Congressman Ron DeSantis stopped by the Inweekly offices yesterday. The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate was making a campaign stop and spoke last night at an event at the Crowne Plaza.
We discussed his view on the race, which has garnered little attention to date; what voters are telling him are the issues–Accountability, National Security, Economic Opportunity, and Defending the Constitution; Future of the Republican Party; and how Washington elites don’t understand the voters.
Inweekly: How’s the campaign going?
DeSantis: It’s going good. I mean, a lot of it is blocking and tackling. You build up an organization with volunteers and you’re putting money into your campaign. We’ve done those two far better than anybody else and we’re gonna continue to do that.
Inweekly: The U.S. Senate race is getting little attention from the media and public. Do you foresee that changing?
DeSantis: Probably not in the next couple of months. I think at the end of the day, you have to potentially contested convention on the Republican side, you have a Democrat contest that Sanders just won’t go away, even though Hillary is the favorite there.
I think in the presidential year, people tend to be focused on the presidential race. What will happen here is there may be a little more visibility, but really, once we get into the heart of the summer and people start doing their paid media, that’s when it’s really going to be more visible for people.
That’s how we’ve forecasted it, that’s what we anticipated and that’s what we planned for. I think that we’ve made the right decisions there.
Inweekly: Some political pundits had said the Senate race has five Republicans who each staked out their own turf –Jacksonville, Orlando, Miami, Tampa, and Bradenton. With all the candidates pulling from different pockets of voters, where’s the battle going to be fought?
DeSantis: I think some of these analyses are a little bit fanatical.
For example, when I first ran for Congress, my district stretch is 130 miles, so I did the best in my area, where I live, but the second best place I did was the furthest away from me. Because we went down there, we spent time; we knocked on doors; we met with people; and people said, ‘you know what, this is a guys we want to support’ – so that’s how I view these races.
A guy like me, I can come out here, which is probably six hours from my home, but as a Navy guy, as somebody who’s strong on the militarist, this is like home for me and we’re going to have a good reception here. We’re down in Palm Beach County and a lot of those Republican’s were signing up a bunch of people. I think you have to be competitive everywhere.
Now certain people, you may have slight natural advantage but in a primary situation, the people that voted in primaries, they know what they’re looking for in candidates.
Inweekly: What are the issues that resonate best when you’re out there?
DeSantis: Well, one is accountability in government. I’ve been a leader in demanding that the Department of Justice treat this Hillary Clinton investigation in an apolitical fashion. A lot of us are concerned that if the FBI does recommend prosecution, that you’re still going to have a Justice department that has not going to go through with it.
The reason why that matters–and honestly if she were to be indicted, she probably wouldn’t be the candidate, which probably wouldn’t be good for Republicans because they’d probably get a Biden or someone who I think would probably be a stronger candidate– is the principle.
Do we all live under the same laws or not? I can tell you when I was in the Navy if I would have taken top-secret information and disseminated that and received that on an unclassified private email, I would have been summarily removed from the post and likely faced consequences.
Hilary is just one thing, but I think there is this general sense of, do we have a citizen government or do we have a ruling class? Which if you’re in, then you kind of live under different rules. If you’re not, then, oh man, you have to do that. And unfortunately, I think that people see that and that’s one of the reasons there’s frustration with what’s going on.
The second issue is National Security—unlike 2012, when a lot of people don’t want to talk about National Security. The president said, “Look Al Qaeda is done, we incarcerated him, we’ve ended these wars” and he painted a picture of a world in which, we didn’t face a lot of threats.
Well, we all know that was not a realistic portrayal when you see things like Paris, San Bernardino, and Brussels. The American people are antsy. I have been dealing with these issues. I was warning a couple months ago about Brussels because it was obvious that there were some serious hot-beds in and around Brussels.
The problem is, obviously for Brussels and dealing with it, but then for us anyone of these people, if you have a passport from Belgium, just hop on a plane, you don’t even need a Visa to come to the United States. It’s a vulnerability for us, here at the homeland, as well. I think a lot of people are concerned about that.
Then I think economic opportunity. The countries kind of in a malaise, we’re kind of stuck. It’s like they say the unemployment rates good and all this other stuff but a lot of people really have no realistic hope of really getting ahead anymore.
That’s caused a major squeeze and the people who are very wealthy seem to do okay. If you’re on dependency programs, and you do that then you can kind of get by with that.
Everyone else in the middle is kinda stuck in neutral. I think there’s a lot of things we can do about that ranging from dealing with the high rising cost of college education; dealing with our debt, which I think is a ticking time-bomb; getting the bureaucracy down to size, which is really hampering a lot of creative activity and preventing businesses from succeeding and creating jobs.
The fourth issue is that we want to support and defend the Constitution with Justice Scalia’s death. I think that’s focused people on, ‘Okay, what’s going to happen now with the Supreme Court? What’s going to happen with the next president?’
I mean, this president said he’s got a pen and a phone, he can go around the Congress, is that really the direction we want to go? And I’ve been arguing no; we want to be a constitutional country and we want to make sure we have a rule of law, not a rule of individual men.
Scalia’s death really heightens the stakes because if you are to put somebody who’s a liberal justice in that position, you’ve flipped the second amendment, 5-4, and that’s going to be a sea change. You’ve further narrowed religious liberty. I think you’ve narrowed the first amendment, I think you narrow private property rights and people like Garland, they will side with the bureaucracy and so that’s going to be a big change. That is not something our voters want to see happen.
So all those things, the national security, the accountability in government, economic opportunity, and restoring the constitution and rule of law, I think pretty much every issue I hear about I can fit into one of those four rubrics.
Inweekly: With Trump battling for the top of the ticket, there’s been a lot of discussion about the future of the Republican Party. What are your thoughts about that on the national party?
DeSantis: We’ll have to see how this play’s out. I mean, how this nomination fight plays out is going to be a major factor and whether the party unites, whether it splits.
I think that the key is, we have a system in place. You earn delegates; it’s kind of a screwy system if you look at it. But if people are competing under that system, people should respect that.
If the Republican party tries to redo the rules in the middle of the game, I think that’s going to leave millions of people really bitterly disappointed depending on which candidate get’s short-changed in that.
So, let them compete and if Donald Trump doesn’t have the delegates then he’s not entitled to be the nominee. If Cruz doesn’t have it, he’s not entitled. But what you don’t want to do is to try to change this stuff in the middle of the game.
You hear these reports about, ‘oh they’re going to engineer this guy or that guy’. I think that would be a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. No one is entitled to the nomination but you do gotta earn it under the current rules. You shouldn’t be trying to change.
And you go up there and it’s like almost like these guys are living in a different universe when you live and you’re in DC the whole time, where some of these do, the lobbyist, the political consultants, some of the members that have been there for 30 or 40 years.
They lose touch of a lot of what’s going out in the country. So, when they tried to change this process, a lot of times they’re just not in touch with what’s actually out there so they can’t even go about doing that in an effective way.
But the disconnect is more damaging for the Republican party than it is for the Democratic party because, at the end of the day, the Democrat part is very honest about what they want. They want to put more power in Washington; they want to expand the government’s ability to spend and tax and regulate. They believe that having elites in Washington, that they can make society better through central planning.
We are the ones that are supposed to believe in, we want to take power our of Washington, we want to limit government, limit spending, and all this stuff. So we are supposed to be more in touch with the people, because we want to return power to the people.
When our guys go up there and some of these guys who are neck deep in the political debate, go native, then it harms us more.
At the end of the day, once you get to Washington, all the currents are in the direction in the Democrats, the media, the interest groups in DC, just the bureaucracy, it’s all moving in that direction of bigger government.
If you actually want to go in the other direction, you got to have a core set of principles, and you’ve got to be in touch with the people that sent you there.