DES MOINES, Iowa — All eyes are back on Iowa as nearly a dozen GOP presidential hopefuls are set to speak to more than a thousand Iowa GOP voters Friday night at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner fundraiser.
After a week that saw a crash and a campaign shakeup, Gov. Ron DeSantis, still polling second to former President Donald Trump, is looking to gain ground in the pivotal Hawkeye State with events scheduled through the weekend.
“I think that we're in good shape. I think [Iowa] has been great area for us, we're going to continue going out and meeting with individual voters in all these early states and that's going to be the focus,” DeSantis said in an interview with CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe.
Though in the past couple of weeks, a lot of the outside focus has been on the newly adopted Black history teaching standards in Florida and on the campaign trail, the governor is being questioned about it. A lot of the controversy stems in part because of instructions for middle schoolers to learn “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“How is it, that anyone could suggest in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to be subjected to this level of dehumanization,” said Vice President Kamala Harris during an event in Jacksonville last week. “It is false and is pushing propaganda,” she added.
The Florida Department of Education and DeSantis have defended the standards, which he says were crafted by more than a dozen scholars, adding critics like the vice president are intentionally mischaracterizing them.
“She tried to demagogue it by saying somehow that it was justifying slavery, which was totally the opposite. I mean they were very clear about the injustices. She's now being called out on that because she supported an AP African American History course, that had the same thing in it and didn't make a peep at that time,” DeSantis said.
The governor is referring to language used in the course framework for The College Board’s AP African American Studies course, which says enslaved people learned specialized trades and once free “used these skills to provide for themselves and others”
Earlier this year, the state received blowback for rejecting the course from being offered in Florida schools.
The criticism over the state’s standards is not just coming from Democrats, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the U.S. Senate’s only Black Republican member and a fellow presidential hopeful when asked responded, “slavery was really about separating families about mutilating humans and even raping their wives, I would hope that every person in our country and certainly those running for president would appreciate that.”
DeSantis responded to Scott in a press scrum Friday saying, “Part of the reason our country has struggled is because D.C. Republicans all too often accept false narratives, accept lies that are perpetrated by the Left. And to accept the lie that Kamala Harris has been perpetrating even when that has been debunked, that's not the way you do it."