Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) may have replaced Gov. Ron DeSantis in Congress, but the combat-decorated Green Beret made it clear on Thursday he won’t be supporting his predecessor's expected run for the White House. Instead, he endorsed former President Donald Trump.
Just a couple months ago, the third-term Republican refused to wade into the looming primary battle between Trump and DeSantis, telling Fox News he thought the next president is “likely to come from the great state of Florida.”
REP. MICHAEL WALTZ ENDORSES TRUMP, ADDING TO WAVE OF FLORIDA GOP SUPPORT
Over the years, Waltz has cautiously threaded the needle when it comes to Trump, careful not to criticize him directly while also, at times, rejecting and voting against policies pushed by his administration. But he announced he was backing Trump in 2024 on Thursday morning.
“We need bold & experienced leadership back in the White House. That's why I'm proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for president,” Waltz tweeted.
As DeSantis made his way to the nation’s capital this week to network with influential Republicans ahead of a possible presidential run, the former president methodically racked up endorsements from Florida, a major blow to DeSantis’s 2024 prospects even before he could get his campaign off the ground.
Waltz’s Trump endorsement becomes the 11th of the 20-member Florida Republican delegation. Reps. Matt Gaetz, Anna Paulina Luna, Greg Steube, Byron Donalds, John Rutherford, Cory Mills, Vern Buchanan, and Brian Mast have all announced their support of Trump’s third run for the White House. Trump also unveiled the endorsements of Reps. Gus Bilirakis and Carlos Gimenez in a fundraising email on Wednesday.
“I generally don't put a lot of weight on endorsements. At the same time though, when your calling card is Florida like it is for Ron, and your folks are defecting in your own backyard, that’s never a good sign,” Ford O’Connell, a Florida-based GOP strategist, said.
“It's quite clear that the Trump campaign wants to knock out the DeSantis’s legs before they can ever get truly up and running. I mean, they know what they're doing. They know what the focus is, and they know that they want to freeze him out,” O’Connell added.
Only one Florida member, freshman Rep. Laurel Lee, DeSantis’s former secretary of state, endorsed him at his Capitol Hill event this week.
"As Ron DeSantis Secretary of State, I had the honor of witnessing firsthand his unparalleled leadership under leadership under pressure, his chapter and his commitment to core conservative principles," Lee said in a statement. "It was my honor to serve in his administration and it is my honor today to endorse him for president of the United States."
According to GOP sources, Trump is set to host a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort Thursday night for all Florida Republicans who have endorsed his White House bid, only a couple of days after DeSantis held his reception in Washington, D.C. Some of the endorsements from the Sunshine State from Trump loyalists such as Gaetz, Mills, and Luna were entirely expected. However, when Donalds announced his support for Trump’s 2024 run, the rest of the delegation began to take notice.
“If there’s one member of Congress within the Florida delegation that actually had a good relationship with the sitting governor, it would have been Donalds,” said a GOP consultant for a Florida member who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
Donalds was considered the closest to DeSantis of any Republican in the House delegation. He had been the one to introduce DeSantis and his family at his election night victory party, even calling him “America’s governor.” The governor also appointed Donalds’s wife to the Florida Gulf University board of trustees in March 2022.
“It felt like a small little bomb detonated in our state here when some within DeSantis’s operation, not the governor himself, started frantically reaching out to other Florida members who had yet to endorse,” the consultant explained.
Sources close to Republican members of the delegation who had not yet endorsed a candidate in the beginning of the week said Ryan Tyson, a pollster within DeSantis’s circle, reached out to them to secure their support. Many said they didn’t even know who he was and were offended that the governor himself didn’t make the effort to gain their support.
“To get a call from a random aide, it caught some folks by surprise. Now, when that got out there, that is when the Trump operation started to pounce,” the source close to the Florida House member said. “This is where Trump himself was going around and personally reaching out to members and really courting them.”
Many of these members served alongside DeSantis when he was the congressman from the 6th Congressional District, describing him as a loner who built few relationships on Capitol Hill. After he was elected governor, some on Capitol Hill described being hopeful about building a relationship with Florida’s chief executive, but that never happened.
“I think the way I’d describe Gov. DeSantis is transactional. He is only out for himself, and that has rubbed many of my colleagues and myself the wrong way,” said a different Florida Republican representative who recently endorsed Trump but has chosen to stay anonymous.
Aides who work with Republicans in the delegation said they’ve found it difficult to get the governor on the phone to discuss important matters in their districts.
Steube said DeSantis has never reached out to him in the five years he has served, despite his trying to connect with the Florida governor, according to Politico.
He recalled a news conference on the damage caused by Hurricane Ian at which the governor's team invited him to stand with DeSantis but then reversed course and told him he wouldn't be a part of the event when he arrived.
The congressman contrasted that with Trump, who was the first call he received when he was in the ICU after he was injured in a tree-trimming accident at the beginning of the year.
Some GOP members of the House delegation feel burned by DeSantis. For example, the House map DeSantis pushed through the legislature last year did not include Sarasota County in Buchanan’s district, where the congressman lives and has represented since 2007. The governor did not speak with Buchanan before drawing him out of his district or help him when he was in the running to lead the Ways and Means Committee. This did not go unnoticed.
A poll from Yahoo News/YouGov, conducted April 14-17, showed Trump leading DeSantis by 16 percentage points (52% to 36%). But two weeks ago, the former president led DeSantis by 26 percentage points (57% to 31%). A recent University of New Hampshire poll, which found DeSantis leading Trump by 12 points in January, now finds Trump leading DeSantis by 20 points in April.
Trump tweeted a video on Wednesday touting the results from a Victory Insights poll that showed him leading DeSantis in a hypothetical 2024 head-to-head matchup among likely Republican voters in Florida.
“I guess Ron DeSantis isn’t as popular in Florida as people thought,” Trump said in the video.
There are still a number of Florida lawmakers who are keeping their options open such as Reps. Kat Cammack, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart. A number of political strategists and consultants in the state are doing the same.
“I’ve worked for both and the major players on both sides for 10 years,” said one GOP consultant based in Florida. “This is a civil war among brothers. Forget the candidates. I know them as people. I’m eventually going to be forced to take a side, but for now, I’m staying out of it."
Florida’s two Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, have not yet made endorsements. Scott and DeSantis do not have a close relationship. The junior senator from Florida and ex-governor has not been shy in pointing out policy differences with his successor. In addition, Scott has a reputation for staying out of GOP primaries, which was a point of contention when he deployed that strategy as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“I think you need to speak to each of the individuals and see why they did their endorsements,” Scott said on Wednesday, sidestepping questions from reporters asking if the flood of Florida endorsements for Trump could weaken DeSantis’s potential White House bid. “I’m focused on my own race,” he added.
Rubio did not attend DeSantis’s event on Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation. He told the Washington Post he was unaware of the event and that DeSantis’s team did not reach out to him ahead of time. “I wasn’t even aware of it," he said. “I’m far from making any decisions on the presidential race for a while.”
Some Republicans in the state are sounding the alarm over the Trump endorsements, urging members of the delegation to put aside their personal feelings and consider which candidate is most likely to win a general election.
“People that flocked to Trump because he had a rise in the polls or whatever, they’re fleeting, and they’re showing what they’re made of,” said former Rep. Francis Rooney, an outspoken Trump critic, who retired in 2021.
“Trump cannot win the general election. It’s not going to happen. It didn’t work in the midterms. We had a bunch of defective candidates, election deniers, they didn’t win. What we should have had was a 20-seat majority, and that’s not what happened. So, thank you, Trump, you really helped us out a lot,” Rooney added.
The former congressman from Florida’s 19th District emphasized endorsements are not an indicator of future success. While Trump has more endorsements than DeSantis right now, the incumbent Florida governor has yet to announce a presidential bid.
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“I think he needs to keep pursuing his own course and not worry about that kind of noise,” he said. “We need someone that can carry the country like DeSantis, Gov. Youngkin, or Ambassador Haley, anyone other than Trump.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to a representative for DeSantis but did not hear back.