the trump/desantis battle evolved into a schoolyard brawl. you don t change your name in the middle of the election. his whole family moved to florida under my governorship. are you kidding me? what is the desantis plan to convince voters he s not just a better nominee but a better president. plus the gop field keeps growing. three more candidates will jump in this week including trump s former vp. republicans have to offer a positive vision grounded in conservative principles. but how many of them will make it to the republican debate stage? and disaster averted. no one got everything wanted but the american people got what they needed. the president said it is proof his brand of politics still works. i know bipartisanship is hard but we could never stop trying. welcome to inside politics sunday , i m abby phillip. thank you for joining. it is all about iowa, iowa. and yesterday marks the first start of the caucus season with eight presidential hopefuls
Make it a two-way contest. i ll say this, this is the polls that show these are the top two vote-getters in the early s surveys. i don t think trump is competing against desantis. i think he s competing against himself and desantis is trying to lockdown the number two spot so if trump becomes unravel, desantis will ascend to the number one spot. they are sparring with each other but donald trump is so far ahead of ron desantis in every poll, barely approximate with trump is in the standings that trump s issue is whether he ll come undone from the revelations and criminal liabilities. that is what is going on. that is true. but i think that desantis is trying to change a narrative. part of the problem is he entered this the race under the narrative that he wasn t ready for prime time and that is why
Reshaping the republican parry. and so he s also trying to bring the republican party back to what the pence party, the ronald reagan party, the more traditional component of the republican party and i mean, i would argue, we ll say, but the republican party has moved on from that. it is a small and perilous lane. right. so pence wants to have a positive cheerful candidacy. and focus on life and abortion and he wants to defy the politics of personality which is a clear allusion to trump and populism. those are the dominant forces that have been covering the republican primary and it is hard to see a dramatic shift even with one candidacy changing that any time soon. and i will also wonder if some of the candidates like a mike pence will have to contrast with ron desantis, as we were discussing earlier in the program, desantis is not running
[ applause ] and that was just the beginning. are you really going after the one who is second and i think the one who is second is going down so much and so rapidly, i don t think he ll be second that much longer. i think he ll be third or fourth. he used to say how great florida was. his whole family moved to florida under my governorship. as you know, i call him ron desanctimonious. i think it is so petty and jewelry. i don t think that is what is voters want. let s discuss this with eli stokols and leigh ann caldwell and marvel talev and daniel strauss. this is pretty intense at the get-go. i think the question from the get-go, was is desantis going after trump or going after the people polling beneath him and
Christi. when you people s police chief in their democracy, when you say that it is patriotic to suspend the constitution, if you believe the election is being stolen from you, that person is disqualified from my view from being president of the united states again. he s on one mission and one mission only and that is to stop donald trump. yeah. and like i said earlier, ron desantis and others aren t willing to go there regarding 2020 election and january 6 with donald trump but chris christie is. so you definitely have the anti-trump lane of the party now that is running, essentially, two candidates. i just wan to get back to mike pence. because one thing that really struck me in what he said, he criticized populism. that stick out to me, too. that was really interesting considering so much of the trump movement and the trump base is a populous movement and been