Florida Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t play around. He’s setting the record straight ahead of the election.
And now Donald Trump is rethinking the 2024 election entirely after what Ron DeSantis announced live on Fox News.
It wasn’t that long ago when Florida was a purple state that was in play for anyone running for president. Who can forget the infamous 2000 election cycle where it came down to the wire with Florida just barely going in favor of George W. Bush. That’s how close the state used to be.
Even in 2008, 2012, and 2016, Florida was a super tight race in all of those presidential elections. In 2020, however, it started to shift solidly in favor of the Republicans as Donald Trump carried the state by nearly four points. In 2016, Donald Trump only carried the state by 1.2 points.
What’s changed and what’s happened? Well for a while, Florida had extremely uninspiring state leaders in the governor’s mansion, but not anymore. Ron DeSantis is extremely popular in the Sunshine State and has been a major factor for how Republicans have dominated Florida politics since he became Governor in 2018.
Recently, Ron DeSantis appeared on Fox News and declared that Democrats shouldn’t even bother with trying to become relevant again in the state of Florida, saying it’s “off the board” for them entirely.
Speaking with Fox News Host Maria Bartiromo, DeSantis said that the Florida state data shows how there is a huge discrepancy of Republican voter registration compared to Democrats in the state. Simply put, there’s millions more Republicans registering.
“You’re talking about a million-plus voter registration shift,” Ron DeSantis said to Maria Bartiromo. DeSantis attributed this partly to voters switching from Democrat to Republican in the state.
“Part of that, I think, is a response locally where people are more likely to switch from Democrat to Republican in Florida, nonparty to Republican, than vice versa. That’s been an important component of it,” DeSantis added.
The second reason he gave for this voter registration shift is the migration people have made from radical Leftist regions like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City to the Sunshine State.
“I do think that migration has skewed amongst people who come to Florida, not because they want to change the policies to reflect in Illinois or California or New York, but because they appreciate how Florida has done it differently from where they’re coming from,” Florida’s governor added.
According to a report from the outlet USA Today, Republicans have the largest voter registration advantage of any political party in the Sunshine State over the past 40 years.
“Republicans now hold the biggest advantage in voter registration either major party has held in almost four decades,” the USA Today report noted.
Later in the interview, Ron DeSantis made the claim that Florida is “off the board” for Democrats and said it is absolutely “a Republican state.”
“Maria, Florida is off the board. It is a Republican state. You have covered politics. We used to be a one-point state. Every election hung on, how would Florida go? That is not true anymore. And I think that’s a good thing for the party,” he added.
For Donald Trump, this absolutely changes the way he approaches the 2024 presidential election entirely as he gears up for a rematch against incumbent Democrat Joe Biden this November.
Donald Trump might spend a little bit of campaign time and money in Florida, but there’s no need to spend nearly as much as he had to in 2016 and 2020. All the polling experts agree with Ron DeSantis that unless there’s something unexpected that comes out of nowhere, Trump is carrying Florida in the 2024 election cycle.
That’s a massive state that you would normally spend millions upon millions of dollars in to make sure you won. That’s what Trump did in 2016 and 2020. Now that money can be better spent elsewhere to make a bigger difference for the Trump campaign.
Think about all of the battleground states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and more that Donald Trump can try to flip in his favor by rerouting all that money they’d normally spend in Florida towards these purple states.
Donald Trump stuck his neck out to endorse DeSantis back in 2018, but DeSantis has made it worthwhile for Trump.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
