Ron DeSantis Blames Media 'Narrative' for Campaign Woes

Ron DeSantis has blamed the media narrative around his campaign for his plunging popularity in polls. He said that the "corporate media" are focusing on him to prevent him from winning the Republican nomination.

The Florida governor launched his presidential campaign in late May on Elon Musk's platform Twitter. He has emerged as a clear second and Donald Trump's main challenger in recent months—but he has struggled to make any progress against the former president.

DeSantis remains far behind Trump, who has a strong lead among the crowd of candidates in the Republican pool.

While DeSantis is the only other candidate who has reached double-digits, he's 28.9 percentage points behind Trump, with 23.3 percent of the vote against the former president's 52.2 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. The distance between the two candidates has remained about the same for the past two months.

The Florida governor was confronted about his sagging numbers twice during separate interviews on Fox News. Host Maria Bartiromo asked him on Sunday, "What's going on?" and cited an article from POLITICO saying that DeSantis' campaign has been struggling to take off.

"There was a lot of optimism about you running for president early in the year [...] What happened?" Bartiromo asked him.

DeSantis laughed, replying that "these are narratives."

"The media does not want me to be the nominee," he added. "I think that's very clear. Why? Because they know I'd beat [President Joe] Biden, but even more importantly, they know I would actually deliver on all these things."

DeSantis's strategy has initially appeared to be picking up Republican voters who aren't already siding with Trump, without directly attacking the former president. The Florida governor took the higher ground when Trump started personally attacking him and calling him "Ron DeSanctimonious"—a strategy that experts said would likely not work in his favor.

DeSantis has recently started to punch back. He launched an anti-LGBTQ+ video that attacks Trump for his past support of gay and transgender people, saying it's "fair game" because they're both campaigning. The video has drawn criticism from the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization that represents LGBTQ+ conservatives. They called the video "divisive and desperate," adding that it "ventured into homophobic territory."

During another interview with Fox News last Thursday, host Will Cain had asked DeSantis why his successes in Florida had not been reflected in his polling, receiving a similar response.

"Well, I think, if you look at the people like the corporate media, who are they going after?" DeSantis said. "Who do they not want to be the nominee? They're going after me."

He then mentioned the Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had called on U.S. citizens not to vote for the Florida governor. "Who's the president of Mexico attacking because he knows who'll be strong on the border and hold him accountable and the cartels? He's going after me," DeSantis said.

"So, I think, if you look at all these people that are responsible for a lot of the ills in our society, they're targeting me as the person they do not want to see as the candidate."

DeSantis added that his campaign "just started," but that "it's pretty clear that I'm the guy that not only can beat [President Joe] Biden—I'm the guy that can beat the left on all these different issues because people's freedoms are under assault."

DeSantis said that he was running to "win in January or February" and not to "juice polling now."

Newsweek has contacted Ron DeSantis' media team for comment by email on Monday.