DeSantis denies preparing a 2028 White House run, accuses Washington Post of fabrication

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday, Nov. 6, denied that he is preparing a 2028 presidential bid and accused The Washington Post of fabricating a report that he had already reached out to a consultant about a campaign.

“The Washington Post is fabricating this out of whole cloth. I have not reached out to anybody about running for anything. Just another pathetic attempt to garner clicks. Using anonymous sources of course!” he wrote in a post on X.

The denial comes as DeSantis prepares to leave office in January because of term limits, and as Republicans regroup after heavy losses in the Nov. 3 midterm elections, which the governor himself compared to a meteor strike.

What The Washington Post reported

Citing three people briefed on his plans, the Post reported Friday that DeSantis is preparing to seek the Republican nomination in 2028. One of them said he had contacted at least one national political consultant about working on a new presidential campaign.

The paper also reported that a federal super PAC tied to the governor sent a fundraising text message that week, and that his chief of staff, Jason Weida, did not respond to a request for comment. Cubanos por el Mundo has not independently confirmed the contacts described by the Post.

DeSantis ran for the Republican nomination in 2024 and dropped out in January of that year, after the Iowa caucuses.

In replies to his post, he kept up the denial. He told a user who hoped the report was true that he was “sorry to disappoint.” To another who suggested consultants might be using his name, he wrote: “Probably the case. But maybe just made up by WaPo.”

Fox News Digital, which reported the exchange, said it had asked both the Post and the governor’s office for comment.

“Close to an extinction-level event” for Republicans

Two days earlier, on Wednesday, Nov. 4, DeSantis reviewed his party’s results at a news conference at the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee.

“This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last hundred years,” he said. He called the outcome “the political equivalent of a meteor strike” that hit “blue states, red states, everything in between.”

He argued the result was not an endorsement of the other side. “Democrats are unpopular,” he said, adding that they won on the national mood but “did not earn a mandate to indulge all of their left-wing fantasies.”

He warned the damage could weigh on Republicans for “two years, four years, six years, maybe even longer.”

Florida held; Texas worries the governor

After January, DeSantis said, “of the 10 largest states in this union, only one state will have Republican control,” referring to Florida. He credited the party’s numbers in the state: “The only thing that saved us was we just have more Republicans.”

His bigger concern is Texas. “If the Republican Party doesn’t have Texas as an anchor, we won’t be viable nationally going forward,” he said.

He also faulted his own party. At the same news conference he said some Republican losses in other states could have been avoided with better governance. And in an interview with Stephen A. Smith on SiriusXM on Nov. 2, the eve of the vote, he said Republicans who deny that gas prices rose because of the war with Iran are misleading voters: “If you can’t admit that to voters, then you’re gaslighting them, and they’re not going to listen to you on other things.”

DeSantis will hand over the governorship in January to Byron Donalds, the Republican who won the Florida governor’s race on Nov. 3.