More than two years after his presidential dreams died in freezing cold Iowa, Ron DeSantis apparently hasn’t closed the door on a future run for president.
“We’ll see,” DeSantis told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on the Fox News commentator’s new podcast, Hang Out with Sean Hannity, which is scheduled to drop Tuesday.
“I mean, I think that in ’24, like in Iowa, the people that voted for Trump — if he wasn’t running, I would have gotten like 90% of those people,” DeSantis said. “They were conservative voters, right? They didn’t want the non-conservative. They wanted me. But the timing didn’t work out, obviously, for that. So, you just got to see what happens.”
Although it will never be clear whether DeSantis would have won the GOP nomination for president if Trump hadn’t been in the mix, the Florida governor led Trump in several polls in the fall of 2022, following his 19-point re-election victory for governor over Democrat Charlie Crist.
In December 2022, DeSantis led Trump 52%-38% among likely GOP primary voter in a Wall Street Journal poll. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll had DeSantis up 56%-33% in a one-on-one contest.
Capturing the mood at his re-election night in Tampa that fall, New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin wrote at the time that “[c]hants of ‘Two more years’ captured the sense of many at the governor’s victory party that the statehouse is just a stop on the way to the White House.”
However, once the campaign began in earnest in early 2023, and after Trump was indicted in New York City and later found guilty of 34 felony counts in his hush-money trial, Republicans rushed back to support the former (and future) president, and DeSantis was never truly competitive after that.
The governor received just 21.2% of the vote in the Iowa caucus in January 2024, nearly 30 points behind Trump, winning nine delegates. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley finished in third place with 19.1%. The New York Times later reported that DeSantis spent $160 million in the race.
Most of the talk of potential Republican candidates for president in 2028 has focused around either Vice President JD Vance or U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with DeSantis rarely if ever in those conversations. But, at 47, the governor certainly has time to consider what his future will be, as he is staring at being out of a job beginning in early January next year after his eight years in office expires.
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