Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has dropped the name of a familiar Republican leader who he appears to be considering as his running mate, even as he continues to fall in the polls.
After touting her during his candidate forum with Tucker Carlson, DeSantis said Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is on his short list of VP picks.
“Governor, you have spent a lot of time with Governor Reynolds, you defended her after President Trump’s recent statements,” a reporter said to DeSantis following the Carlson event, which was also held in Iowa. “Would you consider her as a potential vice presidential pick in this campaign?”
“Of course,” DeSantis said in response. “I mean, she’s one of the top public servants in America, I thought the attacks on her were totally, totally out of hand and totally unnecessary.”
“We should be thanking good Republican officeholders,” he continued. “You know, we kind of joke about the Iowa-Florida [competition], sometimes they do things before us, sometimes we do. But honestly, I want them to do better than us because it’s healthy. When Republicans are doing well, I like that, I don’t get jealous of that, I want to see them do well.”
“And so they’ve done a great job, and I think she’s been a model public servant, and anybody who’s a Republican that’s trying to denigrate her, I think, is way off base on that,” he concluded.
Standing beside DeSantis when he was making his remarks was Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who was nodding in agreement.
As noted by Reuters, the DeSantis camp is putting a great deal of effort into winning the very important state of Iowa in January “despite the former president’s commanding lead in polls and growing questions about DeSantis’ viability.”
But he’s got a tough road ahead of him. All surveys have him well behind former President Donald Trump, and he’s even lost his second-place status to rising GOP star Vivek Ramaswamy in some of the most recent surveys.
This week, he finally responded to a question about whether he believes the 2020 election was “stolen,” as Trump and others have insisted.
The popular governor, who himself stood up an office to monitor election fraud in the Sunshine State, has previously avoided answering the question directly. According to WFLA-TV, as of June 2022, when he referred to stolen election talk as “beating this dead horse,” there is no other record of him addressing the question.
But in Iowa over the weekend, DeSantis provided the most direct response yet to questions and “theories” about the 2020 election.
“I’ve said many times the election is what it is. All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” he said, according to Fox News. “You don’t ballot harvest. You don’t do ‘Zuckerbucks,’ and clearly, having the agencies work with Facebook to censor things like Hunter Biden, that’s unfair.”
He added: “So it was not an election that was conducted the way I think we want to, but that’s different than saying Maduro stole votes or something like that. And I think those theories proved to be unsubstantiated.”
His reference to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was based on claims made by some in then-President Trump’s orbit post-2020 election that the Venezuelan leader was responsible for rigging U.S. voting machines in favor of Biden.
DeSantis also said that if Trump were to be convicted on charges filed by Biden’s Justice Department, he would pardon him if he won the election.
“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the country to have a former president that’s almost 80 years old go to prison,” he said, per The New York Times.
“Just like [Gerald] Ford pardoned [Richard] Nixon, sometimes you’ve got to put this stuff behind you, and we need to start focusing on things having to do with the country’s future,” he said, adding, “This election needs to be about Jan. 20, 2025, not Jan. 6, 2021.”
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