Republican Representative Matt Gaetz has become a national face of the GOP, and recently denied an NBC News report that said he will ditch his congressional seat to run for governor of Florida in 2026 due to incumbent Governor Ron DeSantis- who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024- being term-limited.
Gaetz said he supported DeSantis as governor and that his focus was on a successful Donald Trump presidential campaign, later telling Newsweek that the report was “overblown clickbait.”
Florida voters approve of the job Gaetz, 41, is doing in Congress, according to a poll published last week by the Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab.
The poll was conducted between October 27 and November 11. This encompasses the period of chaos in the GOP following the Gaetz-led ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. Mike Johnson, a staunch conservative from Louisiana, was eventually elected to the role.
Gaetz, a lawyer, was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016 to represent Florida’s 1st congressional district—the state’s most Republican district and one of the reddest districts in the nation, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index.
The district represents Florida’s western panhandle and includes all of Escambia, Okaloosa and Santa Rosa counties, and portions of Walton County.
