AOC says DeSantis is a ‘weaker’ GOP presidential contender than Trump
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday called Ron DeSantis the “weaker” contender in a potential GOP presidential matchup between the Florida governor and former President Donald Trump.
“You can’t out-Trump, Trump, right?” Ocasio-Cortez said of DeSantis in an interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “And that’s what he has really been trying to do.”
DeSantis and Trump are largely considered the GOP’s top candidates for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, though the Sunshine State governor has not yet declared his candidacy.
“I think that Governor DeSantis has made some very large critical errors,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I think he’s weaker.”
The Bronx-Queens Democrat, on this week’s episode of “Inside with Jen Psaki,” said that DeSantis’ mistakes include “attacks on teachers, on schools, on LGBT Americans.”
“And I think that they are a profound political miscalculation and an overcompensation,” she added. “He may be trying to win a base, but that base belongs to Donald Trump.”
Ocasio-Cortez said DeSantis has not shown that he’s more “rational” than Trump.
“He has sacrificed, I think, the one thing that others may have thought would make him competitive — which is this idea that he would somehow be more rational than Donald Trump, which he isn’t,” she said.
Trump is currently leading DeSantis among GOP voters in the polls, however a NBC poll published Sunday shows the latter has been closing the gap.
The NBC survey found that 46% of Republican primary voters favored Trump as their top pick, while 31% said they would choose DeSantis.
An early April Yahoo News/YouGov poll had Trump leading DeSantis by 57% to 31% among Republican votes.
Still, the newest poll found that 60% of Americans — including a third of Republicans — don’t want Trump to run at all in 2024.
“I think right now, the Republican Party is so disorganized that I really don’t see someone that can unite that party. Even beyond Donald Trump,” Ocasio-Cortez said during the cable news interview.
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