CNN political commentator Ana Navarro accused Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday of gaming the system that led to his blowout victory on election night.
“I’ve been dying to talk about Florida and I think it’s being completely misread. I think the narrative is all wrong,” Navarro said.
“I told you he was going to win bigly, but listen, Ron DeSantis barely won in 2018 by 35,000 votes by the skin of his teeth against a Black progressive little-known mayor from Tallahassee, Florida,” she continued. “Yesterday he won by 20 percentage points, Why? Because he gamed the system.”
She suggested DeSantis had somehow used enacted several policies to create an “unlevel playing field” in his party’s favor.
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“Because he turned Florida into an unlevel playing field. They changed election laws making it harder to vote by mail. They paraded a bunch of people—Black people that they arrested for voting fraud and paraded them in front of national media,” she said. “He created an election police. He also was very good in responding to hurricanes and other tragedies, he also invested and laser-focused on Miami-Dade.”
She stated that in addition to DeSantis using these tactics, less of the overall population actually went out to vote.
“Turnout was 10 points lower than it was in 2018 and 2018 it was 63%. Yesterday in Florida was 53%. So that’s not a red wave. Red wave is when people go out to the streets and vote. When you have what you had the depressed, deflated Democratic vote.”
She also offered criticism of DeSantis’ Democrat opponent Charlie Crist for failing to rally the Democratic base.
“Who can blame them when you nominate a corpse. I mean, yes, he won bigly, but he won against a corpse, a political corpse and that’s an insult to corpses,” Navarro said.
Prior to the election, Navarro called Crist a “recycled has-been.”
“I think tonight Ron DeSantis is going to come out of there with no help from Donald Trump, as a vanquishing, you know, conquerer and with much bigger numbers,” she said on an earlier panel. “Frankly because the Democrats ran a recycled has-been who had been a Republican, an independent and is now a Democrat,” she said.
