The Florida governor talks to TIME at the Iowa state fair
point to DeSantis's slipping poll numbers and question whether all this resonates with an electorate polls show to be more concerned with kitchen-table issues.
I ask DeSantis about the rights of parents of trans children, who are being prevented by the state from accessing the medical care they may believe is in their kids’ best interest. He points to the ongoing debate over transgender treatment in Europe, where some experts have recently been moving away from a purely affirmative approach, arguing that the state has an interest in preventing “sterilizing children at age 13 or 14” or performing sex-change surgery on minors.
And when I ask how he’ll respond if one of his children turns out to be gay or trans, his eyes flash momentarily, and he swiftly shuts down the question. “Well, my children are my children,” DeSantis says. “We'll leave that—we’ll leave that between my wife and I.”, DeSantis heads to a stage behind JR’s SouthPork Ranch, where he is interviewed by Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, as part of her softball series of “fair-side chats” with the candidates.
The DeSantises proceed to the pork producers’ barn, where they gamely flip pork burgers. A cheer goes up as the governor flips the last one: the Trump plane has just been spotted flying overhead. A “We Love Trump” chant goes up from the former President’s supporters, many of whom are following DeSantis around in order to troll him, wearing green-and-yellow “Back to Back Iowa Champ” hats.
James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s newly appointed campaign manager, who previously served as his gubernatorial chief of staff and has never managed a political campaign, says the operation has beefed up its accessibility to media and hopes to deploy more surrogates going forward. “The governor’s got a great message, but people aren’t going to know about it if we don’t tell them,” he tells me.
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