DeSantis Signs Law Allowing Himself Run For President Without Resigning

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed SB 7050 into law on May 24, 2023. SB 7050 is an elections bill that includes a provision removing Florida’s resign-to-run requirement for presidential and vice presidential candidates. DeSantis also filed to run in the 2024 presidential election that day.

Under the new law, president and vice president are the only government offices explicitly exempted from Florida’s resign-to-run law. Before the passage of SB 7050, Florida’s resign-to-run law seemed to require candidates running for any government office, including president and vice president, to resign from office.

The law was amended in 2018 to say, in part, “any officer who qualifies for federal public office must resign from the office he or she presently holds if the terms, or any part thereof, run concurrently with each other.” This appeared to reverse a 2007 amendment to the law that removed the resign-to-run requirement for presidential and vice presidential candidates.

State Sen. Travis Hutson (R) introduced the resign-to-run removal amendment on April 25. The Florida State Senate voted to approve the full bill 28-12 on April 26, and the Florida House of Representatives approved the bill 76-34 on April 28.

In addition to Florida, four other states have resign-to-run laws on the books: Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, and Texas.

Hours after signing the bill, DeSantis made his official presidential campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces with tech titan Elon Musk. Technical glitches prevented the governor from making his announcement until nearly half an hour after the event started. In one embarrassing user error on the part of Musk, who purchased Twitter on Oct. 27, 2022, the Twitter owner seemed to create jarring audio feedback by failing to mute himself.

Elon Musk and fellow tech entrepreneur David Sacks — who co-moderated the event — were widely ridiculed for claiming that the digital crowd of roughly half a million was “probably the biggest room that’s ever been assembled online”. In reality, YouTube has routinely hosted millions of simultaneous users for years and had indeed done so the same day for Sony’s Playstation Showcase, which garnered nearly four and a half million views by time of publication.

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Edited by A.J. Cooke and Sterling Creighton Beard