Former President Donald Trump said he believes he could defeat Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., if they both run for president in the 2024 elections despite results from surveys showing otherwise.
Speaking with The New Yorker, Trump said he doesn’t know whether DeSantis plans to run for president in 2024. However, he said he could win the nomination should they both launch a bid for the presidency.
“I don’t know if Ron is running, and I don’t ask him,” he said in the interview that was published Monday. “It’s his prerogative. I think I would win.”
Trump added that he was “very close to making a decision” about possibly announcing a third consecutive presidential run — a prospect he has repeatedly teased since he exited the White House in 2021.
It is not the first time Trump has said he will win against DeSantis. In October 2021, Trump told Yahoo Finance that he was confident about his chances if he decided to run for the presidency, even if it meant going head-to-head with other potential GOP contenders, including DeSantis.
“If I faced him, I’d beat him like I would beat everyone else,” Trump said. “I don’t think I will face him. I think most people would drop out, I think he would drop out.”
Trump and DeSantis are viewed as the top contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. However, several polls and odds suggested DeSantis will beat Trump in 2024.
Last week, betting odds from PredictIt found that DeSantis has a 38% chance of securing the GOP nomination ahead of Trump’s 36%. The former president’s prospects have fallen from 38% following the House Select Committee’s public hearings on the events that led up to the deadly riot in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The public hearings showed evidence that Trump purposely promoted conspiracy theories about the election even after he found out that he lost against Joe Biden.
Earlier this month, DeSantis also won 71% of the votes in a straw poll conducted by Western Conservative Summit in Denver. In comparison, Trump only secured the support of 67% of voters. The poll allowed participants to offer multiple responses.
As of Monday, neither Trump nor DeSantis have officially announced any plans to run for the presidency in 2024.
