Ron DeSantis says he isn’t ruling out another presidential bid: ‘We’ll see’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t ruling out another run for president, telling conservative talk show host Sean Hannity in an interview set to air Tuesday that he would have performed well in the 2024 Iowa caucuses were it not for the overwhelming popularity of Donald Trump
“Will you run for president again?” Hannity asked DeSantis in a clip released Monday from his podcast, “Hang Out with Sean Hannity.”
DeSantis, who will be out of office next year, said: “We’ll see.”
DeSantis lost badly in the Republican primary two years ago to Trump. He invested heavily in Iowa, the home of the first contest in the GOP race, but few high-profile party members campaigned for him and he took home just 21% of the vote. He dropped out of the race prior to the primary in New Hampshire.
One of DeSantis’ few allies during that campaign, Republican Sen. Chip Roy from Texas, told the Herald/Times in 2024 after Desantis’ primary race ended that he was well-liked among voters, but couldn’t overcome the popularity of Trump. Roy spent a month on the campaign trail with DeSantis, mostly in Iowa.
Similarly, DeSantis told Hannity his previous bid for president wasn’t bad, just ill timed.
“In Iowa, the people that voted for Trump, if he wasn’t running, I would have gotten like 90% of those people,” DeSantis said. “They were conservative voters.”
Since the covid-19 pandemic, DeSantis has successfully branded himself as a conservative fighter. His message attracted conservative voters from other parts of the country that were locked down in an effort to curb the spread of the disease, while DeSantis re-opened Florida. That helped turn Florida—once the country’s largest swing state—solidly red.
“The recent shift to GOP registration in Florida is remarkable,” University of Florida political science professor Dan Smith wrote with two other authors in a 2025 article examining the phenomenon for Political Science Quarterly.
While Smith didn’t attribute an exact reason for the conservative shift in Florida voters, he made clear that “regardless of the reason for moving to the Sunshine State, these non-native voters are an increasingly Republican lot.”
Republicans have nearly 1.5 million more active registered voters than Democrats, according to state data.
DeSantis continued his strategy of governing for the conservative base in 2024 when his administration used more than $35 million in taxpayer dollars to defeat two popular citizen-led ballot initiatives during that election. One would have overturned the state’s six-week abortion ban — a DeSantis priority — and the other would have legalized recreational marijuana. DeSantis said at the time that he was trying to prevent the state from becoming attractive again to liberal voters.
The last time DeSantis ran, he argued that his success in making Florida a conservative bastion, could be replicated throughout the country. In line with his recent political moves, it appears DeSantis still believes that.
Voters in Iowa “didn’t want the non-conservative,” DeSantis said. “They wanted me.”
He added: “But the timing didn’t work out, obviously, for that. So, you just got to see what happens.”
This story was originally published March 23, 2026 at 1:36 PM.