Information reads: “Casey Desantis sporting a new jacket at Joni Ernst’s biker event in Iowa today.”
It has become a bit. In these early days of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid for president, Casey DeSantis joins her husband onstage, and the stories start to roll.
There’s the one about bottled water from the Sea of Galilee, preciously savored for the children’s baptisms, that’s accidentally tossed out by a housekeeper at the governor’s residence. Then there are Casey’s attestations of mom-hood, battling permanent marker scrawls on furniture and dragging by day’s end, when her husband comes home from work and she hands over the three children.
The couple fires off all the indicators of wholesome family values to a conservative evangelical-heavy GOP audience. And even without mentioning Donald Trump’s name, they set up an inescapable antithesis to the former president, who faces charges related to a porn star payoff and was found liable for sexual abuse and who, when he landed in Iowa on Thursday, wasn’t accompanied by his wife.
The DeSantis team knows whom it’s playing to in Iowa and beyond. At a retreat for donors last week in Miami, campaign officials estimated that 65% of Iowa GOP caucusgoers are evangelical Christians. According to a person with knowledge of the DeSantis team’s early-state strategy, it’s betting that that segment of the party is sick of the sexualized drama from a man also under investigation for classified documents seized from his sprawling Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.
At one Wednesday morning event in the western town of Salix, Iowa, DeSantis and his wife, Casey, engaged in a living room-style conversation, swapping anecdotes about their three young kids that sought to give voters a rare glimpse into the home life of Florida’s leader, who has generally avoided the mainstream press.
Seated in grey armchairs on a stage inside a vast welding warehouse, where a massive green John Deere served as a backdrop, the couple, each in jeans, told stories that elicited laughs from the audience of roughly 100.
“The one thing I learned is I learned when breakfast room service starts — because they needed food,” he said of his kids.
He then remembered a solo parenting outing, going to visit a new Tallahassee restaurant, and the curveball moment when his 3-year-old daughter needed to use the bathroom.
“So we’re literally just in a drive-thru just sitting there. And so she had to go, so I was like, OK I’ll take her inside, so we go in and we get in there, and she shakes her head and I’m like, ‘What?’ And she’s like, ‘Little potty, little potty.’ And I’m like, ‘They don’t have little potty in Slim Chickens!'” he said.
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