Gov. Ron DeSantis played Peoria Friday night, and Chicago jokes were part of the routine.
DeSantis, the featured guest at the Peoria-Tazewell County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner at the Peoria Civic Center, made jokes about the Windy City’s voting patterns, including contextualizing his 2022 romp over Charlie Crist.
“We won in rural Florida. I mean, we were getting 90 plus percent in some of these rural counties. You know, I used to see numbers like that out of Chicago. I just assumed it was dead people voting or something. I didn’t think anyone could get it. We actually got it. It was fair and square.”
DeSantis also swatted at Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, talking about COVID-19.
“Florida stood as a refuge of sanity as a citadel of freedom for people, not just in our state, but in all of the United States and even for people around the world, including your governor’s family who sent people down there because we were living in freedom,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis made similar comments to reporters ahead of the speech: “I’m a little bit disappointed that your governor said I wasn’t welcome in Illinois…when he was locking down this state, he sent his family to live in my state..I didn’t say they weren’t welcome in Florida.”
The Governor returned to localized themes and COVID-19 soon thereafter, saying “you saw places in Illinois where they locked the kids out of school for not just months but even a year. And that’s going to do irreparable damage.”
The Governor also recounted various accomplishments of his, some with more vigor than others.
He touched on the state’s controversial new six-week abortion ban very briefly, saying he “expanded protections for right to life” without offering any details about the law.
He leaned in harder to saying the state has a new law that “authorized the death penalty for pedophiles,” which got applause in Peoria.
“We have nixed this whole pronoun game in our schools. You can’t force someone to do pronouns,” DeSantis said, further delineating his “package of successes” that he would “put up against anybody in the country.”
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