{"id":215157,"date":"2026-04-01T22:27:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T22:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/215157\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T22:27:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T22:27:09","slug":"i-was-not-involved-desantis-on-gop-special-election-loss-tallahassee-reports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/215157\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I Was Not Involved\u2019 \u2013 DeSantis On GOP Special Election Loss \u2013 Tallahassee Reports"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" <\/p>\n

By The News Service of Florida<\/p>\n

Gov. Ron DeSantis didn\u2019t back Polk City Republican Josie Tomkow in the Senate District 14 special election she narrowly lost last week because she often didn\u2019t support his agenda, he told reporters Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was not involved at all in that race,\u201d DeSantis said during a bill signing event in Tampa. \u201cWhen I get behind a candidate I\u2019m telling voters that this is somebody that shares my values and shares our goals for the state of Florida. You have a candidate that does not do that I am not going to be supporting them and that\u2019s what happened in that race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tomkow was a former House member and part of the leadership team of House Speaker Daniel Perez, with whom DeSantis has clashed on several issues in the last 13 months.<\/p>\n

Notably, DeSantis has castigated House Republicans for initially rejecting his push for strict immigration enforcement measures at the state level, then overriding a handful of line-item vetoes (the Senate only went along with one of them) in 2025. Tomkow voted with House leadership in both cases.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe as Republicans have shown how you win and win big, and it\u2019s substance-driven, it\u2019s leadership-driven it\u2019s results-driven. When you steer away from that and you play some of the games you\u2019re not going to have as good of results, that\u2019s just the reality,\u201d DeSantis said.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By The News Service of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis didn\u2019t back Polk City Republican Josie Tomkow in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[232,234,233],"class_list":["post-215157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}