DeSantis sticks to 'ignoring Trump' as former president starts 2024 campaign

Not long after capturing the 2024 spotlight, Ron DeSantis pleaded with his supporters to "chill out."

The newly reelected Florida governor has been basking in support from key players in the Republican nomination battle following his nearly 20-point victory over former Gov. Charlie Crist. The following day tipped off a cascade of big-name defections from Trump, from the New York Post calling DeSantis "DeFUTURE" to, most recently, GOP supporter and Twitter CEO Elon Musk dumping Trump for DeSantis.

And a raft of polling has come out showing DeSantis eating away at Trump's support in critical early voting states like Iowa and even beating Trump in hypothetical matchups, if the primaries were held today.

But the GOP primaries are still more than a year away, which is why DeSantis and his team are playing it cool until next spring, when DeSantis plans to announce whether he will run for president, Republicans in touch with DeSantis’s team told Yahoo News.

“He’s playing this right by ignoring Trump,” said one Republican in touch with DeSantis’s team.

So far it seems to have worked. Trump teed up his formal campaign launch with routine attacks on DeSantis, even threatening to reveal potentially damaging information about the governor and mentioning his wife — DeSantis's closest adviser and confidant.

But Trump dropped the attack right after his formal campaign launch, leading one veteran adviser to suggest that the pageantry — which Trump is famously good at — has served its purpose for now. And that DeSantis has played it right by dodging Trump’s repeated hits.

“He’s playing a couple of dimensions of chess right now,” the Trump adviser said of DeSantis. The Trump adviser added that it’s not just Trump who other Republican hopefuls are watching before making a decision whether to jump in, but DeSantis as well.

A Trump campaign spokesman didn’t return requests for comment for this article.

Since launching his campaign, Trump received a bevy of attention on everything from the Justice Department's announcement of a new special counsel to oversee the probes into his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and his taking of highly sensitive classified documents from the White House, to his recent dinner with the one of the nation's most prominent white supremacists, 24-year-old Nick Fuentes, an event that was roundly condemned by Republicans (DeSantis hasn't commented on the incident).

But Trump isn’t dominating the airwaves — and depriving his opponents of oxygen — nearly the way he did when he stormed the Republican Party in 2016.

The same week as Trump’s campaign launch, former Vice President Mike Pence, a typically reserved politician, scored dozens of interviews and saw his memoir, released the same day as Trump’s campaign launch, land at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.

All of which has power players in the GOP who could make or break a campaign “watching and waiting.”

“No one is going to push all their chips in on one candidate this far out,” said Dan Eberhart, a longtime GOP donor and CEO of the oil field services company Canary. “The early polls don’t mean anything, and there’s a long bumpy road to go before we know who is a contender and who’s a chump.”

That lackluster start to the 2024 race is giving DeSantis the breathing room to work through the start of his second term in office and keep courting donors behind the scenes.

DeSantis is set to oversee a special session of the Florida Legislature in the coming weeks to work on Florida's homeowner's insurance rules in the wake of Hurricane Ian. Around the same time, he's expected to host a retreat for possible campaign donors, according to three Republicans in touch with his tight-knit political operation.

DeSantis’s spokespeople did not return requests for comment for this story.

Trump’s advisers have pushed DeSantis to wait four years and run in 2028, on the assumption that Trump would either not run a fourth time or would leave office at the end of a second term, as mandated in the U.S. Constitution.

“Why not go be the best two-term governor of the third-largest state in modern history and then walk into the presidency in 2028?” longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said at the Christian Science Monitor’s Monitor Breakfast shortly before the midterm elections.

But for now, DeSantis isn’t feeling the pressure to announce his decision any time soon.