Ron DeSantis supporter questions consultants’ strategy at Iowa tour stop

Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition’s fall banquet. Photo via AP.

In Iowa Saturday, Ron DeSantis heard from a supporter who suggested his campaign wasn’t successfully showing his “heart,” laying the blame on “consultants” as he questioned whether the Florida Governor could win the Presidency.

During an event in Muscadine, which was hosted by the Never Back Down super PAC, the 2024 presidential candidate was confronted with criticism of how the DeSantis message is delivered.

“I don’t know what your consultants are telling you, and it’s good for me to be here today to see your heart. But I think that needs to come across. So my major question is how are you going to win because you’re not moving in the polls and I’m not all that much about polls, but I think there’s got to be something different for people to see that heart of yours,” the supporter said.

DeSantis did not address his consultants’ strategy deficiencies in the answer, preferring instead to focus on the vagaries of public opinion surveys and chiding the media for covering polling.

The Governor said he “would be very, very skeptical” of opinion surveys, defending his strategy of traversing Iowa and pitching “maybe 20, 30 people” at a given stop.

“I’ll be the only candidate that shows up. That’s not about juice in a poll that’s about on caucus night being able to do that. So my goal is winning. It’s not to fluff this. And they use those to create narratives,” DeSantis said. “I mean, give me a break. Some of this stuff is so fraudulent when you look at it.”

DeSantis said “the media” doesn’t “want to put out polls that are positive for me,” claiming “the press wants Donald Trump to be the candidate.”

“And I’ve never seen the obsession with these polls before. It’s like they report that it, like, that’s actually functional news and a lot of people pay for these things. I mean, it’s just absurd kind of what goes on,” DeSantis said, eliding the fact that his Never Back Down PAC has circulated many polls this year to show how DeSantis would outperform Trump as a General Election candidate.

Speaking of polling, the Race to the White House national average shows Trump at 59%, 46 points ahead of DeSantis.

Meanwhile, the Iowa questioner isn’t the first person to quibble with the Governor’s consultant-driven campaign. A recent interview on the PBT Podcast saw DeSantis struggle with questions about how his “marketing team” failed to push his book well enough early this year, and didn’t tell him about speculation in the media about alleged height enhancement via hidden heels.