My Exclusive Interview with Gov. Ron DeSantis: The RNC, Ballot Harvesting, Higher Education and MUCH MORE
The 2022 Red Wave turned out to be a Red Ripple...but not in Florida. In Florida, the Republican Party works, it fights, and it wins. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis joins Charlie for an exclusive interview, where he explains why his party has been so successful while becoming the national left's number-one enemy. Topics include his purge of CRT from the state's schools, his plan to transform a woke college into a "Hillsdale of the South," the GOP's crippling "consultant problem," and the need for change at the RNC. It's a wide-ranging interview with a Republican superstar you don't want to miss.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Florida's Independence and RNC Race00:07:34
Hey, everybody, today Charlie Kirk Show.
Governor Ron DeSantis joins the program.
Text this episode to your friends.
We talk about African American studies not being part of the AP curriculum, the new College of Sarasota, the RNC race, why Florida's done so well.
And is he running for president in 2024?
I ask him directly.
Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Support our show directly, charliekirk.com/slash support.
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Governor DeSantis, thank you for sitting down.
Welcome to Tallahassee, Florida.
First time in the mansion.
It's pretty awesome.
Yeah, well, we're happy to have you.
Thank you.
So a lot of people were talking about how there was going to be a red wave in November, and it seemed as if it was a red ripple, except here.
What happened?
Well, it was interesting because we knew we were going to do well.
They called the race right at poll closing.
I gave the victory speech like 9 o'clock, and I really thought that we had set off a red wave that would sweep the country.
And then I remember like after I gave this speech, some of my folks in my campaign were like, Governor, this is not a red wave.
I'm like, what do you mean it's not a red wave?
We win by 20 points.
Like, no, no, no, it is here, but we're not seeing it in Pennsylvania.
We're not seeing it in some of these other areas.
Our candidates are in trouble.
Look, in Florida, I think what we were able to do is, you know, I came in.
I won a razor-thin election, 30-some thousand votes.
But I said, okay, I want a close election, but I got 100% of the executive power.
So I'm going to set a vision.
I'm going to execute that vision.
I'm going to deliver results for people.
We obviously had to do that through things like COVID-19, where I had a chance to do things which were not popular with the media, but we stood up for parents, we stood up for business owners, we stood up for people's jobs.
And so we were able, I think, to develop a record of achievement and really produce results that resonated with not just Republicans, which of course did strongly.
We want independents overwhelmingly.
We even want a decent chunk of Democrats.
We had the highest percentage of the Latino vote in the history of the state of Florida for any candidate.
And I got the highest percentage of the vote that any Republican governor candidate has ever gotten in the history of the state of Florida.
You won Miami-Dade County.
I mean, that's unheard of.
By 11 points, too.
And you won Palm Beach County?
That's unheard of.
That's the big deal.
Having spent some time, I think we both have spent time together in Palm Beach.
It's not exactly a right-wing haven.
And I remember watching the results coming out of Florida, and we were hosting our live show, and I was getting so excited because I thought they were going to be indicative of something that was going to unfold the rest of the country.
And it seemed as if it became the outlier, not the trend.
And not just like a little bit of an outlier, but a massive outlier.
What was the final vote, Tyler, that you won by?
Over 1.5 million votes.
Yeah, so we went from 32,000 to over 1.5 million.
So that's the, I think, the closest or the next highest raw vote margin in a governor's raising history was like 780,000.
So we almost doubled that up.
But I think it is good when you're going into like a Miami Dade and not just winning it by winning it decisively.
You don't do that by speaking to kind of just a small segment of the electorate.
I mean, it's a very diverse county.
The whole, the county itself is 70% Latino, and we were able to really, really dominate there.
Yo, Palm Beach, I think, is a good example of we were able to really win a lot of the independence in Palm Beach.
One of the reasons why is because I kneecapped these local governments that wanted to do all the incessant COVID restrictions.
And so I think they really appreciated, hey, my kids are in school.
I got a job, all this stuff because the governor had my back.
So I think some of this stuff, I mean, I think we did some good stuff on the campaign tactically, and I think that that's important.
But at the end of the day, really, substance, leadership, and results drive election outcomes.
And I think that, at the end of the day, was the story in Florida.
We galvanized our base voters, but we did that while also attracting independent voters and really demoralizing the Democrat base because they knew by the time the election came around, they knew their goose was cooked in this one.
And so we were able to take credit for that.
As one Democrat strategist said, he said, we're only going to invest in Battleground States from this point forward.
And they're pulling out of Florida.
Now, one of the things I don't think you get enough credit for is how you challenge some of these gerrymandered maps.
Now, we barely control the House of Representatives, I think, by four seats.
You were sent some maps, and there was some back and forth in that.
Walk us through that because Ana Paulina is now a member of Congress.
We won another seat near Orlando.
I believe you sent four new people to the congressional delegation in Florida.
That's a huge deal.
And in fact, it very well had been decisive in the fact that now Republicans control the House.
So we had a dispute about racial gerrymandering.
The legislature wanted to racially gerrymander and take a district from Tallahassee and go 200 miles to go to Gatston County, which is west of Tallahassee.
And that had just been something they had already always done.
I don't believe that that's constitutional.
And so we were really doing taking a stand about what's the appropriate constitutional principle here.
So I vetoed the map, sent it back.
They cleaned up the gerrymandering and produced basically a compact fair map.
And in Florida, we actually have provisions in our state constitution that limit how you can draw maps.
So you're not allowed to say, well, Charlie Kirk lives in Sarasota.
I'm going to draw a district for him.
Unconstitutional.
You're not allowed to draw a district and say, well, I want to pack Republicans or pack Democrats.
You've got to draw nice, compact districts.
And so that gerrymander district was not compact.
And so we were able to challenge the legislature.
We ended up winning and we produced seats.
But part of the reason we produced seats in fairness was because we had such a strong electoral performance.
I mean, these candidates were able to benefit from a lot of the turnout increases and the persuasion increases that we generated.
Yeah, and that whole process, so many other Republican governors refused to even challenge some of these maps.
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Education Ideology and Common Sense00:12:29
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So other Republicans are looking for answers right now.
A lot of Republicans are looking for answers, and they look at Florida as one example.
And I'm afraid that some lessons are not properly really being gleaned, one of which is that you in an election year were bold and courageous.
Usually courage goes down in election years.
People kind of run for the hills.
I mean, one thing, for example, the entire media came after you for a misrepresentation of a bill.
They called it the don't say gay bill, which was not in the bill.
It was a smear job and a hit job.
And then you also decided to hold Disney accountable to fairness and proper standards.
What was the calculus you went through to do that in an election year of all times?
Well, look, we have a situation where there's a movement.
I don't know why, but they want to inject this gender ideology into the schools.
And so think about it.
You have like a kindergartner.
I have a kindergartner.
My daughter's in kindergarten.
You have a teacher that's going to say, well, you know, you were born a girl.
Maybe you're a boy.
Do you want to be a boy?
That is totally inappropriate to be doing.
It confuses kids.
And so that has no place in the schools.
And so basically, the legislation was making sure that parents had the right to send their kid to school in the state of Florida without having this injected.
You also had situations, you see it around the country.
We did see examples in Florida too, where schools would, quote, change the gender of somebody's kid without the parents' consent.
I mean, you've got to be kidding me.
So this was very common sense.
The people were with us.
Now, the media, we benefit sometimes from how because they just have, it's like a tick.
I do something, they have to have a knee-jerk reaction against it.
So I think that they thought what they were criticizing me for, that they were in the right in terms of popularity with the public, because Disney came in and all that stuff.
I honestly think they thought that they would defeat us on this.
And my view on that is, is when the heat gets on you, when they start coming after you, that's when you need to stand your ground more than anything.
So all I do is stand.
Those tactics don't work on me.
But I do explain and I call the media out on what they're advocating for.
I would make journalists, if they tried to use these phrases, I'd say, is that in the bill?
Oh, it's not in the bill.
Okay, well, what is in the bill?
You walk me through it.
You know, you think, okay, kindergarten, first grade, what are we doing here?
And so then they have to admit what the debate is about.
And the people of Florida sniffed that out very, very quickly.
But you know, Disney was in a situation where they came after it, which, you know, it is their right to do this.
They also have a company that's gone in the direction of trying to inject sexuality and sexualization of the programming directed at kids.
And that is a parent of three young people.
We have a six of four and a two-year-old.
That bothers me.
It bothers a lot of parents in the state of Florida.
So they have had a position in Florida where they have their, they control their own government.
They've gotten all these special privileges over many, many decades.
And so my view is just, okay, wait a minute.
We're putting this one company on a pedestal who does not share the values of the state of Florida with respect to raising our kids.
And so we work to say, okay, this self-governing, you're not going to govern yourself anymore.
You're going to pay your debts and taxes and live under the same laws.
And so, you know, Disney's not really being treated poorly, just being treated like everybody else.
We're removing, though, special privileges.
And I think as these corporations get into trying to impose a woke agenda on society, we just as conservatives got to say, wait a minute, okay, yes, it's bad if the legislature is trying to enact woke legislation, but if corporate America is doing that without any constitutional process, do we just say because it's corporate, they can do what we want?
Or are we going to defend our folks against that?
And I think we've just decided to say, we'll fight it in the boardrooms, we'll fight it in the legislatures, we'll fight it in the schools.
Our state is where woke goes to die.
There's that extra constitutional order that is growing outside of just government.
And Disney is one of those companies.
And they never would have imagined that they would ever be treated fairly because they thought of themselves as the number one employer in Florida.
I think that's actually, that might be true.
One of the biggest.
I don't know.
They're one of the biggest.
But I do think, I mean, so since the 1960s, everything Disney has wanted from the state of Florida, they have gotten.
I don't think they've ever lost anything major.
And so until now, I mean, this is really the first time where we said, you know what, people are free to do business here, but you do not run the state of Florida.
And let's just make that very, very clear.
This transitions nicely to this emphasis on parents and parental choice and schools and education to another quote-unquote controversial thing the media focuses on, which I fully support what you did, which is saying that this African-American, AP African-American studies class, has no place in the core curriculum in Florida schools.
The media, of course, immediately got reaction was that you're a terrible person, all this, but then you responded, wait, do you actually know what's in the course?
So walk us through it.
Why was this not worthy of being in the core curriculum?
So we have certain standards about what is appropriate or not.
And basically our mantra is education, not indoctrination.
So if it's education, it can be approved.
If it's indoctrination, we're going to go and pass on that.
In our core curriculum, mind you, requires the teaching of black history, but real black history, I mean, things that really matter.
This course had things like queer theory.
It had things like abolishing prisons, intersectionality.
It advocated for reparations and things.
And so, look, that's political activism.
If that's what you want to do on your own time, it's a free country.
But we're not going to use tax dollars in the state of Florida to put that into our schools because it's not trying to educate kids.
It's trying to impose an agenda on kids.
And you had, this is ongoing.
The media is kind of coming after you.
What's the lesson for other Republicans that might be less willing to pick that fight?
Because they call you all these bad names, racist, bigot, and all that.
It doesn't seem to really shake you or bother you.
It doesn't factor into your calculus.
Look, if you're winning, they're going to call you those names.
I mean, that's just the reality.
So if you let the media or the left have a cudgel that they can veto you from doing what's right by just calling you names, then you're not going to be worth your salt as a leader.
You've got to understand that that just goes with the territory.
These are the tactics that the left uses.
And I honestly view it as if the left's not attacking me or the corporate press isn't attacking me, I think to myself, am I not doing a good job all of a sudden?
I mean, I got to figure out.
So that's what's going to happen.
But here's what I think these other Republicans should understand.
There's a hunger out there for just common sense.
And common sense is, yes, you teach the Frederick Douglasses and the Booker T. Washingtons and the MLK, but you don't do black queer theory to high school.
You don't do intersectionality or say that, advocate for abolishing prisons.
That's a political agenda.
So when you just say that, people say, you know what?
That's right.
And think about it.
I mean, if you just asked the average person on the street, you know, what do you think is important about African-American history?
How many of them would honestly say queer theory?
I mean, like, seriously, nobody would say that.
So this is an agenda that people are trying to push.
And so just call them on it, explain kind of what you're doing.
And I think these attacks really do fall flat because they overuse them.
They try to do it no matter what.
But the worst thing you can do is let them cow you.
Once they know they can cow you, then they're just going to keep coming at it.
And I think what we've shown in Florida is that's not going to work here.
Put them on defense.
You also have a vision to, and I want to make sure I'm not mischaracterizing this, but create the Hillsdale of the South.
Is that a fair well?
Yeah, I mean, I think so.
We have a situation.
I mean, this is just, we're looking at our higher ed writ large, and I'll get to New College in a minute.
But I think the debate in this country is: what's the purpose of higher education?
Is it to impose ideology and be kind of an instrument for social justice, quote unquote, or is it about the pursuit of truth and about equipping people with the foundations so that they can think for themselves?
So we think it's the latter, but overwhelmingly, modern academia has gone in the direction of the former.
They believe it's about imposing an ideology.
And so we've been very strong on that.
We did a bill last year that reins in tenure for university professors.
All tenured professors must undergo review every five years and they can be let go.
No questions asked.
And so that's important because you can't just have people that are not accountable in any way.
With New College, this is a small liberal arts school in Sarasota.
It is by statute supposed to be the premier honors college in the state of Florida.
Most Floridians have never heard of it.
The enrollment had declined.
You know, they didn't have great test scores.
They focused a lot on things like gender ideology.
And so we said, okay, there was a movement in the legislature that I was working with, maybe to just close it or fold it into something else.
That didn't have enough support.
So I said, okay, look, if this is something being funded by the tax stars, we wanted to follow our vision for what higher education should be.
And so I appointed a slew of people to be on the boards of trustees there that share the vision.
And it is going to be, and we're going to put money behind it.
We're going to recruit great professors.
You know, it is going to be what higher education should be: open inquiry, no political correctness, no CRT DEI embedded in the administration, welcoming the classics in Western civilization and giving people an education that's going to be lasting.
You know, part of my problem with modern academia, yes, it's left.
I don't like the left, but it's like a sugar high.
You know, they get this, and then 10 years, there'll be other fads.
When you're talking about real serious classical education, the things you learn from that, you carry that with you for the rest of your life.
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, they're not teaching that at many of these schools at all.
Or even our founding fathers.
I mean, how many classes could you get on the Constitutional Convention or true inquiries into like the creation of the Bill of Rights and all these things?
They don't, they shy away from that.
They want to focus on identity politics rather than really the ideas that have stood the test of time.
So the vision is to create new college as a shining city on the hill in a very, let's just say, depraved wasteland that higher education.
Just the announcement, just the announcement, professors started to ask, how do I go to New College?
Parents have been asking, How can I apply?
I want to get my kid into new college.
So I think what we're doing is it's the right thing to do, but just the reality from a dollars and cents perspective, this is an underserved market.
It's the kind of the modern leftist view of academia is oversaturated.
You go pretty much anywhere and get that.
This, to have a college like this, and you know, it's not going to be exactly the same at Hillsville because it's publicly funded, all this.
But I don't think there is a publicly funded liberal arts school who's really taken on the mission of classical education.
So I think it's going to be very exciting, but I think we're going to have a lot of success with it because it's not just going to be Florida parents.
There's going to be parents from all over the country.
And think about it.
There are way worse places to go visit your kid in than Sarasota.
So I think it's going to be popular.
Right near the Ringling Museum.
It's beautiful, right?
Right off Route 41.
It's funny.
I've driven by the new school a hundred times.
And until you did the announcement, I didn't know what it was.
And that just kind of proves your point: oh, wow, there's an honors college here.
Let's do something there.
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Ballot Transparency and Voter Direction00:06:20
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Okay, so I want to now focus on right now.
The RNC is meeting in Dana Point, California.
And there are some questions of who should lead the RNC and whether it should be Rana for a fourth term or go a different direction with Harmeet Dillon.
What are your thoughts on this?
Well, we've had three substandard election cycles in a row, 18, 20, and 22.
And I would say of all three of those, 22 was probably the worst, given the political environment of a very unpopular president and Biden.
Huge majorities of the people think the country's going in the wrong direction.
That is an environment that's tailor-made to make big gains in the House and the Senate and state houses all across the country, and yet that didn't happen.
And in fact, we even lost ground in the U.S. Senate.
And so, you know, I think we need a change.
I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC.
I like what Harmeet Dillon has said about getting the RNC out of DC.
Why would you want to have your headquarters in the most Democrat city in America?
It's more Democrat than San Francisco is.
So I think you get it in real parts of the country.
You attract people who want to live in those parts of the country, not DC insiders.
But I do think we need some fresh thinking.
And here's the thing: just practically speaking, you need grassroots Republicans to power this organization with volunteering and donations.
I think it's going to be very difficult to energize people to want to give money, to want to volunteer their time with the RNC if they don't see a change in direction.
Do you have any personal experience with the RNC?
I mean, because they'll say that Florida was one of their great successes this last cycle.
So we actually ran our election assuming we weren't going to be involved with the RNC at all because they weren't raising the type of money that they needed to be raising.
And so our get out the vote, our ground operation, we funded that.
We focused a lot on actually low-propensity voters and we turned out a lot of low props, which is very, very good.
So it was very successful, you know, but that was really being driven by our agenda, our accomplishments, and us putting a lot of dollars behind this important ground game.
Yeah, and there's, I'm talking to a lot of members, and we're going to see how it ends up.
And people are kind of looking for direction and for answers.
But here's what we do know: 92 to 98% of voters say this is insane what's happening here, this continued lackluster results.
Why are we going to put our foot on the gas and accelerate in a direction that is really against us?
And I would just say, hey, look at Florida.
Maybe Florida's a path forward that actually could show us how we could do things.
And so just kind of closing thought on that.
The members are meeting, and you've said, you know, it's time for a change.
What other ideas do you think the RNC could embrace, you know, regardless of who wins, to actually have a path forward that can achieve victory?
It needs to be less consultant-driven.
Okay, this money that's going in needs to go to ultimately winning elections and not to be lining the pocket of so many consultants.
So we need huge transparency on that.
You know, when we ran our election, we had our digital in-house.
You know, we've got a great fundraising team.
We have all this.
But we're not giving commissions to people.
Pay them a salary.
You know, will you do a good job?
I want to pay you.
I want you to do well.
But you can't have incentives to where the campaigns and the operations are run with an eye to putting more money in the pocket of the consultant class.
And obviously, they're very powerful in D.C.
So I think if we can get away from that, have more transparency, and then really be in touch with our voter base.
I mean, one of the reasons why we did well is because our base voters knew governor's going to do the right thing.
I trust him.
He's got our back.
There's not a lot of trust between the grassroots and the RNC up in D.C. In fact, when I would do fundraising, I'd raise money for the Republican Party of Florida.
We would do good, but if I did a fundraising for me instead of for the party, we'd raise much more money because they trust the people that they see doing the job.
When you start talking about Republican Party apparatus, a lot of our voters are like, yeah, I don't know about that.
So we need to restore that trust because ultimately you want to have an organization that's going to be able to help in a lot of these key races.
It's very important.
Is it time for us to embrace early voting, in-person early voting, ballot harvesting?
That was actually, in some ways, a separating characteristic of your campaign.
You did really well with in-person early voting.
So here's the thing.
Florida, I work with the legislature.
We ban ballot harvesting.
I don't think you should have ballot harvesting.
We ban zucker bucks.
I don't think you should have zucker bucks.
However, if it's legal in your state, you've got to exploit the rules as they exist.
So in Nevada, if it's legal, Republicans need to have a ballot harvesting operation in these rural counties.
I would do Zuckerbucks in these places.
I think Zuckerbucks is corrupt as hell.
But if it's legal and the Democrats are doing it, why aren't we doing it?
So I would say whatever, fight for whatever election reforms you think matter.
And I would say ban ballot harvesting, do all that.
But if it's not banned, you need to do it because otherwise we're fighting with one hand tied behind our back.
If you have early voting, we need to tell people to vote as soon as they can.
And if you have absentee ballots, you need to tell voters to return absentee ballots.
And we did that in Florida.
And I'll tell you, a lot of the low props who we ended up getting to come out, a lot of them voted with absentee ballots.
So whatever the rules are, I think we need to go to the hilt on all of it because there's some people that may not go to a polling place, but maybe they'd be willing to put something in the mail.
Now you can support reforms.
I don't think you should have mass mail balloting.
And I would even say, you know, early voting, even though we did very well, I kind of like Election Day.
But whatever the rules are, do whatever you can to maximize your performance.
Voting Rules and Absentee Returns00:01:25
Last question.
We're one year out from the Iowa caucus.
I know you get this question all the time.
It's the third rail.
It's the elephant in the room.
The media is asking you about 2024 all the time.
How should we think about your place in 2024?
Well, I think we've got a lot of runway in 2023.
I mean, we talk about winning the big victory, which is great, but what are you going to do with that?
And so we're having a legislative session coming up in March, March, April, into May.
I think we're going to be able to put a lot of points on the board.
So stay tuned.
I'm happy to come back and talk about those.
I also have a book coming out on February 20th.
Yeah, it's The Courage to be Free.
Florida Ready?
Yeah, Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival, DeSantisBook.com.
And you can kind of see what we've done in Florida and how I think that that's something that could make sense across the country.
Governor DeSantis, thank you so much.
Thanks for your courage.
And I was a Florida resident and then I got married, moved to Arizona.
And we're trying to turn Arizona to be more like Florida.
No, I think we got Florida okay.
I think you got to get it done in Arizona.
That'll be good for the country.
Yes, good.
Governor, thanks for watching.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.