Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis got candid Thursday, admitting that his biggest regret of his 2024 presidential campaign to this point is not making more appearances in “corporate” media early on.
“Presidential campaigns are a lot about media,” DeSantis told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “Like, you know, I spent a lot of time on the ground in Iowa, and it’s good. And when you meet people, you convert them. But there’s just so many voters out there that you’ve got to do, and I came in not really doing as much media.
“I should have just been blanketing,” the 45-year-old added. “I should have gone on all the corporate shows. I should have gone on everything.”
DeSantis famously launched his run for the White House this past May with a Twitter Spaces event that was beset by glitches, including audio issues that left listeners unable to hear the governor’s remarks.
The candidate told Hewitt that he had stepped up the number of his traditional media appearances by the “end of the summer” of 2023, “but we had an opportunity, I think, to come out of the gate and do that and reach a much broader folk.”
Last month, the Florida governor said the 77-year-old Trump’s string of legal woes were his biggest regret of the campaign — telling Christian Broadcasting Network host David Brody the four criminal cases against the 45th president had “distorted the primary.”
DeSantis finished a distant second in Monday’s Iowa caucus, nearly 30 points behind Trump.
“Clearly, when you win Iowa by the amount he did, you know, that’s what you want to be doing if you’re going to win the nomination,” he told Hewitt Thursday. “But you know, half the Iowans voted for someone else.
“And the turnout was so abysmal, and I don’t think it was just the weather,” DeSantis added. “I was out there. Look, I’m a Florida guy. I don’t do negative temperatures ever, and I was trudging through that. And I get that, why that would affect — But if you look, there was 110,000 people that showed up. 186,000 voted in 2016. But there were 20,000 independents and 7,000 Democrats, mostly voting for [Nikki] Haley, who came. So that means there were about less than 85,000 Republicans [who] even participated.
“I think that’s a warning sign for the party going forward into the fall.”
Despite the Iowa defeat and polls showing DeSantis with single-digit support in New Hampshire and third behind Trump and Haley in South Carolina, the Floridian says he sees a path to the GOP nomination.
“If we’d won Iowa, we would have been in a great spot,” he said. “You know, coming in second gives us the ticket to continue … I don’t want to be VP, I don’t want to be in the Cabinet. I don’t want a TV show. I’m in it to win it … this isn’t a vanity thing for me.
When asked by Hewitt if he could carry on his campaign through the end of March, by which time most states will have held their presidential primaries and caucuses, DeSantis answered: “Oh, yes on that, 100%. We can do that.”
After New Hampshire holds its primary on Tuesday, the GOP nominating calendar continues with the Nevada caucus on Feb. 8, followed by the South Carolina primary Feb. 24.
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Ryan King
