Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley doesn't stand strongly enough for conservative values as both vie for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
"She has never fought any big fight on our behalf as conservatives and won any big fight," DeSantis said in a Tuesday radio interview in Haley's home state. "Anytime that guns come out anytime the left does, she cuts and runs."
DeSantis pointed back to criticism of Haley's "adopting this left-wing mindset" and "accepting the narrative" during the 2020 George Floyd Black Lives Matter riots.
"I remember when the George Floyd riots were happening," DeSantis said. "I called out the National Guard. I said I'm standing with police. She was tweeting that it needed to be personal and painful for every single person.
"And I'm thinking to myself, why does that need to be personal and painful for you or me? We had nothing to do with it. It just shows an example of her adopting this left-wing mindset and accepting the narrative."
South Carolina is one of the key early GOP primary battleground states where DeSantis is jockeying for voters who are not already steadfast behind former President Donald Trump. Haley's strength in the state is something important for the DeSantis campaign to go after in order to capitalize on any potential primary delegate momentum from Iowa or New Hampshire.
"We need leaders who are going to fight the narrative," DeSantis said. "We need leaders who are going to fight back against the left and beat the left. And I'm the only one running that has a firm track record of defeating the Democrats and defeating the left on all these issues."
Haley has targeted DeSantis with a $10 million ad buy after the third GOP primary debate last week in DeSantis' home state — where he and Haley have battled on the Disney opposition to DeSantis' education policies.
"She criticized me for standing up for kids and the innocence of their curriculum against Disney where they wanted the sexualized curriculum in elementary school," DeSantis said. "So I stood up for parents, I stood up for kids, she sided with a woke corporation. So that is just, I think, what you see in terms of that, it's just par for the course.
"She will kowtow to elite opinions, the media, and big corporations. That is how she falls down. You can pretty much set your clock to it."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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