Former president Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis will hold duelling campaign events on Tuesday in New Hampshire after some squabbling over the close timing of the appearances.
Mr DeSantis, who released an immigration and border security policy proposal on Monday, was set to appear at a town hall event in Hollis, while Mr Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, was scheduled to speak at a lunch in Concord hosted by a Republican women’s club and attend the opening of his campaign’s state office in Manchester.
The New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women, which is hosting Mr Trump, issued a statement last week saying it was disappointed with the DeSantis campaign for scheduling a town hall around the same time as its own event, 40 miles away and a couple of hours before.
The group branded it “an attempt to steal focus from” the organisation’s sold-out Lilac Luncheon fundraiser and said that other presidential candidates had scheduled around the event.
It also said it had asked Mr DeSantis to reschedule, to apparently no avail.
While in Eagle Pass, Texas, I have seen firsthand the crisis at our southern border.
Millions of illegal aliens are flooding across the border and tens of thousands of Americans are dying from fentanyl that is being smuggled into our country. This is a massive dereliction of… pic.twitter.com/4txKrkh28Z— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 26, 2023
Two members of the women’s group, however, posted on Twitter that they disagreed with the statement.
One, former state politician Melissa Blasek, said she was resigning her membership in the group over what she called “a cheap campaign stunt” that appeared to be motivated by the Trump campaign, which sent out its own press release sharing the statement.
When asked to comment on the statement, the DeSantis campaign did not address the issue but said the governor is working to ensure his message “reaches every last primary voter in New Hampshire, and we have a top-notch organisation in the state to help him do that”.
“We are confident that the governor’s message will resonate with voters in New Hampshire as he continues to visit the Granite State and detail his solutions to Joe Biden’s failures,” the campaign’s press press secretary Bryan Griffin said in a statement.
Since launching his campaign last month, Mr DeSantis has largely sought to project himself as more conservative than the former president in an attempt to dethrone him as the party’s dominant figure.
The governor has asserted he would appoint more conservative Supreme Court justices than the three Trump appointed to the court, criticised Mr Trump for implying the six-week abortion ban in Florida is “too harsh” and accused Mr Trump of having generally “moved left”.
While conservative bona fides are important in heavily GOP states like Iowa, the leadoff caucus state, they are politically trickier in New Hampshire, a political battleground state.
Mr Trump’s first-place finish in New Hampshire’s 2016 Republican primary, after losing Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, helped propel him to dominance in the party.
But his Democratic rivals ended up winning the state in both the 2016 and 2020 general elections.
And while Mr DeSantis has spoken about the abortion ban he signed while on the campaign trail among conservative audiences and in Iowa and South Carolina, he has generally not raised it when speaking to crowds in New Hampshire.
On Monday, Mr DeSantis held a campaign event in the Texas border city of Eagle Pass to unveil his first major policy plan, a proposal on immigration and border security that calls for ending birthright citizenship, finishing the US-Mexico wall and sending US forces into Mexico to combat drug cartels.
The plan largely mirrors Mr Trump’s policies and faces long odds, requiring the reversal of legal precedents, approval from other countries or even an amendment to the US Constitution.
