Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t like Congressman Byron Donalds. Most believe it is mostly because of Donald’s decision to endorse Donald Trump over DeSantis in the 2024 presidential primary.
DeSantis also wants a candidate who is deeply embedded in Florida’s state-level conservative legislative achievements.
President Trump endorsed Rep. Donalds.
DeSantis has notably withheld his support, leading some observers to report that DeSantis has considered or touted his wife, First Lady Casey DeSantis, as a preferred alternative.
However, he does have good reasons if he’s accurate.
Gov. DeSantis was infuriated with the GOP for what he says is an attempt to rig the election. He said they are betraying voters by canceling the debate with their shady secret criteria. DeSantis said he would not have won in 2018 if they had canceled the debate for him.
And so it’s counterproductive when you try to engineer an outcome because you need a coalition of voters to do well. And this may be a tough cycle for Republicans if you look at some of the indicators, the way things are trending. And so having an open process and having people be able to have their say is always better than to try to engineer an outcome.
So what the party should be doing is what’s in the best interest of Republican voters. You shouldn’t have another agenda. You shouldn’t be answering to anyone else (Susie Wiles) other than the voters there.
Now, having said that, this whole notion that the party should control debates is ridiculous. You don’t need the party to control it! They have no authority to control debates.
He wants a candidate-driven process.
We did a debate when I was running in 18. We did one on Fox News and had nothing to do with it. I mean, I think the party was involved in terms of like getting people to attend, but we did it. They put it on TV. And so you can do something like that, having nothing to do with the party. You know, the party has a very limited role.
It should be a CANDIDATE-DRIVEN process and NOT for people to be making decisions who voters have never voted into those positions to begin with! So line up something with TV, line up something, radio, all these different forms. There’s a whole host of ways that you can do, but to just set criteria, especially with polling when most people haven’t started paying attention. Qualifying just ended today. So up until 11.59 this morning, you could have qualified to run in these races!
So yeah, I think to do those types of criteria, I think ultimately is counterproductive. I think you alienate people for no reason. And look, we’ve had a great run in Florida, but part of it is, you know, we’ve really, I think, respected the voters and worked really hard to build that trust and support that has seen us go from 300,000 more registered Democrats when I got elected in 18 to now 1.5 million more registered Republicans.
Watch:
I mean, I won this county in 2022, Palm Beach. First time in 40 years a Republican was able to do that. And Palm Beach used to have 170,000 gap between DNR. That gap is narrow dramatically to where you potentially could have Palm Beach have a plurality of Republican registrants. But I think that complicates it if people don’t have confidence in the party label in the party brand.”
“Yeah, there should be a… pic.twitter.com/GTOSFNGIwI
— Chris Nelson 🏝️🇺🇸 (@ReOpenChris) June 12, 2026
