Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Event Has Tiny Crowd & Many Empty Seats In Iowa

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ meet and greets in Iowa have not been as successful as the governor hoped.

On Saturday, DeSantis, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, grabbed breakfast at the Vinton Family Restaurant before heading over to the event in Iowa. 

Photos posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Tim Miller show the room virtually empty with a large number of open seats at Spanky’s Livestock Auction. He captioned the photo, “This was Desantis in Tama. No mention of Mr Trump.”

He also followed up with an additional statement, “Fwiw [for what it’s worth] DeSantis is doing a bunch of events this weekend and not all have been this sparse. This is the reality when you reboot and have to do the grind it out, lots of small events Let Ron Be Ron deal.”

Steven Cheung, Donald Trump’s political advisor, tweeted his own opinion saying, “Tiny crowd for Ron DeSantis in a livestock auction venue. Nobody is buying what that heifer is selling.”

Cheung has amusingly tweeted about DeSantis, writing, “The Pennywise origin story,” with a photo of DeSantis smiling and doing a thumbs up. 

Trump also spoke about the event on Truth Social and highlighted that his opponent only had ten people watching online during the meet and greet commenting, “Wow.” 

DeSantis is attempting to reboot his campaign after multiple controversies that have followed him, especially after he supported the campaign to teach that slavery had “personal benefit” to the slaves in Florida. 

DeSantis also faced backlash after his communications staffer Nate Hochman, which he fired, retweeted a meme that had a white supremacist symbol.