a constituency among the higher echelons of finance, even if he falls short of being a consensus candidate.
i just want florida reactionaries to get into a civil war and start killing each other over whether the GOP nominee should be the governor or the dickhead sleezeball that lives at mar-a-lago. would be funniest timeline
He realizes that you win people's votes by galvanizing your base.
A lot of what Trump did was just showmanship. DeSantis gives the hogs the policy they're slobbering for.
I heard his voice once and wrote him off as a potential POTUS, but there's a world where COVID plays kingmaker for him.
He definitely got a big boost off of the lack of anything precautionary for COVID. The world in which he can probably ride that to the White House is one that's certainly possible, not the most likely outcome but definitely one of them. For now it looks like everyone's just going to point fingers regarding the current spate of respiratory illnesses and various population level analyses of health conditions that went into decline throughout 2020/early 2021 before ticking up during 2021 and 2022... Lots of people with various motivations are going to blame COVID vaccine programs for these anomalies - they were approved on a shortened timescale as is so it's not as if these claims can actually be defeated. None of that excuses Florida's refusals to do the bare minimum at preventing unnecessary deaths, but if there's any systemic problems that a largish number of people can be convinced is vaccine-derived, I'd expect him to win easily. Dems, to the extent they want to win, have put a fucking shit load of more faith in Pfizer & Moderna than I would ever personally. The Brandon admin has definitely tried to distance themselves from COVID & Warp Speed in large part, we'll just have to see if anything comes of it.
