SALIX, Iowa — 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 caucus-goers 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.
But breaking off conservative evangelical support from Trump is no easy feat, given that he is credited with having appointed three Supreme Court justices who eventually joined a conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Nevertheless, the DeSantis team sees it as a necessary path to winning early states.
“Clearly, that is an opening for us with evangelicals,” the source familiar with early strategy said. “It’s authentic. You can’t fake your family. You can’t fake your commitment to your children and your wife. Once they…
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