Ron DeSantis Dodges When Asked if He Will Campaign for Byron Donalds

EXCERPT:

DeSANTIS: "Well, I’m definitely going to be doing state policy all the way 'till we turn the lights out. We’re going to be very active. I believe when you get elected, you get elected to serve the full term. I already told, you know, we told our agency heads and my staff, no senioritis here. You know, you sign the budget and you think like — you can’t think that way. And if you think that way, then just go do something else, because we want to get all the meat off the bone we can and we’re going to continue to work hard on that. You know, it doesn’t mean that I won’t, you know, be involved. I mean, I’ve — you know, and we had a lot of candidates win last night. I mean, obviously the statewide races, we knew had a good sense of that. A lot of new congressional races now, a lot of new Republican nominees there. And so that was good. But you know, the way I view it is this: You know, no one’s worked harder to get Florida to where we are politically than I have. When I was running in 2018, I remember winning that primary and it was like, 'Okay, this is a one-point swing state. The previous elections were all 1% in the major races and they had more registered Democrats than Republicans by hundreds of thousands, and it was a very, very difficult environment.' And so since I’ve gotten in, we’ve gone from hundreds of thousands more registered Democrats in Florida, we now have 1.5 million more registered Republicans. That’s never happened anywhere in the United States of America at that scale and it helped us in the first term. When I ran 4 years ago, you know, we had 300,000 advantage in registration, which people thought that was unbelievable 'cause Florida had never had a Republican registration advantage, and it’s just gone bonkers since then. So, that is something that, I think, has been been really important. My view is, is, you know, these candidates have great opportunities that, quite frankly, we didn’t have when I was coming up in terms of just the sheer number of folks who’ve affiliated with with kind of how we’ve done business. And so, I’m proud of doing that. I think that this state is — I don’t think this is a competitive state for statewide. I think that some of these congressional ones, you know, these are new districts. You've got to introduce yourself to people. I typically haven’t done a lot on those since I’ve been governor, at least in primaries, but, you know, I think that — I think some good candidates won, and so that’s kind of exciting. We would not — Republicans would not have the House right now, the majority, had I not vetoed the map in ‘22. I mean, let’s just remind everybody that. That was very important. And hen now, you know, this could potentially be something that’s very significant for the November election. So we’ll see how it all shakes out. But I do think that if you had a choice to be running — ‘26 may be more challenging in terms of the overall environment for Republicans. That may be true. But if you had a choice to be running in ‘26 or 10 years ago, as a Republican, you would rather do it now because you just have more wind at your back and you have so many more potential votes to be able to turn.”