The Ron DeSantis presidential campaign is laser focused on Thursday night's tangle with Gavin Newsom.
But the open question now is whether it helps him, and if so, how much? It's a valid question, given the Florida' Governor's flagging fortunes in polls, including in the Golden State, where 169 delegates will go the way of Donald Trump if those surveys hold up.
Not that DeSantis or his adjuncts are even bringing that up, of course.
"The next debate will be the biggest one yet," said Campaign Manager James Uthmeier earlier this month, seemingly teasing the Nov. 30 face-off on Fox News over the officially sanctioned Republican National Committee events.
"As Democrats ramp up their efforts to replace the historically unpopular and failed Joe Biden as their nominee, Ron DeSantis' showdown with Gavin Newsom is even more timely. A Newsom presidency would accelerate America's decline, and November 30th will be the first chance to expose to a national audience just how dangerous his radical ideology would be for the country. Ron DeSantis will take this responsibility seriously and looks forward to sharing the stark contrast between his vision to revive our nation and Newsom's blueprint for failure," Uthmeier added.
DeSantis, frustrated in his attempts to draw Trump into a debate, also said the debate Thursday night was intended to draw eyeballs.
"This whole business is you've got to get attention, you've got to get on voters' minds," the Governor explained on the PBT Podcast.
DeSantis said he's been obscured since even before he formally launched by earned media going toward the former President and his myriad legal imbroglios, claiming that for "most of the past six months, it's been mostly focusing on everything that's happening legally with the former President."
DeSantis accepted the invitation to debate over the summer, after goading from Newsom.
"Absolutely, I'm game. Let's get it done. Just tell me when and where, we'll do it," DeSantis told Sean Hannity in August.
Newsom previously claimed he would do a three-hour debate with DeSantis on "one day's notice with no notes."
Logistics took some time to work out, however, but the two camps settled on Alpharetta, Georgia on Thursday.
However, despite the Florida Governor being well-positioned to take right-of-center arguments to Newsom, whose state DeSantis describes as a "petri dish" of left-wing experimentation, polling of California Republicans suggests DeSantis isn't remotely competitive with Trump.
A recent Emerson College Poll shows Trump at 63% support, 52 points ahead of DeSantis and 13 points past the majority he would need to sweep the state's 169 delegates to next year's Republican National Convention.
Emerson's poll of 331 Republican voters in California, conducted Nov. 11-14, tracks with other surveys showing DeSantis getting drubbed by Trump. DeSantis had 12% support in the most recent University of California Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey. He had the same level of support in the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll.
The Governor was in California earlier this fall for a presidential debate, where he also made some other news, including being condemned by the Salinas City Council ahead of a fundraising event in the city.
On a trip to the Port of Long Beach, DeSantis was flanked by truck drivers as he vowed to "take action" against California's "electric mandates for big rigs."
DeSantis has also used California as a public safety punching bag on the trail, both in the state and outside of it.
"When people are telling me that when they go shopping, they take off their jewelry because they don't want to get mugged, even in nice places in L.A., that's a huge, huge problem," DeSantis said in Long Beach.
"I was just in San Francisco. I saw — in 20 minutes on the ground — people defecating on the sidewalk. I saw people using fentanyl. I saw people smoking crack right there in the open, right there on the street. It was a civilization in decay," the Governor said at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event in June.
The Governor also appeared on Bill Maher's HBO program, an appearance more notable for what the longtime comedian and talk show host said than anything else.
"If your campaign was going well, you wouldn't be on this show," Maher quipped, a seeming reference to the Governor's penchant for friendly interviewers in recent years, a group that includes Hannity.
It's an open question as to whether DeSantis would be debating Newsom if he were the front-runner in the race and not battling for second place with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
But a recurrent irony is that people betting on the presidential race rate Newsom, who isn't even running, as a more viable candidate than the Florida Governor who has spent much of this year auditioning for another job.
Per the Election Betting Odds website, Newsom has a 10.1% chance of winning in 2024, more than four times DeSantis' 2.2%.
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