A fired-up Gov. Ron DeSantis absolutely torched Florida’s own Republican Representative-elect Randy Fine on Wednesday, blasting the newly elected congressman’s weak victory margin and claiming only President Donald Trump’s intervention saved Fine from disaster.
“I think you have a candidate in Randy Fine, who, one, he’s a squish,” DeSantis declared at a press conference in Ocala, Florida.
“He supported restrictions on Second Amendment rights back in 2018. He tried to defeat my immigration proposal to help President Trump enforce immigration laws and he tried to make Florida a de facto sanctuary state.”
The governor didn’t stop there. DeSantis argued Fine’s underwhelming 14-point victory in Florida’s deep-red 6th Congressional District exposed the candidate’s overall weaknesses. This is a district Trump and DeSantis both carried by over 30 points in their most recent elections.
“It’s an underperformance. I think it’s unique to the candidate and I think the president really had to bail him out at the end because this race would have been much closer had the president sat on the sidelines,” DeSantis said. “If anything it shows the president has got the juice to get Republicans to go out on Election Day and even vote for a candidate that they’re not crazy about.”
DeSantis said that Republican voters held their noses and voted for Fine solely out of loyalty to Trump.
“These are voters who didn’t like Randy Fine, but who basically are like, ‘You know what? We’re going to take one for the team. The president needs another vote up there, and so we’re going to do it.'”
“Just the way he conducts himself is somebody — he repels people. He’s repelled people in the legislature,” DeSantis said. “They wanted to get him out of the legislature, so they asked me to put him up for Florida Atlantic president, and I did, and the whole board would have resigned rather than making presidents, and now he’s going to be in Congress.”
It’s the latest chapter in the ongoing feud between DeSantis and Fine, which erupted in 2023 when Fine abandoned DeSantis to endorse Trump during the presidential primary. Fine then went on the offensive, penning a Washington Times op-ed accusing DeSantis of failing to adequately fight antisemitism in Florida after the Israel-Hamas war began.
Fine responding to DeSantis’ criticism with a post on X: “A dying star burns hottest before it fades into oblivion. I’m focused on working with @realDonaldTrump to stop Democrats from taking this country backwards, not working with them. Let’s go.”
Allies of Fine have pushed back against DeSantis’ attacks as well. One anonymous GOP operative with ties to the Fine campaign told reporters that DeSantis provided virtually no help while actively undermining the campaign: “Casey and Ron were nowhere to be found. They got more earned media around their attacks than the Democrats did. They say all these nice things about the president, then do everything they can to cripple the president’s agenda.”