I've been a fan of Ron DeSantis for a long time, given the great job he's done as Florida governor and the results of it leading to Florida becoming a red state.

I've been willing to overlook his errors, e.g., too much emphasis on the trans issue, the extended fight with Disney, the flip-flopping on Ukraine, the idiots on his campaign staff, the ill-timed and unwinnable campaign against President Trump -- because his successes outshine these stumbles.

But he's gone over to the dark side in his recent remark that the election of 2020 was fraud-free.

According to the Epoch Times, citing the New York Times:

As reported on Aug. 4 by The New York Times, the Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful levied his most harsh attack to date against GOP frontrunner and former President Donald Trump, saying the allegations that the 2020 election was stolen were "unsubstantiated."

"All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” NY Times quoted Mr. DeSantis saying in response to a reporter’s question following a campaign event at a brewery in Northeast Iowa.

That's a view in contradiction of what most Republicans and a sizable chunk of Democrats think.

After that, DeSantis went into many of the reasons it's reasonable for voters to think the 2020 election was stolen:

Mr. DeSantis also said in comments directed at Democrat-run states, "The way you conduct a good election that people have confidence in, you don't change the rules in the middle of the game. You don't ballot harvest. You don't do Zuckerbucks."

He added that colluding with agencies like Facebook "to censor things," like the story about Hunter Biden's laptop is "unfair" and that the election was not conducted in the way he would want to see it done in the United States of America.

In a post on social media, Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway said the characterization of the response by Mr. DeSantis was "completely false" and "misleading," insisting that the Florida governor "has spoken out consistently and acted against the private takeover of government election offices, unsupervised ballot ops, rushed changes to law, etc."

So which was it -- all free and fair, the way Jimmy Carter used to say of Venezuela's elections, or an utterly flawed election that was stolen from Trump? He's saying Joe Biden was what voters really wanted and all 81 million of those votes he got were legit?

Obviously, he thinks Trump is wrong and Joe Biden won 2020 fair and square, with the corollary view that the majority of Republicans who agree with Trump are idiots.

They're idiots for thinking that all the things that DeSantis himself cited -- the Zuckerbucks, the repression of the news about Hunter Biden's laptop, the ballot harvesting, the junk-mail balloting, the unmanned mail drops, the changed and ignored statehouse rules -- somehow, despite everything, yielded a free and fair election?

Is he saying that there was no "secret bipartisan campaign to save the 2020 election," as Molly Ball famously bragged about in her Time magazine piece? DeSantis sounds like he's actually onboard with that 'bipartisan' element, meaning, the Jeb!/#nevertrump fringe, even though it's pretty obvious he wouldn't allow that crap go on in Florida.

And that's problematic. 

One of his finest selling points to voters in his record as a governor is that none of the shenanigans that went on in other states -- from extended counting, to junk mail balloting, to weird midnight shifts in direction in the counting, to ballot-harvesting, to dirty voter rolls -- went on in Florida.

If there was no fraud in the 2020 election, why were these reforms important? How can they be selling points? DeSantis undercuts his own argument that there was no fraud just by the example of his own record in his own state. How's he going to sell that to voters now? If all was free and fair, then maybe these reforms aren't important, is that it?

What an own-goal. 

There were other problems that also scream of fraud:

There was that odd stop in counting ballots around 2:30 a.m. in multiple states, which resumed with a sudden change of voting direction across the board for Joe Biden; There were those incidents where ballot counters went "home for the night" as if that were normal in a hotly contested election -- and then they didn't go home for the night -- recall those rolling suitcases in Atlanta once the observers were gotten out of the room. There was that weird act by Fox News insistently calling Arizona for Biden despite the numbers on screen contradicting that, as if the nevertrumps there knew something we didn't. There were the election observers blocked in Philadelphia despite a court order allowing them in, and the election observors blocked from observing even from a window in Detroit as pizza boxes were pasted over them to ensure they saw nothing. There was the truck driver who testified to driving his truckload of ballots from state to state. There were the unverified signatures, and the uncreased ballots, and the ballots filled in with just Joe Biden's name as if done in haste. There were the dirty, filthy voter rolls, left unaddressed as states blocked the Trump administration from attempts to inspect them earlier in the race.

What are we to make of this other than massive fraud on a scale unseen outside the worst of the third world?

Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit has some particularly prescient observations:

SO, IS HE DISINGENUOUS, MATHEMATICALLY ILLITERATE, PSYCHOLOGICALLY OBTUSE OR ALL OF THE ABOVE?  DeSantis Says Trump’s Election Fraud Theories ‘Did Not Prove to Be True’.

1- What we saw on election night 2020 is completely impossible without fraud. (BTW I personally know one of the poll watchers who was locked out of the polling place when the fraud happened.) 2- For it to not prove to be true, it would need to have been examined, in a rational way. Not you know, run the same faked ballots through the machines and announce all is honky dory. Also courts would have to give someone, even, you know, other states “standing” to challenge it. 3- given vote by mail ever state or election goes left. It’s a miracle, right? 4- These people don’t behave like they won the election. Psychologically, if they knew they won, they would facilitate investigations and allow talk about it, as Bush and Trump did. They behave like con men who don’t want the con discussed.
So, he’s either a moron, a liar, or has been lied to or thinks we can be lied to. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’d vote for him against Biden, otherwise the wrong lizard will win. But the gilding is cracking on this one.  We don’t need another W. Or worse, another Pierre Delecto.

 Who the heck could disagree with that in any capacity?

The biggest problem with DeSantis's statement is that he believes he can get elected in this atmosphere as Trump couldn't, and no reforms would be necessary. DeSantis seems to think that this fraud machine wouldn't do to him what it did to Trump, based on, oh, his nevertrump links or something.

That's hard to believe, and even if I am wrong, a Ron DeSantis who becomes a President DeSantis will therefore sweep these problems with the elections under the rug 

I can't support someone who thinks that.

That's too much. DeSantis has jumped the shark.

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