Ron DeSantis has been governor of Florida since January 2019 and, as of 2026, is serving the second and final term the state's term limit allows. Born in Florida in 1978 and raised in Dunedin, he captained Yale's varsity baseball team, earned a law degree at Harvard, and served as a U.S. Navy judge advocate, deploying to Iraq in support of SEAL operations in Anbar province. He represented a northeast Florida district in the U.S. House from 2013 to 2018 and in January 2015 was one of nine cofounders of the House Freedom Caucus. His first book, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers (2011), carried the subtitle First Principles in the Age of Obama.
He won the governorship in 2018 by less than half a percentage point over Andrew Gillum. During the pandemic, on September 25, 2020, he issued an order letting restaurants statewide operate at full capacity and barring cities and counties from collecting fines from people who broke mask or distancing rules. "We're not closing anything going forward," he said. In 2022 he defeated Charlie Crist by nearly 19 points, the largest margin in a Florida governor's race since 1982, and told supporters that "Florida is where woke goes to die."
The laws of his first term drew national attention. The Parental Rights in Education act, signed on March 28, 2022, bars instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade and lets parents sue districts over violations. The Individual Freedom Act, signed on April 22 and known as the Stop WOKE Act, defines it as discrimination to require students or employees to accept listed concepts about race and sex. "In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces," his office quoted him. In March 2024 a federal appeals court upheld an injunction against the act's workplace provisions, with Judge Britt Grant writing that penalizing viewpoints is "the greatest First Amendment sin." After the Walt Disney Company opposed the education law, he signed a February 2023 bill giving the governor the power to appoint the board of Disney's self-governing district, declaring that "the corporate kingdom finally comes to an end." In April 2023 he signed the Heartbeat Protection Act, which bars most abortions after six weeks of gestation.
He entered the 2024 presidential race on May 24, 2023, in a Twitter Spaces audio stream with Elon Musk, and published The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival that year. After finishing second in the Iowa caucuses with 21.2 percent to Donald Trump's 51.0, he withdrew in January 2024 and endorsed Trump, saying the party could not go back to "warmed over corporatism" of the kind he said Nikki Haley represented.
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