Casey DeSantis made her first solo appearance for her husband’s campaign on Thursday as she launched the national version of “Mamas for DeSantis” in Iowa, where the 2024 presidential season will begin with the Iowa caucuses.
Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis’ wife first launched the statewide version of “Mamas for DeSantis” in 2022, when her husband was reelected governor in a landslide by a whopping 19 points. She signed up over 1.1 million mothers to support her husband, as he won female voters by 9%.
“It’s one thing when your policies come out after us: the mamas. It’s another thing when they come after our children. And that’s when the claws come out,” she told Iowa voters at the public event.
DeSantis also conducted a public back-and-forth with Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds, who told the audience, “I didn’t run to preserve the status quo; I ran to get things done. I am a woman on a mission and I think you’re a woman on a mission, too.”
DeSantis spoke of her battle with breast cancer:
There was a time in my life when I didn’t know if I was going to see my kids graduate from kindergarten, let alone high school. And I was able to beat that back, but I had some really long, difficult battles. As a matter of fact I remember — and the governor was getting criticized for doing this with me — but I remember every single chemotherapy appointment that I went to, and there were six of them and they were very long and they were very hard, and I had to wear this dumb cold cap on my head that was like an ice cube, you’re like in an igloo for six or seven hours, and he held my hand during every single one of them and he never left my side.
And I’ll tell you what: when you go through something like that, and you’re in the middle of the night, scared, and you don’t know what’s going to happen, and you crawl into bed with your kids, and you’re getting hope for tomorrow that you can have some more time with them, and then you realize that God has given you more opportunities to be able to live, when you’re given that opportunity in life, what do you do with it?
“Do I care about what a headline says? No. I care about the innocence of my children and your children,” she concluded to applause.
Speaking to voters, DeSantis turned to a prime concern for parents after the 2020 COVID pandemic debacle of children had kept from school across the nation, as her husband had championed opening schools while other states kept them closed. “It should be up to the parents to decide what education they think are best for their children. And government should, again, get out of the way,” she stated.
“It was COVID that was really what led to a lot of this parental empowerment revolution because for the first time parents were peering into the classroom, and they did not like what was being taught they saw: the sexualized curriculum being thrust in front of 5-year-olds,” she said.
She said that her husband had enabled parents “to be able to go to the schools to say ‘I want to see what kind of curriculum you’re teaching our kids.’ And if they didn’t give that information to the parent in a timely manner, they then had a right of action to be able to sue.”
DeSantis also focused on the woke issues her husband has confronted during his tenure, saying, “They’re not doing the woke Olympics, by the way, in the state of Florida. There’s no discrimination if you use the wrong pronoun.”
