The governor of the US state of Florida, Ron DeSantis, plans to officially announce today at an event with Twitter owner Elon Musk that he will run for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024.
DeSantis is lagging behind former President Donald Trump in the polls among Republican voters the least, but still quite a bit, with Trump regularly getting more than 40 percent support in recent weeks, DeSantis, 44, around 20 percent, none of the other confirmed or announced Republican candidates but does not exceed the threshold of ten percent.
A conversation with Ron DeSantis was announced on Tuesday by Elon Musk. “This will be the first time something like this will happen on social media and with a real-time, non-scripted Q&A. So it will be live. Let it resonate,” Musk announced. American media reported last week that DeSantis would finally enter the race this week.
In preparation for announcing his candidacy in Florida, DeSantis is taking a series of actions that, according to Democrats, fall into a far-right ideological direction. The largest black organization in the US, the NAACP, along with some others, even issued a travel warning to Florida because the state is said to be openly hostile to blacks and other minorities and the LGBTQ community.
“Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state of Florida has criminalized protest, restricted teachers’ ability to teach history, and launched an open war on diversity and inclusion,” the NAACP wrote.
Florida lives on tourism – 137 million people visited in 2022, the first full year after the pandemic. So it is not yet clear what they would be may be the consequences of such calls.
DeSantis is also at loggerheads with one of Florida’s largest employers, Disney, which canceled a billion-dollar project. Disney has objected to DeSantis’ bill against talking about homosexuality in schools, and the governor wants to strip the company of its autonomous status around the Disney World theme park near Orlando. The case is in court.
Source: Rtvslo
