owes it to the people to be there tomorrow night. haley has said it s hard to earn support if you re absent. and chris christie went so far as to call trump a coward. now, not all of the republican candidates feel this way. vivek ramaswamy, the conservative entrepreneur, said he doesn t mind if trump isn t there tomorrow. take a listen to what he said. if he refuses to debate through the entire debate season, i have an issue with that. but i have no issue with him skipping the first couple of debates. the truth is many people in this country didn t even know who i was six months ago. so this is a good opportunity for me to introduce myself to the country. now, if trump doesn t show up, which he said that he won t, desantis allies are preparing for him to become the focal point of tomorrow night s debate. he will be at center stage next to ramaswamy. and he says he believes he ll be coming under fire from all sides. but this is an opportunity for
solidified the nomination early on. you have vivek ramaswamy who wants to get into the second place spot and knock ron desantis out of it. it draws a lot of attention to ron desantis. i d ask you what the strategy is going to be, except we know what it s going to be. at least it was released to us in talking points. do you think he s going to do something different? it s a good question. this is sort of what he has to do right now. what we saw in the strategy memo and a lot of desantis allies were telling me last week, it was sort of predictable. it makes a lot of sense. desantis is not wants to attack him, but at the same time, he wants to solidify his second place. going after someone like ramaswamy allows him to go after
ally, take us behind the numbers of the desantis campaign, if you will. reporter: this is not the first time we ve seen the desantis team sort of playing defense. i will tell you we re in a pretty quiet room here. i ll do my best golf whisper as i give this assessment. when you talk to desantis allies, they ll tell you they feel good about what they brought in in the second quarter. such a high burn rate to the fact they re offloading about a dozen or so mid-level staffers, it s notable especially as we re starting to see donors question whether or not this is the campaign they thought it was going to be at the outset. several of them speaking to our colleagues at nbc news saying this campaign just hasn t caught fire in the way that they thought that it would. you see that not just in the way this fund-raising shook out with desantis maxing out on so many donors so early on in the process. but also in the way he s actually having to start offloading staffers as he s not
gaining any steam in the polls. i want to pull up so you can see a sense of how many more staffers the desantis team had than his counterparts. 92 people, just shy of 100 on his national payroll. then, of course, you see 50, 40, the rest of the field up there. for someone like desantis who had been compared before he got in the race to former wisconsin governor scott walker who ran such a top-heavy campaign that he had to drop out just a few months after getting in the race, this is not the headline you want to see if you are desantis and the florida governor s allies who are trying to buck that comparison and show he has a campaign that can win and can be in it for the long haul. well done with the golf whisper or the wimbledon voice, whichever you would like to call it, and calibrated to the audience level behind you. well done, ally vitali. thank you for all the great reporting there. congressman curbelo, let me turn to you here. the latest polling shows
that state because that is where a lot of folks have seen new hampshire as challenging terrain for desantis, not necessarily his crowd that people would expect, but they said very clearly in that memo, we will not cede new hampshire. they also hinted at a popular threat from tim scott and hinted that we might see some scrutiny coming from desantis allies against senator tim scott in the coming weeks. also laying out some policy rollouts that we might see on the economy, on foreign policy in china, and the messaging that they seem to believe is working when it comes to desantis being a dad, being a veteran, and a culture warrior. so these are the things that we re going to be seeing from the campaign going forward, chris. dasha burns and former congressman david jolly, thank you both. we have breaking news on student loan relief. the education department announcing it will automatically forgive student loans for more