Quiet efforts to prepare for DeSantisLong before Biden announced his reelection campaign last month, White House aides had become practiced in toeing the legal line in slamming DeSantis's record without explicitly calling him out as a 2024 rival.
But for months, the Democratic National Committee has had a staffer deployed in Tallahassee – the only such employee outside the first four states on the GOP's 2024 nominating calendar – officially to boost Florida Democrats' day-to-day responses to DeSantis but informally to monitor and compile intelligence up close.
As DeSantis has traveled the country in the run-up to his planned campaign launch this week, Democrats have been road-testing attack lines. A mobile billboard about his onetime support for Medicare and Social Security privatization trailed the governor on his trip to Iowa in March. Democratic Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist of Michigan responded to his arrival for a speech in the state last month by saying, "We will not stand for MAGA extremists like Ron DeSantis trying to impose his far-right agenda on our state," with similar language used in South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada.
Other digs have been more subtle. According to two people familiar with the conversations, major Biden donor and nationally known trial lawyer John Morgan quietly reached out to Trump adviser Roger Stone to urge the former president to come out against a state tort overhaul law limiting settlements and narrowing liability for negligence. On the same day he was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney, Trump attacked DeSantis for signing what he called the "worst insurance scam in the entire country, with the highest rates in the entire country. That's Florida."
A Trump spokesperson didn't respond when asked about the origins of that particular attack.
The Biden orbit has been privately cheering on every stage of the ongoing Trump-DeSantis grudge match, eager to see them cut each other down.
"We'd all rather run against Trump, but we hate DeSantis just as much. So the fact that we can watch Trump devour [DeSantis] while both of them further alienate the swing voters that will decide this election makes us feel about as positive as Democrats can feel," said one senior Democrat close to the Biden campaign.
Democrats are keeping track as those fights continue. DeSantis went to a Christian school last week to sign into law new LGBTQ restrictions that could outflank the former president on the right, while Trump slammed the governor after Disney canceled plans for an expansion that would have created 2,000 jobs.
DeSantis "needs to out-Trump Trump," said Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost, a 26-year-old freshman from Orlando who's also part of the Biden advisory board. "The president won't let him or the nation forget about the egregious attacks on democracy and personal freedoms and liberties that he has overseen in the state of Florida."
The Biden campaign has started to spend. Cable and online ads in Florida were part of a multistate purchase shortly after the campaign kick-off. And the DNC leaned into Biden's volunteer network to have what it says were over 130,000 contacts with voters ahead of last week's Jacksonville runoff that saw Donna Deegan become just the second Democrat elected mayor in the past 30 years.
A person close to the Biden campaign said that Deegan's win was encouraging because she "ran a campaign on a platform that is a lot like the one Biden ran to build his coalition – a focus on kitchen table issues, unity over division and culture wars" and that the city going Democratic after turning out strongly for DeSantis last November "sends a strong signal to folks who count Democrats out of Florida."
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Posted by Jane Wilde to Trang Ánh Nam at May 21, 2023, 10:02 PM 
