FL Governor Ron DeSantis: “Deceptively” Written Florida Fourth Amendment Measure Would Lead to “California Style” Abortion Policy

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis joined The Guy Benson Show today to discuss some of the important issues surrounding his state of Florida in the upcoming election. DeSantis addressed Amendment 4, a ballot measure seeking to codify “abortion rights” into law,  but DeSantis said the amendment dangerously vague and could lead to late-term abortions and other radical California-like abortion policies. DeSantis also shared his surprise at Kamala Harris attempting to take digs at him as Hurricanes Helene and Milton were bearing down on Florida, and he provided updates on the ongoing recovery efforts from those respective hurricanes.. Listen to the full interview below!

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GUY BENSON: Okay. Here we go. And joining us now is the governor of the state of Florida, Ron DeSantis. Governor, welcome back to the show. Great to have you.

GOV. DESANTIS: Hey, how are you doing?

GUY BENSON: I’m doing very well. Before we get to politics, I want to start with the recovery that is still very much underway in your state following Hurricane Milton. I know a lot of the national media has moved on. But many people in your state have not because they cannot. What are the updates there? Is there progress still being made steadily for the people of Florida?

GOV. DESANTIS: Sure. So obviously, we got hit with two major hurricanes in a two week period. First, Hurricane Helene. We conducted thousands of rescues. 2.4 million power restoration in record time. Milton Hundreds of rescues from the initial storm. Then in the aftermath, there was flooding inland. More rescues there and there were 4.2 million power restorations. And there that was a record for for how much how many people had been out. And so we were able to respond and stabilize very quickly. Now, these storms left a lot of debris in their wake, some of it with Milton, with the wind. But a lot of with the surge, with Helene, people had to muck and got their homes. And so there’s all this debris. So we’ve done this massive debris effort to get it cleaned up as quickly as possible. Sometimes this takes years. Hurricane Katrina took years. We’re not going to do that. So we created an online debris removal portal so people in Florida can go to their city, see how much debris has been removed. And if the progress isn’t good, they can nail their their locals and tell them to get on the ball. And I’ve devoted a lot of state resources to help the local governments to be able to do it. So I would say we have a lot of work to do. But I was just in Steinhatchee, which is North Florida, which is where Halloween hit. So they had 15 to 18ft of storm surge right there. It’s a beautiful fishing community there. And it really got wrecked. And we were there after the storm helping out. Now, here we are a few weeks later, and they’ve already repaired a lot of stuff with the dogs. I brought $1 million to help with some of the marine repairs. But these are I mean, it’s stone crab season right now. They got all these different these great restaurants. Many of them closed. Many of them are going to now reopen soon. The dead Marine is going to open November 1st. And so, you know, I think what we see is just there’s a very quick bounce back in Florida. Those folks in particular in the big bad, you know, they’ve been whacked more than I probably any time in the last 50 years to get multiple storms like that. But they’re resilient and people are doing well. So we got a lot of work to do. But I would say we are way ahead of schedule.

GUY BENSON: You know, during that interim period between the two storms. I think a lot of people were caught off guard. You seem to be, by this move from the vice president to try to insert herself into the process and create some controversy trying to pick a fight with you. It blew up in her face. Not even Joe Biden was going along with it. Were you surprised by that, especially with this gigantic storm headed for your state?

GOV. DESANTIS: You know, I was because I’ve dealt with Biden for years now on these things, and I’ve never tried to hurt him politically and honestly. He’s never done he’s never politicized it either way in terms of the response. And we had just responded to Helene and did it very effectively. And, you know, a day or two after Helene, no one was even paying attention before. They’re both on North Carolina cities, other places. And so when Milton did, it’s like it’s it’s a ramp up. I mean, like it’s all consuming when we get into these emergency situations. So I’m doing all the stuff I need to be doing. And you’ll never work harder as governor than during one of these things. And then I read online to see just won’t talk to Harris. I didn’t even know she had tried to call me. And so she was making a big deal about it. And I thought to myself, you know, I’ve been dealing with these emergencies under both Trump and Biden, but since Biden’s been in, she’s been vice president. She has never once called. She has never once come to Florida to be helpful. She’s never done anything. She’s never been involved in this. And in point of fact, she has no role in it. So for her to say that me focusing working 24 seven was, I think she said selfish and irresponsible because I’m not catering to her was a total joke. And the fact that she had never been involved in these before showed she was trying to politicize. And I’ll tell you, when these things happened, people’s properties on the line, their lives are on the line. I work with Republican officials, Democrat officials. Like I really don’t care at that point about the politics because, like, you’ve got to do the job. She thought politicizing it was somehow smart and it hurt her. There’s no question it hurt her, the both of those hurricanes. She did not come out of that looking good.

GUY BENSON: On the election itself. There’s the horse race side of it. And we can talk about Florida and nationally, but in your state in particular, there are these amendments that will be decided by the people by direct ballot. One of them pertains to abortion. And we’ve seen this now in some other states, very heavily funded by the left, very misleading language to try to appeal to certain people and mislead them, in my view, about what the amendment would actually do. This one is right on the brink of passing or not passing in Florida. What’s your message? Because obviously committed pro-lifers are going to vote no on this amendment?

GOV. DESANTIS: Well, you would think so though, Guy, but I mean, I think, you know, you pointed out that because it’s written so deceptively, we have and it’s not as many as there were four months ago, but we still have some voters who read it and think it’s pro-life the way it’s done. So what we’re finding is, is people are informed about it. Their support goes down. Now, these these measures have passed around the country, but you need 60% in Florida. You know, I’ve seen polling between 55 and 61% on it, but I think it’s moving our way. And so we just need to let people know. What would this actually do? One, it they don’t define any of the terms in it. And so it is basically an invitation for liberal judges to do even worse things that are in there. But there’s no limits on when an abortion can be performed because what they say is any health care provider can greenlight an abortion up until birth if they deem it to be appropriate for the patient’s health. They don’t define patient’s health. And so you would basically have California style abortion policy in the state of Florida, which is bad enough. But considering we’re in the southeast region of the country, from Texas to Georgia, all those states have very strong pro-life policies. And so we would be really a tourist destination for this. They also eliminate parental consent for minors. Florida has that. They can’t give your kid a Tylenol without your consent. But now you’ll have a non-physician be able to perform a late term abortion on your minor child. That is absolutely nuts. They they try to do a bait and switch on that to say, well, this doesn’t take away parental notification, but that’s not the same as consent. And so basically, the legislature would be able to say, you have to notify the parent, but the parent wouldn’t be the decision maker. Abortion would be cut out. And then this idea of health care provider is really crazy because, you know, look, I’m pro-life. I know I look a lot of people that aren’t pro-life that I know, but but most of them don’t think abortion is good. They don’t want to say they want it to be rare, but they what they will say is, look, I don’t they don’t support legal protections for the unborn child because they want the mother and the doctor to make the decision. This is a health care practitioner can greenlight a late term abortion. And so you will have bootleg abortion clinics where non physicians are involved in these things. The surgical abortions, they are risky. And we have laws, common sense regulations that say if something like that happens, the physician has to have admitting privileges at a hospital so that the person get treated. So all that goes out the window. Finally, what will happen in Florida is what they’re trying to do in Michigan that passes. They will sue in front of a liberal judge and say that that language mandates that tax payers fund the abortion, which is obviously nuts. Now, it’s interesting on the campaign they’re running. They’re not talking about their amendment at all. What they’re doing is they’re basically just lying about Florida’s law. So we have a Heartbeat Protection Act, which, you know, abortions are allowed until there’s a detectable heartbeat for the unborn child, with exceptions for rape, incest, life and health of the mother and victims of human trafficking. Every commercial, they’re saying is about women who are raped or women have health problems, miscarriages, things like that. None of that is impacted by Florida’s current law. So that shows me they have that playbook that they’ve run in other states. They’re trying to run it in Florida. It doesn’t really make sense. And so what we’ve done is we’ve educated people on what one what the law is, But then to more importantly, what is their proposal actually do? Because you can always tweak a law once it goes into the Constitution. You know, that’s pretty much all she wrote. And so what we have found is as more voters have have have understood the implications, the support falls off dramatically. And I think the reality is when when people pull this stuff out, especially our voters, they don’t really worry about these amendments until late. So we’re starting to see I think a lot of people come home on this. And I’m optimistic that it’ll be defeated.

GUY BENSON: So we have a lot of listeners in Florida. We have stations down in Florida. We have people on the podcast. You are urging a no on Amendment four for the reasons that you just laid out. And I think what’s so important, just to underscore what you said, it’s not just the hardcore pro-lifer that would want to vote no on this. I’d be an easy no. Instantly on this personally if I were living in Florida. But if you are like, let’s say, moderately pro-life or moderately mainstream pro-choice, you should be a no. On Amendment four as well, because it is not a mainstream proposition that they’re offering. They are wording it and marketing it like it’s that to appeal to that middle. But what they’re actually coming at this from is a very left wing, vastly permissive structure that is deceptive in the way that it’s being presented. So I just want to make sure that our listeners in Florida are well aware and educated about what the stakes are on that ballot initiative. Meanwhile, statewide, a couple of big races. Of course, we have been watching the early and mail in votes tabulated over the last couple of days. Early in-person voting started this week. And I don’t want to extrapolate too much too soon, but is it safe to say that the Republican Party and Republican voters are coming out in force because the numbers to me look pretty jaw dropping almost along the lines of what we saw with you in 2022. We remember what happened in Florida two years ago.

GOV. DESANTIS: Yeah. I mean, I think I think the thing about Florida that I think would be different than most of these other states is we’ve had an underlying shift in our electorate. So if you go back to 2020, Democrats had 150,000 registration advantage over Republicans. Donald Trump carried the state by 3.4%. Fast forward two years after that, 2022, I was running for reelection. We then changed that to a 300,000 Republican voter advantage, and we won. But the state by almost 20 points now we have close to a 1.1 million registration advantage over the Democrats. And so to compare now to 2020, it’s kind of like comparing apples and oranges in Florida for four for the reasons that the electorate has shifted. But then also, you just had a situation in 2020 where the Democrats were scared to vote in person. They were voting by mail. Donald Trump had told the voters, don’t vote by mail, vote in person. And so we tried to change that a little bit in 22. But I can tell you, I remember campaigning and I and we were doing like early voting. And I would ask how many people have sent in an absentee ballot And like three people would raise their hand. How many people are going to vote early and like five people? How many people are going to vote on Election Day? And like 500 people raised their hand and I said, guys, you’re going to go home. The voting is open. Just vote. Get get the thing in. I think that there’s been a psychology change for Republicans. Trump’s campaign, the RNC, state parties, they are stressing go out and bank your vote. And so I think that I think that’s smart. I think it’s easier to conduct Election Day operations. But I do think that I think Democrats probably are not going to be as wedded to the mail this cycle as they were in 2020. And I think Republicans are going to be much more likely to either send in absentee or vote in person. So I think you got to see how it’s going to play out. But I would say Florida, we probably are the state that has had the most significant underlying shift in our electorate in a Republican direction since 2024. And if you if you think about it, to go from 150,000 in the in in the red in 2020 for our 2020 to now one point almost 1.1 million in the black where we’re beating them. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a shift quite like that. So so we’re going to do very well as Republicans here across the board. Obviously, Donald Trump will win the state likely by significantly more than the 3.4%. But I also think that our voters have more warmed up to some of the early voting compared to where they were four years ago.

GUY BENSON: I know you’ve got to run in a second. Very quickly, we have a national show. We have a lot of people, maybe not a lot, but there are some people that I’ve seen on social media who aren’t comfortable with Trump. They’re right leaning voters. They really liked you. They’re really not sold on Kamala Harris. And they’re toying with this idea of like, writing your name in or writing someone else’s name in instead of Trump. Do you have any message to them about how you would think about that?

GOV. DESANTIS: I am not a candidate, so putting me in, I am not a candidate. You know, I’m voting for Donald Trump because I think that he will reverse Biden’s border policies. I think he will appoint much better judges than what Kamala Harris would do. And I think he would be much better on national security and national defense. And I think those are three clear contrasts between Trump and Harris. I don’t see as a conservative how you can have any common ground with Kamala Harris. She is the most left wing candidate that the Democrats have run, certainly in my lifetime and maybe in their entire time as a party.

GUY BENSON: Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, our guest here on The Guy Benson Show. Governor, we really appreciate your time. Thanks so much.

GOV. DESANTIS: Thanks. Take care. Bye bye.