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DeSantis makes his case to run against Trump, asks GOP to follow Florida's lead

The governor of Florida delivered a speech in which he aimed to take the reins of the national leadership of the Republican Party.

Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida

Ron DeSantis / Gage Skidmore- Flickr

Published by
Juan Carlos Téllez

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Ron DeSantis delivered a speech Thursday that appeared to show his intention to take the Republican Party nomination in the 2024 presidential election. The Florida Governor questioned the GOP's "underperformance" in the midterms and tried to point out the path he believes the party must take to regain power.

DeSantis expressed disappointment in the results obtained by the Republican Party in the midterms. However, he showed pride in the result achieved by his campaign in Florida:

Some of my folks were like, ‘Governor, this is not a red wave.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about? ... This is a 20 point win. When have we ever seen that?’ They’re like, ‘No, no, no. Florida is a big win. But in the rest of the country, we are not seeing really good performance from a lot of these Republicans.’

The Florida governor recalled the disappointing defeat of the Republican Party in the Senate and underwhelming victory in the House of Representatives, with results far below expectations:

We assumed we were going to end up with like, 245 House members, we’re at 222 it looks like, which is a huge underperformance. And so, you know, the question is, is, you know, why did that happen? Because the way these midterms work, someone gets elected to the White House, and then there’s a reaction the other way. That’s what happens almost every two years and especially when people are pessimistic about the direction of the country, have a negative view on Biden. Usually those voters are going to want to vote for people that are offering an alternative. And yet some of those voters throughout the country, not in Florida, but throughout the country, even though they disapproved of Biden, even though they disapproved of the direction of the country. They still didn’t want to vote, you know, for some of our candidate

Florida, the nation’s lead example

The recipe for success in DeSantis' opinion is to follow in his footsteps in Florida. The governor believes that his campaign did a few things that were not seen from many other GOP candidates:

I think what we’ve done in Florida is we’ve shown that we’ve exercised leadership, we’ve not kowtowed, we’ve been willing to take on big interests … producing results, and that ends up attracting more people to want to be on your team — and so that was not something that was happening throughout the rest of the country.

This is why the Florida governor is calling on the Republican Party to follow in his footsteps. This message seems to be aimed at challenging Donald Trump for the GOP leadership and be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. DeSantis recalled, "If you look at how we performed, no Republican governor has ever gotten a higher percentage of the vote in Florida's history than we did in 2022." The truth is in the data.

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