“That means the world,” she said. “Just knowing that you were praying for me and my family, I can’t even begin to tell you what that means. And I know that I would not be sitting here if it weren’t for those prayers. So anybody out there who’s fighting the good fight, like I just had, have hope that you can beat it.”
But one of the questions she gets frequently is how did someone from Troy, Ohio, meet a man who would become governor of Florida.
The answer: by chance.
Casey DeSantis, whose maiden name is Black, worked for a local television station in Jacksonville, Fla. Ron DeSantis was JAG officer at the Navel Station Mayport.
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
They both happened to be on the same golf course hitting golf balls on the driving range. The governor said, “I thought she was checking me out.”
She wasn’t. At that time, she had eyes on some leftover golf balls that happened to be in the bay between them.
“They were like $10 a bucket,” she said.
The two ended up sharing those remaining golf balls, which led to a conversation, which led to a date. They started a relationship. Ron was deployed to Iraq, and when he completed that tour, they got married in September 2009.
They shared several stories of their lives with the partisan crowd, including how they canvassed neighborhoods together when Ron first ran for Congress in 2012. They also shared that they were married at Disney in Orlando, which Ron said, “That was the pre-woke Disney era, and it wasn’t my idea; it was her idea.”
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