Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) brushed off claims that his 2024 presidential campaign has come to a halt, claiming they are just false “narratives.”
Despite most national polls showing him trailing former President Donald Trump to be the GOP nominee, DeSantis said in an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Saturday that the media does not want him to be the nominee because “they know I’ll beat [President Joe] Biden.”
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“Even more importantly, they know I will actually deliver on all of these things,” DeSantis said, citing his policy ideas for the economy and immigration.
“You know, my reelection in Florida, we had the greatest victory that any Republican governor candidate in the history of the state had, and yet a few months before the election, I had media saying that somehow my reelection campaign was stalling, that we weren’t doing anything,” Desantis added. “We’re doing what it takes to win.”
Bartiromo had referenced a section of Politico’s Playbook released on Saturday titled “Failure to Launch,” in which Steve Cortes, a top DeSantis PAC official, said DeSantis is “way behind” in national polling. DeSantis acknowledged the 2024 election would be an uphill battle but that he was not expecting results right off the bat.
“I never expected to be just snap fingers and all of the sudden, you know, you win seven months before anything happens,” DeSantis said. “You got to earn it, and you got to work. And it requires a lot of toil and tears, and sweat. And we’re going to do that.”
Last week, he revealed a $20 million fundraising haul within the first six weeks of his campaign. While Trump posted $35 million in the second quarter of 2023, DeSantis’s team pointed out that the governor’s six-week haul is more than Trump raised in the first two quarters following his mid-November announcement.
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DeSantis confirmed that he plans to participate in the first Republican presidential candidate debate for the 2024 cycle on Aug. 23. Trump has indicated he may not show up to the debate.
“I look forward to doing it,” the Florida governor said of the debate. “I think, really, Maria, that’s when people are really going to start paying attention to the primary. I think up to his point, a lot of that has been about some of these legal cases. And I think a lot of the voters are concerned about that, and understandably so.”
