A.G. Gancarski
While Ron DeSantis may want to run for President in 2028, people investing in prediction markets put several names ahead of him.
One is a former Fox News host who played a key role in a drama surrounding the Governor’s 2024 Republican nomination campaign.
According to Polymarket, shares for Tucker Carlson are priced at 3.7 cents, incrementally ahead of DeSantis, who is at 3.5 cents for a “yes” vote.
Interestingly, Carlson and DeSantis seem to have fallen out recently.
DeSantis told friendly interviewer Dana Loesch that he’d “lost track” of the former primetime stalwart after his falling out with Fox, responding to Carlson’s charges that the Governor was a “marionette” of his donors on Ukraine.
“And it made DeSantis look weak, and it made him look controlled, and this is a moment where people are kind of hip to that trick and they sort of know the politicians, you know what I mean, aren’t really acting on their behalf or even independently, they’re acting because some billionaire told them to do what they’re doing. And I think DeSantis was just too obvious about that, and it destroyed him.”
DeSantis’ position on Ukraine particularly ran the gamut, and Carlson has blamed Ken Griffin for DeSantis switching it up from arguing “it’s a regional conflict we shouldn’t get involved in” to “it’s a super important thing; we should send more money.”
DeSantis initially deemed the war a “territorial dispute” and not one of America’s “vital national interests” in a statement provided to Carlson, in a seeming effort to curry favor with the noted isolationist.
A triangulating DeSantis soon enough walked that position back, telling Piers Morgan, “it wasn’t that I thought Russia had a right to that, and so if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it.”
He would go on from there to call for a “settlement” in the war, before a spirited exchange in July with Carlson in Iowa at the Family Leadership Summit.
DeSantis took issue with Carlson, saying he changed his position from telling Carlson that the Russian invasion was a simple “territorial dispute,” rejecting Carlson’s restatement of DeSantis’ position as changing his view “to describe Putin as a war criminal and say that it was central to America’s foreign policy.”
Both Carlson and DeSantis stare up at several names in the estimation of Polymarket investors, including President Donald Trump (4%), Secretary of State Marco Rubio (9%), and Vice President JD Vance (52%).
However, they both are ahead of Steve Bannon, whose chances have faded to 2% at this writing, as well as Matt Gaetz, Byron Donalds, and Tom Brady, all of whom hover around 1%.
