Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he expects that if former president Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, were to lose the first Republican voting contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire, he won't accept the results. 

Trump never publicly accepted his loss in the 2020 election and has been indicted in two separate cases related to his alleged efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.

"He will say it's stolen no matter what. He will try to delegitimize the results. He did that against Ted Cruz in 2016," DeSantis said, referring to Cruz's victory in the Iowa caucuses. In remarks to reporters in New Hampshire Friday, DeSantis pointed out Trump had also tried to discredit the Emmy Awards for years after his show, "The Apprentice," failed to win any awards.

"I don't think there's been a single time he's ever been in competition for something, where he didn't get it, where he has accepted [it]," DeSantis added. "I think that that's to be expected, but I don't think people are gonna buy it."

DeSantis and the rest of the GOP field trail Trump by double digits in both Iowa and New Hampshire polling. 

In a response, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said DeSantis "is acting out on his Lincoln Project fantasies and doing his best impression of a Never Trumper by reciting Democrat talking points peddled by Crooked Joe Biden and his campaign."

"When Ron's political career is finished in a few weeks, he can start moonlighting as a Democrat surrogate because he's showing everyone his true colors," he added. 

In 2016, although he won the Electoral College, Trump complained without basis on Twitter that he had also "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally" because there was "serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California." 

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes that year. 

In the federal indictment related to the last presidential election, Trump is accused of participating in a scheme to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power after he lost to Joe Biden. Trump and six unindicted, unnamed co-conspirators are accused of knowingly spreading lies that there was  widespread "fraud in the election and that he had actually won," ultimately leading to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Trump denies any wrongdoing.

And in the state indictment, Trump and 18 others are accused under Georgia's RICO law of coordinating an effort to thwart proper certification of the state's 2020 presidential election. Trump denies the allegations in this case, too.

When DeSantis was in Congress, he was a staunch Trump ally and initially remained so after he was elected governor in 2018.

For some time, DeSantis would not clarify if he believed the 2020 election was rigged, as Trump does. Asked in June 2022 about it, DeSantis pivoted to touting that Florida had "the best-run election in this state [than we've] probably ever had."

But as a presidential candidate, he has not echoed Trump's contention that the election had been rigged. 

"Of course he lost," DeSantis said of Trump in an interview with NBC News in August.  

Later that month in Iowa, DeSantis said, "I've said many times that the election is what it is. All those theories that were put out, did not prove to be true." 

He has criticized changes to mail ballot laws implemented by states during the pandemic and leading up to the 2020 election. But when asked by voters about the possibility of fraud in the 2024 election, he often says he'll take advantage of each state's specific ballot access practices, like ballot harvesting, and mail and early voting, even though he has criticized them in the past.

"That is not the way an election should be run," he said earlier this month in Iowa. "But if that's the law, I'm doing all of that. I'm not going to let the Democrats harvest ballots and us just complain about it. I'm not gonna fight with one hand tied behind my back." 

Grace Kazarian contributed to this story.

In:
• Donald Trump
• Ron DeSantis

Aaron Navarro

Aaron Navarro is a CBS News digital reporter covering Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign and the 2024 election. He was previously an associate producer for the CBS News political unit in the 2021 and 2022 election cycles.

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