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By: The opinion Posted Jul 25, 2023, 15:39 pm EDT
The governor of Florida and candidate for the Republican primary, Ron DeSantis, suffered a car accident on Tuesday in Tennessee, although he was unharmed, as were his companions. This was reported by his campaign team.
“This morning, the Governor was in a car accident while traveling to an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He and his team have been unharmed. We appreciate the prayers and well wishes from across the country that he continue to be protected during his campaign,” Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for DeSantis, said in a statement.
The governor, who is in second place in the vote intention polls for the 2024 primaries, but far behind the first, former President Donald Trump, he was on his way to a campaign event in Chattanooga when the accident happened.
According to Griffin, he had planned a meeting in that Tennessee city with donors of funds.
Traffic slowed and four cars in the convoy collided, Chattanooga, Tennessee, police told WTVC-TV.
One staff member suffered minor injuries, police said.
Campaign representatives did not respond to questions about who was driving DeSantis’ car or provide further details of the accident.
To attend the event with the governor in Chattanooga, sponsors had to pay $10,000 per couple, co-sponsors $5,000 and others $2,000, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported.
DeSantis also had events Tuesday in Knoxville and Franklin.
The Republican governor has been attending a large number of fundraising events, at a time when his campaign is under financial pressure. She was in Utah over the weekend and in New York last week, at an event in the Hamptons.
Barely two months after announcing his candidacy, DeSantis had to cut staff and has faced questions about his massive spending, his media strategy and his apparent willingness to criticize all his rivals except Trump
“The DeSantis campaign is recalibrating and it obviously has to. But in the end, the DeSantis campaign is better positioned than any other against Donald Trump’s,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist who was Marco Rubio’s campaign manager in 2016.
Last Saturday a national survey by the Harvard Harris Poll showed that Trump completely dominates the panorama ahead of the primaries, with 52% of voting intentions, even despite having lost seven points compared to the previous poll.
He also has a five-point advantage over the current president, Joe Biden, with 45% support compared to 40%, ahead of the presidential elections on November 5, 2024.
The governor of Florida, who just a few months ago seemed like he could overshadow Trump, is 40 points behind the former president and only two ahead of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy according to said survey.
Said in other words, DeSantis would only have a chance to win the nomination if Trump dropped out of the race, which seems very difficult to achieve.
However, In a hypothetical case that this was the scenario, the Florida governor would have 29% of Republican support, followed by businessman Vivek Ramaswamy who would only have 19%.
Another controversial point for the DeSantis campaign is that it has lost 12 points compared to the previous Harvard Harris poll.which reflects how some citizens have begun to turn their backs on him, especially after having shown their rejection of the LGTBQ+ community and also for having implemented a fierce policy against undocumented people in the state he governs.
With information from EFE
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