Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has argued that Democrats and the media are “covering up” Vice President Kamala Harris' past as they scramble to deal with the fallout from President Biden's abrupt withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.
DeSantis, 45, who unsuccessfully ran for the Republican presidential nomination, said the party was “up to the challenge” against Harris, 59, but remained optimistic the party would win.
“The media worked really hard to get rid of Biden, and now we see every artery of the left, corporate media, Hollywood, academia, using all of the king's horses and the king's men to bring the Democratic Party back together,” DeSantis said on Fox News' “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“We've all seen her: I mean, she's incredibly vapid and even more incredibly liberal and has no achievements,” he continued.
DeSantis argued that the border crisis, the inflation crisis and other failures of the Biden administration are Harris' “fault.”
Republicans have highlighted that Harris was tasked with tackling the causes of the surge in migrants into the United States in the early days of the Biden administration.
Various polls have shown the border crisis to be a top issue for voters with 100 days until the November 5 presidential election.
The Florida governor later denounced a GovTrack analysis that said Harris was the most liberal senator in 2019 as a flawed memory and warned that Harris' allies were “covering up her past.”
“We're in Florida, it's hot in July and August, but there's going to be a torrent of lies over the next few months,” he said. “They're going to try to rewrite history.”
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris expressed a number of far-left positions, including supporting Medicare for All, banning fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
She has since retracted many of those positions.
Harris suddenly became a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination last week after President Biden dropped out of the race last Sunday and endorsed Harris as his successor.
Here's the latest on Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign.
After Biden's shock announcement last week that he was endorsing her and dropping out of the presidential race, leading Democrats quickly rallied behind her.
Harris currently has enough delegate support to become the party's standard-bearer, and is expected to be officially selected as the candidate in a virtual vote within the next two weeks.
“There was no way Biden was going to win,” DeSantis said after former President Donald Trump debated Biden last month.
But he stressed that Harris is the Republican Party's best option after Biden “because she owns all the policies” and “cannot distance herself from them.”
“Biden has set the bar too low, it's like a soft bias of low expectations,” DeSantis said bluntly. “Biden makes her look like Socrates because we're so used to him not being able to do anything.”
“The Trump administration has been far more successful than the Biden/Harris administration, and the American people will be faced with a tough choice.”
DeSantis ultimately withdrew from the 2024 Republican primary in January after coming in a distant second to Trump in Iowa.
Trump, 78, was furious that DeSantis had challenged him, but quickly softened his stance after DeSantis left the stage.
DeSantis gave an energetic speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this month, and managed to bring a smile to Trump's face several times during his speech.