Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Mike Warren, senior editor here at the Dispatch.

Ron DeSantis has up the ante now for the other Republicans who were trying to defeat Donald Trump

in the 2024 presidential primaries. These also running candidates, people like Tim Scott,

Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgham,

have a lot to do over the next few months if they want to be able to compete with Trump and DeSantis.

I'll be talking today with Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican political consultant and strategist.

He's worked for a number of candidates, including John McCain, Jeb Bush,

Omar Alexander, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Let's take a listen.

Mike Murphy, welcome to the Dispatch Podcast.

Well, it is good to be here, Mike. Good to see you.

Well, let's take stock, Mike, of the 2024 Republican field. Here we are,

the very beginning of June 2023. And we've got Donald Trump obviously running for a,

I guess, a third time for a second term. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is in now. It's been just

over a week. Those two are really seem to be battling it out, but there are the other candidates.

And we should look at exactly where things are with the people I'm calling the also runnings.

You say, and you're not the only one who say that it's not over for those people, not named Donald

Trump and Ron DeSantis, but there's some things they're going to have to do over the next few months.

Let's just start there. Where are things as you see it?

That is the big question. So, you know, we tend to be in the Heisenberg business here in the

pun, you know, the pundit arena where we have a lot of hot thermometers. We're sticking into things

and then declaring temperatures. And we tend to be really early. You know, the voter timetable is

much more backended than the bloviating timetable that we're all on. So every day in the modern news

...