On May 24, 2023, Ron DeSantis, the 46th and current governor of Florida, announced his candidacy for the 2024 United States presidential election. On January 21, 2024, DeSantis suspended his campaign and endorsed former President Donald Trump. DeSantis's campaign finished after having won nine delegates from the Republican National Convention in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries.
DeSantis won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012 and was reelected in 2014 and 2016. He sought Marco Rubio's U.S. Senate seat in 2016, withdrawing when Rubio announced he would seek reelection. In 2018, he was elected governor of Florida, winning reelection in 2022 in a landslide. DeSantis's aggressive decisions during his governorship led to speculation that he would run for president. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News promoted DeSantis as an alternative to former president Donald Trump following the January 6 Capitol attack. In early 2023, he began a book tour for his newly published memoir The Courage to Be Free in early voting states.
DeSantis officially announced his campaign in a Twitter Spaces discussion with X Corp. CEO Elon Musk, following the release of his plans to the Associated Press a day earlier. Technical issues affected the discussion and became a focal point for critics. His campaign began with an in-person event in Iowa, followed by a tour in early voting states. DeSantis focused on his governorship and his policy record. In particular, he touted his stance on LGBT issues and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida in an effort to differentiate himself from Trump. Although DeSantis initially had competitive support to Trump according to aggregate FiveThirtyEight polls, the margin between Trump and DeSantis steadily widened over the course of 2023.
Background
In 2012, DeSantis secured a seat in the House of Representatives for Florida's 6th congressional district. He was reelected in 2014 and 2016. DeSantis served on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, chairing the latter's Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs. During the 2016 Senate election in Florida, he ran for the seat held by Marco Rubio, who abstained from running from reelection due to his presidential campaign. Following Rubio's withdrawal and subsequent reelection campaign, DeSantis dropped out of the race. In January 2018, DeSantis filed to run for governor of Florida in the state's gubernatorial election to succeed Republican incumbent Rick Scott. Supported by then-president Donald Trump, DeSantis won the Republican primary in August and resigned from Congress in September. DeSantis and his running mate, Jeanette Núñez were confirmed the winners, following a statewide recount that led to Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum conceding. DeSantis signaled his intent to run in the 2022 gubernatorial election in September 2021, launching his reelection bid in November. In a landslide victory, he defeated Democratic nominee Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida from 2007 to 2011.
DeSantis's tenure as the governor of Florida has seen several major developments. The COVID-19 pandemic in Florida began in March 2020; subverting scientific consensus, DeSantis downplayed the effectiveness of face masks against COVID-19 and attempted to reopen Florida while following Trump's advice. He appointed Joseph Ladapo, a noted COVID-19 vaccine skeptic and a signee of the Great Barrington Declaration, as Florida's surgeon general in September 2021, while fining local governments for enforcing vaccine mandates. DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education Act in March 2022, prohibiting public schools in Florida from discussing or having classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade and beginning a feud with The Walt Disney Company. In April 2023, Disney sued DeSantis. DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban while supporting limited government and taking a hard stance on crime. He downplayed running for president in August 2020, calling the speculation around a potential bid "total garbage".
Pre-candidacy developments
Early speculation
By January 2021, DeSantis had been a potential candidate in the 2024 presidential election. He was invited to the Republican National Committee's January meeting in Amelia Island, despite supporting then-president Donald Trump at the time. DeSantis's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida ascended him further within the Republican Party; Josh Holmes, an advisor to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, said that DeSantis was "having a moment with conservatives". In October 2022, former Florida governor Jeb Bush praised DeSantis as a potential 2024 candidate, and in February 2023, repeated his hopes that DeSantis would run, while reserving he was "praising, not endorsing" DeSantis. A Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) straw poll saw DeSantis second only to Trump, and the only other Republican to receive double digit polling numbers in the poll. In May, DeSantis spoke to the Republican Party in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, further fueling speculation of a potential bid, as some Democrats began seeking to mount a campaign against him. Despite various endorsements, he publicly opposed a presidential bid, saying that the discussion over his candidacy was "purely manufactured" in a press conference in September 2021. State straw polls suggested a strong connection with college-educated voters within the Republican Party and narrow victories against Trump.
In conservative media, DeSantis was frequently featured and developed a mutual relationship. In an email obtained by the Tampa Bay Times, a Fox News producer said that he "could host [Fox & Friends]". DeSantis forged alliances with conservative pundits, hosting political commentator Dave Rubin and Newsmax reporter Benny Johnson to the Governor's Mansion in January 2022. In The American Conservative and the National Review, he was lauded as a strong alternative to Trump. As the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal—owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp—began to appear critical of Trump for the January 6 Capitol attack, Murdoch's Fox News began shifting coverage to DeSantis and worked with his team to portray him in a positive light; The New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman's book, Confidence Man (2022), states Murdoch was willing to "throw [Trump] over" following his loss in the 2020 presidential election. The New York Post ran the headline, "DeFuture", after DeSantis was reelected, while The Wall Street Journal proclaimed it the "DeSantis Florida tsunami".
DeSantis's speculative campaign was targeted by conspiracy theorists, particularly followers of QAnon. In February 2023, Hungarian-American businessman George Soros expressed his hope that DeSantis would defeat Trump for the Republican nomination, although he qualified this as a hope that such an outcome would result in Trump running as a third-party candidate and splitting the Republican vote rather than a DeSantis presidency, and therefore was not an endorsement. Opponents of DeSantis later seized upon this, putting forward conspiracy theories that DeSantis was "a tool of the Deep State", with "more than 12,000 mentions of 'DeSoros' on social media and news sites" from January to May 2023. Former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake falsely claimed that Soros had endorsed DeSantis, which she referred to as "the kiss of death". As speculation continued, Trump mounted attacks against DeSantis, referring to him as "Ron DeSanctimonious" at a rally in Pennsylvania in November 2022, in advance for a presidential campaign. The New York Times reported that Trump has casually used the nickname "Meatball Ron"; DeSantis is Italian-American. Several days after the article was published, Trump said on Truth Social that he "will never call Ron DeSanctimonious 'Meatball' Ron", and that it is "totally inappropriate".
Preparing for a run
In February 2023, DeSantis released The Courage to Be Free, a memoir overviewing his political beliefs, and subsequently embarked on a book tour in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, among other states. Despite teasing a potential presidential bid, DeSantis stated that the tour was intended to advocate for his record as the governor of Florida, rather than Trump. In April, he visited Japan, South Korea, Israel, and the United Kingdom, in a move considered to improve his credentials on foreign policy. DeSantis was criticized for an apparent lackluster performance over the course of the trip. According to The Guardian, DeSantis began assembling senior staff on February 27. The Florida Legislature passed an elections bill in April that removes the requirement that DeSantis must resign as the governor of Florida if he launches a presidential campaign. The bill was signed into law by DeSantis hours before he was expected to announce his candidacy. At the end of the Florida legislature session on May 12, DeSantis told reporters that he'll "put up or shut up" on a campaign announcement soon. A person affiliated with DeSantis's campaign told The Hill on May 19 that DeSantis would file paperwork with the Federal Election Commission the following week, and DeSantis's Twitter handle was changed from @RonDeSantisFL to @RonDeSantis on May 23.
Ahead of a potential presidential bid, reports of DeSantis's aloof personality began to form. In the most notable of these instances, The Daily Beast reported in March 2023 that—during a private plane trip in March 2019 from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C.—DeSantis ate a "chocolate pudding dessert" using three fingers, according to two sources. A former staffer told the publication that DeSantis would eat "like a starving animal who has never eaten before" as part of a section about his tenuous social skills. Although he denied the incident, it quickly garnered press attention. A political action committee (PAC) aligned with Trump ran a political message in April titled "Pudding Fingers" and featuring claims DeSantis had made across a backdrop of a man eating pudding with three fingers. Speaking to NBC News, multiple Republican colleagues said that DeSantis was "a loner" who was often seen on his cellphone. The New York Times reported that DeSantis used bike racks to separate himself from the crowd during his visit to Iowa. A video of DeSantis laughing loudly and awkwardly at an Iowa campaign event went viral and drew comparison to the Dean scream, a political gaffe in Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.
Prior to the campaign announcement, allies of DeSantis established a political action committee known as Friends of Ron DeSantis. Although the PAC raised US$86 million, its funds cannot be transferred to Ron DeSantis for President because they were raised under looser laws. On May 15, Friends of Ron DeSantis filed paperwork with the Florida Division of Elections changing its name to "Empower Parents" and devoted its new mission to "protecting parental rights in education", in an apparent effort to distribute the funds and circumvent federal law. The watchdog group Campaign Legal Center has stated that it will file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission if the funds are transferred. Empower Parents may transfer its funds to Never Back Down, a federal super PAC that has raised US$30 million. Never Back Down has run ads in key early-voting states that directly target Trump, and expects to have a budget of US$200 million. The PAC intends to transfer US$80 million from one of DeSantis's political accounts. Although the transfer would have been prevented under state law, the Florida Department of State changed its handbook to allow such a transfer, citing Citizens United v. FEC (2010).