(Tallahassee, Fla.) There’s just a little over two months before the November election when Sunshine State Republican Gov. Ronald D. DeSantis faces former Democratic congressman Charlie Crist, and already the campaign is getting hot.
At the briefing Wednesday, White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre accused DeSantis of instigating political violence that is threatening American democracy: “And just last week you had Governor Ron DeSantis suggested that Dr. Fauci should be physically assaulted.”
Jean-Pierre was referring to a joke the governor told at an Aug. 24 Seminole County “Keep Florida Free” rally: “I’m just sick of seeing him. I know he says he’s going to retire. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”
The attack from the White House comes after the Democratic Governors Association released a poll showing DeSantis leading Crist 51 percent to 46 percent.
The poll shows Crist within striking distance, but it is a landslide compared to the governor’s win in 2018 by less than a point.
Crist also showed he was serious about the race when he announced he was quitting Congress to focus on the campaign. The former Republican governor-turned-Democrat made another big move when he named Karla Hernandez-Mats as his running mate.
The DeSantis campaign lost no time blasting the head of the Miami-Dade teachers union for her opposition to DeSantis’ program that helps military veterans become schoolteachers, making a commercial using a clip of her bashing military veteran teachers on MSNBC.
“It’s the way he supports them. This is them–deprofessionalizing our careers. Teachers have gone to school for four years. They have their bachelors. They have masters. They have doctoral degrees, and to think that somebody that has four years of combat experience would do well in our schools is actually very disrespectful to our educators, to our teachers,” Hernandez-Mats said in the clip.
DeSantis has repeatedly said he is pushing left-wing ideology out of Florida schools, and Karla Hernandez-Mats is one of the ones pushing it back in.
This earned her the moniker from the DeSantis campaign: “Karla Marx.”
Source: One America News Network
