DeSantis Won’t Rule Out Another Presidential Run — Claims He ‘Would’ve Gotten Like 90%’ of Trump’s Iowa Vote

AP Photo/Meg Kinnard

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is not ruling out another attempt to move to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, telling Sean Hannity he’s convinced he would have been able to get “like 90%” of President Donald Trump’s Iowa caucus voters.

In a clip Hannity posted from the upcoming episode of his podcast, Hang Out With Sean Hannity, he asked the Florida governor point-blank, “Will you run for president again?”

Replied DeSantis:

We’ll see. I mean, you know, I think that, in ’24, like in Iowa, the people that voted for Trump, if he wasn’t running, I would’ve gotten like 90% of those people –they were conservative voters. They didn’t want the non-conservative, you know, they wanted me.

But the timing didn’t work out obviously for that. So you just gotta see what happens.

The math from 2024 is not as clear-cut as DeSantis framed it.

The governor was singing the same tune that year with his campaign messaging — claiming he was the true conservative and therefore natural choice for Iowa’s staunchly conservative GOP base — but he was still annihilated in the the state’s Republican caucuses in January 2024. Many expect the challenges that dragged DeSantis down in 2024 to still play a factor if he runs again.

Between his campaign and PAC, DeSantis ’24 torched over $130 million to run what GOP political strategists Curt Anderson and Alex Castellanos called “The Worst Presidential Campaign in History” in a brutal analysis for Politico magazine.

Anderson and Castellanos savaged DeSantis for blowing all that cash only to lose all of Iowa’s 99 counties, and for the way he “pretended to be just like Trump but in a less bombastic and less entertaining package”:

The candidate did not match the hype. He was less than advertised. In person, he was a diminutive politician. The campaign introduced him to the nation as a bright but socially awkward introvert, a nerd who did not enjoy people — which was a problem since voters tend to be people.

First impressions are wildly important in politics. The campaign never recovered from its pitiful Twitter kickoff, its discomfited candidate and the wandering purpose of his candidacy. To the campaign’s surprise, the message that “I’m just like Trump, but awkward, shorter and less interesting” did not seem to catch.

In the end, when Iowa Republicans trudged through the snow that January, Trump got 20 delegates with 51% of the vote, DeSantis picked up 9 delegates with 21.2%, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had 8 delegates with 19.1%, and Vivek Ramaswamy had 3 delegates with 7.7%. Several other candidates got less than 1% each and zero delegates.

It’s far from proven that DeSantis would have gotten 90% of Trump’s Iowa voters with Haley, Ramaswamy, and the other candidates also competing, especially since DeSantis could hardly have done more to win over Hawkeye State Republicans. His “Never Back Down” PAC spearheaded a massively expensive canvassing and get-out-the-vote effort that The New York Times characterized as possibly “one of the most colossal bonfires of cash in American political history.”

That Times analysis in the aftermath of DeSantis’ crushing loss also highlighted how close Haley came to his delegate count, despite the fact that she “didn’t begin to seriously compete in Iowa until October” and DeSantis had been “traveling frenetically around the state and courting white evangelical voters with hard-right stances on abortion and L.B.G.T.Q. issues.”

After Iowa, the DeSantis campaign spent a few days reenacting the meme of the dog in the café that’s on fire, insisting everything is fine, before finally calling it quits before the New Hampshire primary.

Looking at 2028, if DeSantis runs again, he cannot reasonably expect to have the path cleared for him. Donors who helped him run up the score in his 2022 gubernatorial re-election campaign and then poured money into that PAC for its “rapaciously expensive” — and ultimately unpersuasive — advertising are unlikely to pull out their checkbooks with the same abandon again.

Moreover, it is widely reported that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are eyeing throwing their hats into the ring in 2028. DeSantis is term-limited out and will leave Florida’s governor’s mansion in January 2027; Vance and Rubio will remain in the national spotlight as top members of the Trump administration through the entirety of the 2028 election cycle.

Trump’s ability to nudge his MAGA supporters is almost certain to be a factor, and he’s been throwing compliments and implying a possible endorsement mostly in the direction of Vance and Rubio throughout his second term.

While the president’s attention span is notoriously fickle and his track record on congressional endorsements is a mixed bag at best, if he gives the nod to someone other than DeSantis for 2028, that would make the battle for Trump’s voters even tougher for the Florida governor.

Watch the video above via Hang Out With Sean Hannity.

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