CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is promising a return to "normalcy" should he win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and the White House, sounding similar to President Joe Biden in 2020.
"We need to restore a sense of normalcy to our communities," DeSantis told a crowd of 500 Wednesday in Cedar Rapids. “It's not normal to have millions of illegal aliens pouring into communities all across our country, to have drugs pouring across our country, because it's a dereliction of duty as the commander in chief.”
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During his last event in Iowa, DeSantis also introduced a call and response portion into his stump speech, asking the audience whether they were "happy" with their lives under Biden.
"Are you happy having an economy where inflation has reduced our standard of living?" he said. "Are you happy that Biden is trying to stop us from being energy independent and producing our own? Are you upset that we have a bureaucracy that is totally out of control?"
DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo previewed how the governor’s four-day, 12-city tour through the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina will outline his vision for America to the public after describing the country as being in "decline" and in need of a "Great American Comeback" in his announcement video last week. The campaign announced Tuesday, too, that DeSantis will return to Iowa on Saturday for Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) annual Roast and Ride fundraiser.
"I wish the elites in Washington, D.C., would take a page out of the Iowa playbook, but instead, they have ignored what works, and they continue to plunge this nation into the abyss," the governor said Tuesday during his in-person campaign launch in Clive, Iowa. "These elites are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They are imposing their agenda on us via the federal government, via corporate America, and via our own education system, all for their benefit and all to our detriment."
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"My job as a leader is to put the interests and the jobs of the people I represent ahead of protecting my own political hide," he added. "We had some tough going politically for a while, we were getting hammered, and lo and behold, when you do the right thing, regardless of polls or regardless of wherever the wind's blowing, people appreciate you. They know when you stood up for them when it's not easy, and you do it; that's when they go to war for you."
Trump has an average 31 percentage point advantage over DeSantis, according to RealClearPolitics's aggregation of very early primary polls, though the governor raised a record $8.2 million on the first day of his campaign.