DeSantis begins to acknowledge Biden win even if he has trouble saying it

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a top ally of President Donald Trump, all but acknowledged on Tuesday that Joe Biden won the presidential election even if he appeared to have difficulty saying it out loud.

DeSantis’ attempt to deflect answering a question about Biden’s win came the same day that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell directly acknowledged Biden as president-elect a day after he officially won 306 electoral college votes.

The state’s Republican governor — who won his election due in part to an early endorsement by Trump — has been a staunch and vocal supporter of the president. Trump is expected to continue to loom large in GOP politics in his newly adopted home state once he leaves the White House.

When asked directly by reporters if he accepted a Biden win, DeSantis said, “It’s not for me to do. But here’s what I would say: Obviously we did our thing in Florida. The college voted. What’s going to happen is going to happen.”

DeSantis added there was a “lot of frustration” for Trump supporters because he said the president’s opponents did not accept Trump as president during the preceding four years.

“I mean Hillary [Clinton] the last week of the election was saying [Russian President Vladimir] Putin stole it,” DeSantis said. “And I just think that’s left a lot of people really frustrated with how it’s going to go. But we’re going to do the job for Florida. We’re going to push ahead. We’ll work with whoever we need to be able to do right by the state of Florida.”

DeSantis said that Trump’s departure is “unfortunate” for the state because he may no longer “be a phone call away from getting everything done soon.” Since getting elected governor in 2018, DeSantis constantly urged Trump to help out Florida on everything from hurricane aid to Everglades restoration to signing off on the state’s attempt to import drugs from Canada. During his campaign rallies in Florida, Trump would joke about how often he got asked for money by DeSantis.

Despite Florida’s past reputation as the nation’s largest swing state, Trump won Florida by nearly 4 percentage points in 2020, largely due to a surge of support from Miami-Dade County.

Many top Florida Republicans — including those who cast Florida’s official 29 electoral college votes on Monday — have been unwilling to accept the prospect of a Biden presidency and said that Trump should continue to fight to overturn the results of the election. DeSantis sat in the state Senate chamber while Trump electors cast their votes.

DeSantis’ comments on Tuesday were among the most extensive he has made publicly on the election results.

In the immediate aftermath of the November election, DeSantis suggested on Fox News that the GOP-controlled Legislature in Pennsylvania and Michigan should intervene and award electors to Trump.

As the legal battles mounted, however, DeSantis remained relatively quiet about the results. POLITICO earlier this month reported that DeSantis told a closed-door gathering of political donors and corporate executives in Orlando that he had urged the president to “fight on” even though he also acknowledged that “time was running out.”