Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who remains the No. 2 GOP presidential contender heading into 2024, finally responded to a question over the weekend about whether he believes the 2020 election was “stolen,” as former President Donald 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.”
Per CNN, DeSantis struck back at Trump’s “juvenile” nicknames of him and other Republican contenders.
“These insults are so phony. These insults are juvenile. That is not the way a great nation should be conducting itself. That is not the way the president of the United States should be conducting himself,” DeSantis said.
“As Republicans, that will cause us to lose if we behave that way,” he said. “There are millions of voters out there who do not like what Biden is doing to this country. … They do not like the direction the country is going in. But they aren’t going to sign up for a candidate who is behaving like that.
He noted further: “So let’s be better. Let’s look higher, and let’s set a good standard for our children to follow.”
DeSantis also took some shots at Trump’s record while in office.
“He’s running in 2024 on the things that he promised to do in 2016 and didn’t do,” DeSantis said, according to a report by WMUR-TV. “He said he was going to drain the swamp. He did not drain the swamp. Not even close.”
“We ended his presidency with Anthony Fauci running the country,” DeSantis said. “He couldn’t even fire Fauci? And so now you’re going to drain the swamp? Give me a break.”
CNN went on to report that the Florida governor added some additional criticisms of the 2020 election after his initial remarks about it.
“I think what happened was COVID was used as an excuse to change the voting rules. Some of those were, I think, unconstitutional changes because it’s got to be done by the legislature. … It can’t be done by emergency executive order,” he said.
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