Florida Governor and Republican U.S. presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida clearly stated in a new interview that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, diverging from the orthodoxy of most Republican voters as the former president’s struggling GOP rivals test out new lines of attack against him.
“Of course he lost,” DeSantis said in an interview with NBC News published Monday. “Joe Biden’s the president.”
DeSantis’ remarks — his first blunt acknowledgment of the 2020 outcome after three years of hedging — were the latest sign that Trump’s rivals are seeking to use his growing legal troubles against him. In the days since Trump was indicted on charges related to a scheme to overturn the 2020 election, both DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence have more sharply broken from the former president over his actions leading up to the Capitol riot.
The criticism has been subtle. Neither candidate has openly attacked Trump or suggested the charges are warranted. In his latest comments, DeSantis continued to suggest that the election had problems, calling it not “perfect.” But both appear to be seeking ways to use the indictment to press on the former president’s weaknesses, with some hope of building a case even Trump supporters will hear.
DeSantis has also been trying to reset his struggling campaign, and his donors have pushed him to moderate his positions to appeal to a broader audience.
First, though, DeSantis must find a way through the Republican primary contest, in which Trump holds a dominant polling lead. And DeSantis’ latest remarks, while accurate, may put him at odds with much of the Republican base. Although the 2020 election was widely found to have been secure, roughly 70% of Republican voters say that Biden’s victory was not legitimate, according to a CNN poll conducted last month.
In a statement, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, said that “Ron DeSantis should really stop being Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader.”
So far, of the most prominent candidates, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Pence have spoken out most strongly against Trump. Christie is running on an explicitly anti-Trump platform. Pence has said that Trump deserves the “presumption of innocence” but has also said he would testify in the former president’s trial over Jan. 6, 2021, if called to do so.
“The American people deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the Constitution, but I kept my oath and I always will,” Pence told CNN in an interview that aired Sunday. “And I’m running for president in part because I think anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”
But neither argument appears to be resonating with Republican voters. Christie is polling at about 2% in national surveys, and Pence has not yet qualified for the first Republican debate this month. At a dinner for the Republican Party of Iowa late last month, the audience booed former Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, a long-shot candidate, after he accused the former president of “running to stay out of prison.”
In the NBC interview, DeSantis still said he saw problems with how the 2020 election was conducted, citing the widespread use of mail-in ballots, private donations to election administrators from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and efforts by social media companies to limit the spread of a report about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“I don’t think it was a good-run election,” DeSantis said. “But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back. You’ve got to fight back when that is happening.”
DeSantis had acknowledged Friday that the former president’s false conspiracy theories about a rigged 2020 election were “unsubstantiated.”
In the run-up to last year’s midterms, DeSantis campaigned for vociferous election deniers, including Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake, who ran for governor in Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Both lost, as did all of their most prominent counterparts, showing that while election denial can work in Republican primaries, it does not play as well in general elections in battleground states. Sixty percent of independent voters nationwide believe Biden won the 2020 election, the CNN poll found — an ominous sign for Republicans who embrace election denialism going into 2024.
For Trump’s hard-line supporters, DeSantis’ new comments on the 2020 election were seen as disqualifying.
“Any politician that says that Donald Trump lost that election and Biden really won is done,” Mike Lindell, the pillow company founder who has been a vocal promoter of conspiracy theories about election machines, said in an interview Monday with The New York Times. “Their campaign is basically over when they make a comment like that.”
DeSantis’ shift, however, serves to buttress his overall argument against Trump, namely that under Trump’s leadership, Republicans have performed poorly in three elections in a row.
And it could help assuage the fears of some of DeSantis’ big-money donors. Robert Bigelow, who contributed more than $20 million to a super PAC backing DeSantis, told Reuters last week that he would not give more money unless DeSantis adopted a more moderate approach. The governor’s campaign is experiencing a fundraising shortfall and last month laid off more than a third of its staff.
DeSantis has also had more opportunities to address sensitive subjects like 2020 in recent weeks. As part of a “reboot” of his campaign, he has opened himself up to more interviews with mainstream news outlets, retreating from the safety of sitting down only with hosts from Fox News and conservative pundits. He has recently given one-on-one interviews to CNN, CBS, ABC and The Wall Street Journal, in addition to NBC, and has also taken far more questions from reporters on the campaign trail.
He has used those platforms to dig at Trump for his age, his failure to “drain the swamp” during his term in office, and the “culture of losing” that DeSantis says has overtaken the Republican Party under Trump.
“I think I’m the only candidate running who can win the primary, defeat Joe Biden, and then deliver on all of these things that we know that needs to be done,” DeSantis said at a WMUR town-hall event with New Hampshire voters last week.
But he has also defended Trump over the criminal charges, saying they represent the “weaponization” of federal government against a political rival of Biden. Taken together, DeSantis’ comments on the former president suggest he is inching, rather than running, toward more direct confrontation. The governor never mentions Trump by name in his stump speech to voters, preferring to engage on the topic only when asked by attendees at his campaign events or by reporters.
Some candidates running for the Republican nomination have already confirmed the overall legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Speaking to voters last month, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina — who is polling in third place in Iowa, behind Trump and DeSantis, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll — said that he did not believe the election was “stolen.”
“There was cheating, but was the election stolen?” Scott asked. “There’s a difference.”
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has rejected Trump’s false claims of a stolen election but has markedly calibrated between criticism and defense of the former president.
Before the Capitol riot, she refused to acknowledge that he was acting reckless or irresponsible in refusing to concede. But in its immediate aftermath, she harshly criticized Trump and wrongly predicted that he had fallen so low that he would lose all political viability.
Within months, she had again embraced him, saying he was needed in the Republican Party. After the Jan. 6 indictment against Trump was released, Haley told a New Hampshire radio show that said she had intentionally refrained from releasing a statement because she was “tired of commenting on every Trump drama.”
A spokesperson for Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech millionaire who is doing better in the polls than expected and has been a strong defender of Trump, did not respond to questions about whether Ramaswamy believed Trump had lost the election.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.