DeSantis brushes off early campaign obstacles

The Florida governor blamed the media for the narrative.

Despite an impressive $20 million fundraising haul in the first six weeks of his campaign, the conservative governor is now polling in the 20-percent range, down from his January peak of 40.5%. Last week, Steve Cortes, a top spokesperson for DeSantis’ super PAC, called the DeSantis campaign a “clear underdog,” and praised Trump as a “runaway frontrunner.”

On Sunday, DeSantis pushed back.

“You know, my reelection in Florida we had the greatest victory that any Republican governor candidate in the history of the state had, and yet a few months before the election I had media saying that somehow my reelection campaign was stalling, that we weren’t doing anything,” DeSantis said during the interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.” 

DeSantis also made an effort to draw distinctions between himself and Trump, promising to fire FBI Director Chris Wray and “clean house” at the Department of Justice, and casting blame on the former president for social media companies’ handling of Hunter Biden’s leaked computer files.

“I look back at, like, the Hunter Biden censorship which was a huge, huge deal to happen in the 2020 election. And yet, you know, those were Donald Trump’s own agencies that were colluding with big tech. I would never allow that to happen. I would fire those people immediately,” he said, adding that if Hunter Biden were a Republican, “he would have been in jail years ago.”