Ronald Dion DeSantis (; born September 14, 1978) is an American politician serving since 2019 as the 46th governor of Florida. A member of the Republican Party, he represented in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2013 to 2018. DeSantis is a candidate in the 2024 United States presidential election.
Born in Jacksonville, DeSantis spent most of his childhood in Dunedin, Florida. He graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School. DeSantis joined the United States Navy in 2004 and was promoted to lieutenant before serving as a legal advisor to SEAL Team One. He was stationed at Joint Task Force Guantanamo in 2006, and was deployed to Iraq in 2007. When he returned to the U.S. about eight months later, the U.S. attorney general appointed DeSantis to serve as a special assistant U.S. attorney at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida, a position he held until his honorable discharge from active military duty in 2010.
DeSantis was first elected to Congress in 2012 and was reelected in 2014 and 2016. During his tenure, he became a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and was an ally of President Donald Trump. He briefly ran for U.S. Senate in 2016, but withdrew when incumbent senator Marco Rubio sought reelection. DeSantis won the Republican nomination for the 2018 gubernatorial election and narrowly defeated the Democratic nominee, Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, in the general election by 0.4%.
DeSantis was governor during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Hurricane Ian and Hurricane Nicole. He encouraged the passage of the Parental Rights in Education Act. In the 2022 gubernatorial election, he defeated Charlie Crist by 19.4 percentage points, the state's largest margin of victory for a governor's election in 40 years.
On May 24, 2023, DeSantis announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. He continues to serve as governor during his campaign. He has written two books: Dreams From Our Founding Fathers was published before his first campaign for Congress in 2011, and The Courage to Be Free was published in 2023.
Early life and education
Ronald Dion DeSantis was born on September 14, 1978, in Jacksonville, Florida, to parents Karen DeSantis (née Rogers) and Ronald Daniel DeSantis. His middle name, Dion, extols the singer Dion DiMucci, and his family name has different pronunciations. His mother's family name, Rogers, was chosen by her grandfather upon immigrating from Italy. All of DeSantis's great-grandparents immigrated from Southern Italy during the first Italian diaspora. His parents and all of his grandparents were born and grew up in Western Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio.
DeSantis's mother worked as a nurse and his father installed Nielsen TV-rating boxes. They met while attending Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, during the 1970s and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, during that decade. His family then moved to Orlando, Florida, before relocating when he was six years old to the city of Dunedin in Florida's Tampa Bay area. His only sibling, younger sister Christina, died in 2015 at age 30 from a pulmonary embolism. He was a member of the Dunedin National team that made it to the 1991 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. DeSantis attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School and Dunedin High School, graduating in 1997.
After high school, DeSantis studied history at Yale University. He was captain of Yale's varsity baseball team; he played outfield, and as a senior in 2001 he had the team's best batting average at .336. DeSantis was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and of the St. Elmo Society, one of Yale's secret societies. While attending Yale, he worked a variety of jobs, including as an electrician's assistant and a coach at a baseball camp. DeSantis graduated from Yale in 2001 with a B.A., magna cum laude.
After Yale, DeSantis taught history and coached for a year at Darlington School in Georgia, then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2005 with a Juris Doctor, cum laude. At Harvard, he was business manager for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
Military service
In 2004, during his second year at Harvard Law, DeSantis was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Navy and assigned to the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG). He completed Naval Justice School in 2005. Later that year, he reported to the JAG Trial Service Office Command South East at Naval Station Mayport, Florida, as a prosecutor. He was promoted from lieutenant, junior grade to lieutenant in 2006.