Ron DeSantis casts himself as Maverick in Top Gun campaign ad

Florida’s governor took Tom Cruise’s character in a new television ad, as two powerful Democrats face off in a bid to torpedo him.

Florida’s governor and likely presidential contender Ron DeSantis has cast himself as Top Gun’s Maverick in a new television advertisement, as two powerful Democrats face off in a bid to torpedo the Republican star’s 2024 White House ambitions.

Mr DeSantis’s wife, Carey, who recently recovered from breast cancer, launched the advertisement, which highlighted her husband’s combative record in fighting “false corporate media narratives”, on Twitter Monday (Tuesday AEST).

Top Gov… Dogfighting… Taking on the Corporate Media…

Rules of Engagement are as Follows:

⬇️ pic.twitter.com/tG7iMCAXvY

— Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) August 23, 2022

“When they fire you fire back with overwhelming force … never back down for a fight,” Mr DeSantis said, dressed in Tom Cruise’s trademark Top Gun uniform.

Voters in Florida and New York, the third and fourth largest US states by population, headed to the polls on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) to pick their candidates for congressional and gubernatorial elections in November, which will define the political landscape nationwide in the final two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

But it’s the elections in Florida, including for candidates to be governor, that have captured the most attention.

Ron DeSantis at a rally in Pittsburgh. Picture: Getty Images.

Mr DeSantis, 43, shot to prominence across the US throughout the pandemic after apologising for following White House advice and locking down his state in early 2020, then banning mask and vaccine mandates and passports, in stark contrast to other big states California and New York.

His approval of a controversial law in March banning discussion of sexuality with children under 8 in schools – dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by opponents – ensured his ongoing notoriety among Democrats, making Florida ground zero in the US culture wars.

A former junior Congressman, Yale law graduate and former US naval officer, Mr DeSantis, won the governorship in 2019 after an endorsement from then President Donald Trump, with whom his relations have reportedly deteriorated as Mr DeSantis’s political stocks have risen.

Political betting agency PredictIt has the first term governor the favourite to win both the Republican nomination for president in 2024 and the White House as of Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), marginally ahead of Mr Trump, and he is expected to cruise into a second term as governor in November according to polls.

Charlie Crist, 66, a Democrat congressman and former governor of Florida (as a Republican) between 2007 and 2011, is expected to win the Democrat nomination on Tuesday ahead of Nikki Fried, the state’s Agriculture Commissioner, although the low turnout expected in the August holiday season has made the result unpredictable.

“He is the opposite of freedom. He is an autocrat. He is a demagogue. And I think people are sick of him,” Mr Crist, who left the Republican party in 2012 citing a far-right takeover, told Associated Press on Tuesday.

Ms Fried, 44, who compared Mr DeSantis to Adolf Hitler in April, has similarly cast the governor as an extremist bully and tried to tap into nationwide unease over the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v Wade, which guaranteed abortion rights nationally, a decision Mr DeSantis supported.

DeSantis “won’t have a 2024 because he won’t have a 2022. We are going to beat him in November, and we are going to kill all of his aspirations to run for president of the United States,” Ms Fried told AP.

“Ron had a costume party and only invited his ego. What a buffoon,” she tweeted earlier today, mocking the governor’s Top Gun advertisement.

Known as the sunshine state, Florida, with a population nearing 21.5 million, has witnessed the fastest population growth in the union since the pandemic owing mainly to immigration from California and New York, despite concerns the state will be badly affected by climate change in coming decades,

“(Fried) had an opportunity as being the only Democrat elected statewide to exercise some leadership and get some things done and instead she’s used her time to basically try to smear me on a daily basis,” Mr DeSantis told reporters after a state cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, losing to Mr Trump, will also learn of his Democrat rival in November, tipped to be veteran Democrat political Val Demings, an incumbent congresswoman.