Inside DeSantis Election-Night Party, Supporters Dejected by Overwhelming Trump Victory: ‘Very Disappointed’

West Des Moines — Florida governor Ron DeSantis will remain in the presidential race after finishing a distant second behind former president Donald Trump in the January 15 Iowa caucuses, he told supporters inside his election-night party Monday evening.

“We have a lot of work to do, but I can tell you this as the next president of the United States: I am going to get the job done for this country,” he said to whoops and cheers from the crowd. “I am not going to make any excuses. And I guarantee you this, I will not let you down.”

But about an hour before he took the stage to a cheering crowd, the mood inside the Florida governor’s election-night party was quite somber, with many pro-DeSantis attendees telling National Review how frustrated they are that Trump finished in a landslide and that the race was called so early. Trump won more than 50 percent of the vote, according to current projections, with second-place finisher DeSantis lagging more than 30 points behind and Nikki Haley a close third.

Alice Rekeweg, a DeSantis supporter from Houston, Texas, said in an interview she is “very disappointed” by Monday night’s results. “I love that man,” she said of DeSantis. “But I guess all the sheep are sticking together.” Rekeweg told National Review she was flabbergasted that Iowa voted so overwhelmingly to nominate the former president on caucus night, given how little time he spent in the state in the lead-up to the caucuses.

She said Trump has “disgraced” this country over the years with his polarizing rhetoric, “breaking traditions like walking in front of the queen,” and lack of follow-through on many of his promises, namely finishing the wall at the U.S.–Mexico border. “I want in a president someone we can be proud of,” she said.

DeSantis supporter Gene Church, who flew in to Iowa on his own dime from Pensacola, Fla., says Republican voters are making a huge mistake if they go on to nominate Trump. “I always said, ‘Trump is a fighter, and he just punches back.’ And I realized that he didn’t just punch back. He punches,” said Church, who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020.

Church said the 2024 election is too important for DeSantis to drop out at this point. He predicts that Trump will soon be a convicted felon, citing the 91 charges he’s currently facing across four criminal indictments.

“When that happens, whether he wins on appeal or not later is irrelevant, because every Democrat out there, and a majority of the independents out there, will know that he’s a convicted felon,” he said. “Democrats will ask every Republican down ballot: ‘How do you feel about having a convicted felon at the top of the ticket?’ And they’ll run ads saying about how Republicans are the party of criminals, and we will lose the down-ballot races as a result of this, and we will lose the presidency.”

As the DeSantis camp approaches the next early-state contests, they’re staying optimistic about his Iowa performance. “He overperformed public expectations,” former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, founder of the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, told NR before DeSantis spoke. He cited the latest NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll released Saturday in which Haley had narrowly eclipsed DeSantis’s second-place standing in the race in the final stretch.

At least one DeSantis supporter in the crowd was on the fence about whether the Florida governor should stay in the race for much longer.

“If he stays in this race too long, I think he could ruin his political career,” said Des Moines resident Gary Updegraff, who caucused for DeSantis earlier this evening. He called Trump’s win a “foregone conclusion” given the polls, adding that if DeSantis doesn’t perform well in New Hampshire in the state’s open primary next week, the party should “unite and start spending our resources to try to get the vote out to secure the election.”