Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was pressed Thursday during a Fox News interview about his polling struggles and the emerging narrative, promoted by analysts on both sides, that he is “not connecting” with voters who should otherwise support his messages.
Fox News host Will Cain began by mentioning the fact that Steve Cortes, a top DeSantis PAC official, publicly acknowledged Sunday that the Florida governor’s campaign is looking at an “uphill battle.”
DeSantis currently trails Donald Trump by about 28 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight's average of GOP primary polls, despite having been within a few percentage points of the former president in February.
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After making sure to tell DeSantis that he believes he has “done a wonderful job” as governor, Cain asked him “when that job—if ever—begins to resonate in the numbers for you for president.”
“There are those that say there is something about you that is not connecting for whatever reason—not connecting with the voter, whether it be personality, Donald Trump says it’s about loyalty, Francis Suarez says it’s about your relationships,” Cain said, referring to the Miami mayor, who announced his presidential candidacy last month.
When asked about the reason for these criticisms, DeSantis directed Cain to his recent fundraising numbers.
“Well, I think—did you see the news today about the record fundraising haul we’ve had? Nobody has been able to match that in the history of modern presidential politics,” he claimed.
DeSantis’s campaign brought in $20 million since its May launch, it announced earlier in the day, with the super PAC called Never Back Down raising $130 million, though more than $80 million of that was from DeSantis’ 2022 gubernatorial re-election fund.
“So we’ve got a huge amount of support to take the case to the people. We really haven’t started that yet. We are in the process of building out a great organization and I think we’re going to be on the ground in all these early states,” DeSantis said, then declaring that he has been better than anyone else in the last five years at standing up for “hard-working Americans.”
“That’s going to be a great story to tell because if we did it in Florida, we absolutely can do it as president,” he continued, before deploying one of his favorite campaign targets. “That will mean the border invasion stops, it will mean the economy is restored, and it’s going to mean that woke ideology ends up in the dustbin of history.”
Later in the interview, DeSantis was asked more directly about what it would take to beat Trump in the primary.
“I have… been attacked more than anybody,” DeSantis claimed. “Trump has spent over $20 million attacking me. That’s more than he spent supporting Republican candidates in last year’s midterm elections.”
Trump, for instance, has said that DeSantis “needs a personality transplant.”
DeSantis then suggested that he is better equipped than Trump to make inroads with Independent voters and those who haven’t voted Republican in years.
“I’ve shown I can do that, and I think we can do it nationally,” he said.
