The numbers aren’t adding up for Ron DeSantis in recent 2024 polling, but the Florida Governor says the more relevant metrics come from elections of the past.
During a virtual press conference with Iowa reporters, the Republican presidential candidate urged those with questions about the future to look back to previous years rather than put stock in public opinion surveys.
“So, every time I’ve been on the ballot, I’ve over-performed the national environment,” DeSantis said Thursday morning.
He contrasted his win in 2022 over Charlie Crist (“a victory that nobody has ever been able to do as Republicans”) with allegedly less impressive wins by Primary rival Nikki Haley.
“When she ran for Governor of South Carolina, she ran in two really big red wave years and she under-performed both of those. In fact, her margins, even though South Carolina is a really solid Republican state and she was running in wet red wave years, she had much small margins than I did in Florida running in a relatively poor year for Republicans in a swing state,” he said.
The Governor believes his 2022 success against Crist, a former Republican who emerged from a divisive primary against Nikki Fried, is the best indicator of future performance.
“If you want to be able to win the Electoral College. You got to win Georgia. You got to win Arizona. You got to win Wisconsin, maybe even Pennsylvania. And so we’ve shown an ability to do that in ways that the other candidates have not. Obviously, you know, Donald Trump ran in 2020 against Joe Biden,” DeSantis said. “It didn’t work out well.”
The Governor also threw cold water on polling in general.
“Some of these polls that people put out, I would remind people the polls were predicting a red wave in 2022 that did not happen,” he said. “The polls were predicting that I would win Governor, but by about half as much as I actually did; a lot of them were saying 5 to 7 points and we won by almost 20. So, we not only have a history of over-performing the national environment, but also over-performing the polls.”
DeSantis’ words will be put to the test in the months ahead, starting with the Iowa caucuses Jan. 15. He will have to over-perform polling for sure: the Race to the White House average shows him 48 points behind Trump nationally,
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