Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking the media to task for pushing a narrative that his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination is struggling.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo, DeSantis pointed to recent fundraising numbers and other factors to push back on the narrative.
He also said that it is still very early in the primary cycle.
“These are narratives. The media does not want me to be the nominee,” he said. “I think that’s very, very clear. Why? Because they know I’ll beat Biden. But even more importantly, they know I will actually deliver on all these things.
“We will stop the invasion at the border, we’ll take on the drug cartels, we’ll curtail the administrative state, we’ll get spending under control. We’ll do all the things that they don’t want to see done,” he said.
DeSantis said his view is that national primary polls hold limited value since the process is not conducted on a national scale and unfolds gradually over several months rather than occurring on a single day.
“I can tell you we understand this is a state-by-state process,” he said. “We’ve had incredible support in the early states building an organization, signing up the key people that you need to be able to compete in a place like Iowa. We just launched our ‘Mamas Movement.’ My wife was in Iowa with Gov. Kim Reynolds launching that.”
The popular GOP governor said that women, especially mothers, are going to be a big focus of his campaign because he believes they become “the secret weapon both in the primary and the general election.”
“Nobody has been a better champion for those folks than me,” he said. “And I would just also point out, you know, my re-election 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 re-election campaign was stalling, that we weren’t doing anything. And so we’re doing what it takes to win.”
“And, oh, by the way, we just announced last week better fundraising than any non-incumbent has ever had if you look at what was reported, it was about $150 million, and that hasn’t even been deployed yet,” he continued.
“We’ve got a long way to go. I’m looking forward to being able to participate in the debates, but this is not something that, you know, I ever expected to just snap fingers and all of a sudden, you know, you win seven months before anything happens. You’ve got to work, and it requires a lot of toil and tears and sweat, and we’re going to do that,” he said.
