A group of prominent Michigan Republicans are trying to get Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run for president in 2024. This is a big and not-so-subtle shot at the only Republican candidate who has already said he will run, former President Donald Trump.
Last month, Bryan Posthumus, the leader of the Republicans in the state House of Representatives in Michigan, flew to Florida and gave DeSantis a letter encouraging him to run for president. The letter was signed by 18 Republican members of the state House, which is a quarter of the party’s caucus.
It said that DeSantis was “uniquely and exceptionally qualified to provide the leadership and competence that is unfortunately missing” in the White House under President Joe Biden. A spokesperson for Posthumus read some excerpts from the letter.
The signers also say that they are “ready and willing to help [DeSantis] win Michigan in 2024.” Even though the letter doesn’t come out and say that DeSantis is better than Trump, it shows that Republicans aren’t happy with the former president after a string of bad elections for their party.
Trump is trying to shut out potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, but a lot of the party, from regular voters to big donors to Republican officeholders now, is looking for other possible candidates.
“I think it’s very important that elected Republicans are so openly looking for an alternative in 2024. It shows how much you want to win, even if it might annoy Trump. “I think we’ll see more of this in the next few months,” said Jason Roe, who used to be the executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and has been critical of the former president.
Zach Rudat, a spokesman for Posthumus, said that the letter was sent in December when the state representative “flew to Florida and met with the governor and an aide to talk about the presidential election.” A spokesperson for DeSantis refused to say anything.
The calls to DeSantis come as Michigan Republicans are still reeling from a string of losses during the Trump era. Since 2018, Republicans have lost control of three statewide offices, including the governorship, both chambers of the state legislature, several seats in Congress, and other important positions. “Before Trump, Republicans in Michigan were in charge of everything in the state, but now they have no power at all,” said Roe.
People who support Trump don’t agree that he is to blame for the party’s losses in the state. Matt DePerno, who ran for attorney general in 2022 but lost despite having Trump’s support, said that Trump’s critics are part of a “small part of the Republican Party” that “can’t deal with Donald Trump.”
DePerno said, “I can tell you that Donald Trump still has a lot of support and strength in Michigan and that America First is still going strong.” “It is still very strong, and it is the movement that he started. The grassroots movement in Michigan is still very much behind Donald Trump.”
Michigan was important to Trump’s rise to power. The former president beat a group of GOP rivals in the primary election in 2016. He then beat Hillary Clinton in the general election to win the state. It was the first time since 1988 that Michigan had chosen a Republican candidate for president. But Trump’s chances got worse in 2020, when he lost the state to Biden by a small margin.
Trump’s strategists admitted more than a year before the election that it would be hard to repeat their success in the state. They expected more Democrats to vote than in 2016 in Wayne County, which has a large number of black people, and more trouble in nearby counties where people didn’t like Trump.
Some of the people who signed the letters have supported Trump in the past. Posthumus, the son of former Michigan Lt. Gov. Dick Posthumus, ran for state House for the first time in 2020. He called himself “pro-Trump” and said that former First Lady Melania Trump’s speech at the convention that year was “inspiring.” Last year, he signed a letter asking Michigan’s Democratic attorney general to look into claims of fraud in the 2020 election that turned out to be false.
Phil Green, a third-term state representative who attended a “Farmers for Trump” rally, is also on the list of people who signed the letter. Even though the letter didn’t say that it supported DeSantis directly, Green said that the Florida governor “has a track record of sticking to conservative principles and putting them into practice in a way that makes real changes in his state.”
“It’s not just empty words,” Green said. People who are not in office are also showing that they want to break away from the former president. In a poll released last month by EPIC-MRA, a Michigan-based polling company, more than half of Republican voters in the state said they would rather have an alternative to Trump as the party’s nominee in 2024.
But DePerno, a former candidate for attorney general who backed Trump, said that if Trump and DeSantis ran against each other in the state, Trump would win. “DeSantis would lose, I think. DePerno said, “I don’t know by how much, but I think he would lose.” “I have no doubt that Donald Trump would win the next primary.”
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