DeSantis brushes off early campaign obstacles

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday he isn't concerned that there's a perception that he has struggled to gain ground in the GOP primary since launching his campaign in May.

"Maria, these are narratives,” he said to Fox News' Maria Bartiromo of reports on polls that show his support waning since January. “The media does not want me to be the nominee. I think that's very, very clear.”

DeSantis has consistently been polling second in the crowded Republican presidential field, behind former President Donald Trump. But that position has made him a target for the GOP front-runner, who has ceaselessly attacked DeSantis on the campaign trail, while largely avoiding direct hits on some of his other opponents.

Despite an impressive $20 million fundraising haul in the first six weeks of his campaign, the conservative governor is now polling in the 20-percent range, down from his January peak of 40.5%. Last week, Steve Cortes, a top spokesperson for DeSantis’ super PAC, called the DeSantis campaign a “clear underdog,” and praised Trump as a “runaway frontrunner.”

On Sunday, DeSantis pushed back.

“You know, my reelection in Florida we had the greatest victory that any Republican governor candidate in the history of the state had, and yet a few months before the election I had media saying that somehow my reelection campaign was stalling, that we weren't doing anything,” DeSantis said during the interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

DeSantis also made an effort to draw distinctions between himself and Trump, promising to fire FBI Director Chris Wray and “clean house” at the Department of Justice, and casting blame on the former president for social media companies’ handling of Hunter Biden’s leaked computer files.

“I look back at, like, the Hunter Biden censorship which was a huge, huge deal to happen in the 2020 election. And yet, you know, those were Donald Trump's own agencies that were colluding with big tech. I would never allow that to happen. I would fire those people immediately,” he said, adding that if Hunter Biden were a Republican, "he would have been in jail years ago."