Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis slammed an analysis presented to him on CNN during an interview this week that claimed that his policies hurt his electability with suburban moms, saying that his policies actually won over suburban moms in the state of Florida.
Speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “The Lead” on Tuesday evening, DeSantis was asked about the claim that his policies on “divisive social issues” can “alienate moderate suburban moms.”
“Well I don’t think that’s true. I mean, the proof is in the pudding,” DeSantis fired back. “I mean, I took a state that had been a one-point state, and we won it by 20 percentage points, 1.5 million votes. Our bread and butter were people like suburban moms. We’re leading a big movement for parents’ rights that the parents be involved in education, school choice, get the indoctrination out of schools. Of course, there’s bread and butter issues that matter, too. Inflation, more economic opportunity — Florida’s economy is ranked number one of all 50 states. We’ve worked hard to make that happen.”
DeSantis said that the reason that his poll numbers have taken a slight hit over the past several months was because he was getting “a lot of media attention at the time, coming off the victory” and then he returned to his role as governor to focus on the state’s legislative session and did not immediately begin campaigning.
“So I think that that analysis is wrong,” he said. “And so I was basically taking fire really nonstop since then because a lot of people view me as a threat. I think the Left views me as a threat because they think I’ll beat Biden and actually deliver on all this stuff. And then, of course, people would have their allegiances on the Republican side, you know, have gone after me. But the reality is, this is a state-by-state process. I’m not running a campaign to try to juice, you know, whatever we are in the national polls.”
DeSantis said that he is focused on building a strong organization that can mobilize a large ground game that can help him win the early states.
“Now that is not going to make the same type of splash as if you were trying to run ads nationally or do those other things,” DeSantis said. “And so we’ve been making really good progress. I think this weekend was really good in terms of The FAMiLY Leader and some of the other things we were doing in Iowa. We’re here in South Carolina; we’re going to do a lot in New Hampshire. But that’s going to be our focus, focusing on those early states, continuing to build our coalitions and going forward.”
DeSantis also addressed narratives that have been pushed by his opponents in the past that turned out to be false, including a 2018 CNN poll that had him down roughly 15 points before he won election as Florida’s governor for the first time.
“So I think some of this is motivated reasoning, but I tend to get a kick out of it when they say, ‘He didn’t fundraise well’, when I did more than Biden and Trump in the second quarter, and I’m just the governor,” DeSantis added.
Tapper added at the end that he “didn’t believe that poll was accurate, just for the record.”