Florida’s Governor says he doesn’t regret his decision to launch his presidential campaign until after Sine Die.
But he also says it would have been better, perhaps, if he hadn’t felt the obligation to see the Legislative Session through.
“I had a responsibility to see all that through before I started worrying about running for anything else,” DeSantis said before presenting a counterfactual.
“Now, had I not had that opinion? Had I just turned around right after November of ’22 and started building, you know, perhaps that would have been advantageous for me with the presidential, but that’s just not the way I roll,” DeSantis claimed. “I had a job I had to do. I had promises I needed to keep, and I wasn’t going to turn my eye to a presidential race until I followed through on all those promises.”
The Governor made the comments on NewsRadio 1110 on Tuesday.
DeSantis traveled often during the Legislative Session under the auspices of a book tour, which appeared to be a soft launch for a presidential campaign at the time. But before he launched, supporters were restive, urging him to get in the race before the Session ended, which included a law that was changed to clarify statutory ambiguity about whether his running was legal.
“I would prefer him to be in the race right now,” U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said in April. “In fact, I encouraged him to get in the race right now.”
Massie also said it “looks and feels a little odd for him to act like a candidate with the trips and the speaking tours without actually being a candidate,” comments made while DeSantis was in Japan, declaring he was “not a candidate” when asked about his slump in polls against Trump.
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