Casey DeSantis sits cross-legged on a couch in jeans and a long-sleeve lavender top. Her thick, dark hair is swept to one side, carefully curled at the ends. The light behind her is soft.
"I get asked all the time: Who is Ron DeSantis?" she says as piano music plays in the background. She introduces Ron as a hardworking, bootstrapping Floridian and the father of her children. Then, her voice gets lower. "But if you want to know who Ron DeSantis really is, when I was diagnosed with cancer and I was facing the battle for my life" — the music stops suddenly, and Casey continues — "he was the dad who took care of my children when I couldn't. He was there to pick me off of the ground when I literally could not stand. He was there to fight for me when I didn't have the strength to fight for myself."
Gone is Casey's typical polished newscaster voice. Instead she sounds as if she's holding back tears, though they never come. The DeSantis campaign told Insider that the ad, released in mid-October as the Florida governor's race revved up, and one of the most talked-about spots this campaign season, was unscripted — that presumably Casey ad-libbed it. Somehow, it is flawless.
Casey doesn't mention any of the Republican governor's more controversial stances: his feud with Disney, his crusade against what he calls "woke gender ideology," or the pending lawsuits alleging that he lured unsuspecting migrants to Martha's Vineyard. In Casey's story, Ron's combativeness is reframed as care. He's a fighter for their family and for the families of Florida; any other reality is carefully edited out.
In October 2021, after her breast-cancer diagnosis, Casey, now 42, briefly faded from view. But since an announcement in March that her cancer was in remission, she's been a constant at Ron's side. He's seen as a shoo-in for reelection; he almost never mentions his challenger, the Republican turned independent turned Democrat Charlie Crist. He doesn't mention Donald Trump either — a change from four years ago when he was endorsed by, and campaigned in lockstep with, the president. Ron has been described as "Trump with a brain" — someone who has channeled the GOP's pugilistic grievance politics and polished them up.
That polish is in large part thanks to Casey. In public appearances her sheath dresses and jumpsuits are perfectly tailored, her jewelry simple: pearl earrings or hoops, sometimes a silver cross necklace. Her Instagram page is filled with pictures of her hugging people in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, of her and her family at sporting events with their hands over their hearts pledging allegiance. In one of the most humid states in the country, she never seems to sweat. Even her stories of raising three small children in the governor's mansion, anecdotes about their coloring on the walls of the state dining room and singing into the security guards' microphones before dawn, are told with a practiced bemused expression.
Ron, 44, has by now been examined and reexamined by the press as a hypothetical presidential candidate. The New York Times Magazine suggested he might be the "future of the Republican Party"; the Financial Times labeled him Trump "without the drama"; and The New Yorker posited he could displace the 45th president as the "combatant-in-chief." Casey, on the other hand, is often mentioned in passing, framed as a political wife and mother. But Florida's first lady is more than a convenient helpmate to her husband's ambitions. Several people told Insider she's an equal partner, a masterful image maker, and a powerful confidant to a man at the forefront of GOP politics. If there were no Casey, there would be no Ron.
"It's clear she's the X factor," said Scott Parkinson, one of Ron's former chiefs of staff in the US House of Representatives. "They complete the political element that is Ron DeSantis. Without Casey, he would not be the same person."
The DeSantis double act, which often includes their three young children — Madison, 5; Mason, 4; and Mamie, 2 — is intentional, powerful, and highly scripted. When Hurricane Ian left swaths of Florida waterlogged and ruined in late September, it could have been a public-relations disaster for the governor. But it wasn't. Casey and Ron toured the devastation in matching outfits of jeans, navy blue Florida Division of Emergency Management jackets or vests, and white shirts. Even their hair was styled the same: dark brown, slicked back, no part. In one image, they wore the same knee-high white rubber boots. At a September press conference in Florida's Charlotte County, Ron described the state's hurricane-recovery efforts then handed the lectern over to Casey. She promised to get people the help they needed — through Floridians helping Floridians. Two weeks later, she announced she'd led a $45 million fundraising effort for disaster victims and launched a toy drive.
"There's an operating agreement between the two," said state Sen. Jason Pizzo of Miami-Dade, a Democrat and frequent DeSantis critic. "She is his rock, his biggest supporter. I get the sense she really believes in where he's going." He added, "We would not see Ron DeSantis outside of press conferences if he did not have a wife and kids."
Casey "totally reinvented" the role of Florida's first lady, said Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative and publisher of the influential news website Florida Politics. He went as far as to brand her the "co-governor." (Schorsch, whose wife was a special advisor to Crist, is supporting Ron's challenger.) Casey interviews prospective job candidates for her husband — a fact first reported in Puck. "Her interview was equally as thorough and tough, if not more so, and she took as much time as he did and cared about it as much as he did," a former DeSantis political staffer who interviewed with Casey before meeting with Ron told Insider.
Casey is a gatekeeper in her own right, Schorsch added, and staffers who want to demonstrate their proximity to power brag about how often they talk to her.
"It's very Hillary Clinton 1992-esque," he said. "You're getting the two-for-one deal here."
Ron DeSantis began clawing his way into the national spotlight in 2017 as a member of the US House of Representatives. He became a favorite on Fox News, railing against Robert Mueller's investigation and pushing for congressional term limits. In 2020, as Florida's governor, he defied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's coronavirus mask mandates and reopened schools, drawing still more national attention. (Florida has reported the third-highest COVID-19 death toll of any state, behind only California and Texas, and its death rate as a share of the population is higher than both those more-populous states'.) He's toed the line on election denialism and declared Florida "the place where woke goes to die."
Trump made headlines with his senseless sound and fury; Ron's newsmaking represents a more controlled swagger. And Casey is there with him, echoing his messaging through her own lens.
While Ron decried school masking policies, calling them "COVID theater," Casey wrote on Instagram that "parents should be the ones empowered to make the best decisions they can for the well-being of their children." When Ron signed into law legislation that critics had labeled the "Don't Say Gay" bill, Casey posted a video of the governor to Instagram countering that "kids should be able to be kids without having an agenda shoved down their throats." Her caption said: "Thank you @flgovrondesantis. Sincerely, a mom of a 5, 4 and 2 year old." When the Biden White House ripped Ron for "playing politics with human beings" after he sent planes of migrants to Massachusetts under what they say were false pretenses, Casey tweeted an ad featuring a mom who lost her son to a reckless driver living in the US illegally.
Whatever Ron does to seemingly tear Florida apart, Casey can stitch it back together. "I think she enables or fortifies him in these positions," Schorsch said.
Casey's particular touch has made her a favorite among her constituents. Guests at a party in St. Petersburg, Florida, over Memorial Day weekend were smitten. "We love Casey. She just had cancer," said the party's host, a Cuban immigrant. A person who worked with Ron noted that they "would often get calls in the office from Florida residents commenting on how much they love her."
Jill Casey Black has always been likable: popular, athletic, smart — an off-the-rack American girl. She did track, student government, and basketball in high school in Troy, Ohio. Her senior year, she was a member of the homecoming court, easy to spot in yearbook pictures with her wide, white smile.
Casey's father, Robert Black, was an ophthalmologist, and her mother, Jeanne, helped run his practice. Her older sister, Kate, was a figure-skating prodigy, winning the US Figure Skating Association's novice dance couples championship at 13.
The family set their daughters up to succeed. "She has never had to apologize for having thoughts and ideas," said a friend who's known Casey since third grade. (The friend requested anonymity to keep her relationship with Casey private.)
While Kate enlisted in the Air Force, Casey enrolled at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, where she majored in economics, minored in French, and competed on the equestrian team. Her coach there, Bob Story, told Insider that Casey joined the team as a novice but swiftly mastered the sport. Steve Maxwell, who owns Campus Equestrian magazine and is an avid follower of college competitions, told Insider that in 2000, Casey's freshman year, she placed fifth in her division at the Intercollegiate Horse Shows Association's national competition. She did even better at the 2001 IHSA Nationals, finishing second in a field of 15 and helping her school tie for third overall.
After a brief stint interning with Merrill Lynch, Casey moved to Florida right out of college where she became a general-assignment reporter and eventually an anchor for WJXT, Channel 4, in Jacksonville. She worked for the Golf Channel, hosting "On the Tee" and "PGA Tour Today." By 2013, she was working as a host and producer at First Coast News, which aired on NBC 12 and ABC 25.
At First Coast News, she produced an all-female roundtable show called "The Chat" and hosted "First Coast Living," a "View"-style talk show for locals. As a talk-show host, Casey frequently displayed a coffee mug touting the Club for Growth, an organization that supports abolishing the Department of Education and whose PAC endorsed the conservative firebrand Lauren Boebert during her 2020 campaign for a US House seat in Colorado. Toni Foxx, a Florida radio personality who also hosted "The Chat," described Casey as ambitious and focused. "She was and is such a talented producer," Foxx said.
In addition to her work at First Coast News, Casey produced an Emmy-nominated documentary about JT Townsend, a young Florida athlete whose career was cut short when a football injury paralyzed him from the neck down. Townsend went on to graduate from high school and college and started his own foundation. He died in 2013, at 26.
The sociocultural forces behind a young Black man's grievous sports injury — the questions of healthcare, of insurance coverage, of racism — are all gently glossed over in the film. The documentary deals with a difficult subject in a simple way: There is light and there is dark; there is life and there is death. But through it all are prayer and faith. This is the story of a world in which bad things happen out of the blue and it is the community, and not the state, that steps in to help. Tragedy becomes inspiration.
This is Casey's narrative — one that emphasizes individual resilience over institutional accountability. Our rights, as she wrote in a 2022 Instagram caption, "come from God — not from government."
And Casey's narrative is closely guarded. Most friends contacted for this story hung up the phone upon hearing her name. Several political aides politely agreed to talk at a later date, only to stop answering calls and emails. After days of phone tag, Casey's mother declined to speak about her daughter.
Casey and Ron met at a driving range at the University of North Florida. In Casey's telling, she was practicing her swing and looked over her shoulder to see whether she could grab an extra bucket of golf balls. Ron was behind her and thought she was looking at him. Sparks flew. "The two of them, from the moment they met, knew they would be a successful couple," a former friend and colleague of Casey's said, adding that Casey wanted to date someone who was her equal, who shared her goals and professional ambitions. "I think he was the type of person she was waiting for."
Casey's childhood friend first met Ron when she came to town for a Florida-Georgia football game while the couple were still dating. At first she didn't know his full name, she said, because Casey called him "D." (Ron used to pronounce his name "Dee-Santis," and friends called him "D" growing up. But over time, the pronunciation shifted. Now, the governor often uses the soft "D" — deh Santis. In 2018, the Tampa Bay Times suggested the change was a Casey rebranding.)
The childhood friend remembers Ron as "a nice, affable guy." Six months later, he and Casey were engaged.
Casey wasn't afraid to put herself and her relationship in the public eye — especially if she was the one controlling the narrative. WJXT ran a segment on Casey's search for the perfect wedding dress. She narrowed the options down to five and had viewers vote for their favorite online. While Casey told viewers she liked the one they picked, she ended up selecting a different dress altogether: a ruched V-neck gown by Pronovias.
In other moments, Casey could be guarded. In 2007, Ron was deployed to Iraq as a lawyer for SEAL Team One. The former friend and colleague of Casey's recalled that while Ron was abroad, he called into WJXT while Casey was working to surprise her. "She was noticeably uncomfortable," the person said. "I think she liked to keep her relationship private."
Ron and Casey were married on September 26, 2009, at the Walt Disney World Resort, with roughly 150 people in attendance, including Casey's WJXT colleagues. They exchanged their vows in the Grand Floridian's wedding pavilion. The reception was at Epcot's Italy Isola, in a nod to their Italian heritage. It rained at the tail end of the cocktail hour, two guests recalled.
The former friend and colleague of Casey's said the choice of venue was surprising because Casey was "not really a Disney person." (This year, Ron engaged in a bitter, public fight with Disney over his "Don't Say Gay" law.) But they said Casey "wanted something all-inclusive and put together" — a ready-made fairy tale.
A few years after their wedding, Casey accompanied Ron to Barack Obama's second inauguration. Though she attended as Ron's wife, she described the trip in a First Coast News segment, blurring the line between politician's spouse and news producer until it was nearly indiscernible.
Casey left First Coast News in June 2018, during Ron's campaign for governor, to spend time with her young family, she said. Ron, she added, supported her career and encouraged her in all she set out to do. What that career would become, she didn't say.
That November, Ron won the gubernatorial election. Two days later, First Coast News aired one of the few searchable clips of Casey: an interview in which she is the subject. In the segment, Casey talked about the day in June 2017 when a gunman targeting Republicans shot six people during practice for the annual congressional baseball game. Casey was at the station when the news broke. She knew Ron was at the practice, and she told First Coast News that day was one of the worst of her life. The couple's first child, Madison, was just over a year old, and their son, Mason, would be born a little more than nine months later. Describing the moment, she switched from first person to second, evincing the deep emotion of that day. "I don't think you can put words to what that does," she said. "That's your husband, that's your family, and you think about something like that happening."
Some of Casey's friends from her TV days said they lost touch with her after she left the industry. Foxx recalled that she and others learned of Casey's breast-cancer diagnosis from the news.
Schorsch, the former Republican operative, said that while most political holiday parties have rotating guest lists, he saw the same group of aides and lobbyists at the DeSantis Christmas party every year. Casey "knows what's required of her in her life to be successful," he said. "But at the end of the day, I think that she does keep that circle very small." He said he's no longer invited to the governor's Christmas party.
From the start, Casey was instrumental in shaping Ron's trajectory. During his bid for the US House seat, she was his primary advisor, one of Ron's former congressional staffers said. "She was definitely the only person that he trusted. He didn't listen to anyone else on the campaign," they said, adding, "Ron and Casey did the strategy — did everything."
When Ron joined the House, he told aides he wanted to be on Fox News as much as possible, a person familiar with his office told Insider. As governor, he built on his symbiotic relationship with the network, using it to craft his image as a conservative hero. All the airtime will be useful if Ron does decide to enter the presidential race. "He gets to set the bar," Adam Goodman, a veteran Republican media strategist, told the Tampa Bay Times. "All the other competitors, when they have their day on Fox, there's a measuring stick that they're going to be up against." And it was Casey who taught him how to contour his face for TV — how to make his message camera-ready.
On January 29, 2018, a seven-months-pregnant Casey stood at a podium in Boca Raton to kick off Ron's run for governor. She called him a man of honor — "someone who I've had the pleasure of watching up close, far away, in front of the cameras, behind the cameras, and at home with his daughter and soon-to-be son."
It's unusual for political spouses to introduce candidates at campaign rallies, and it's definitely unusual for them to do so at pivotal moments. Wives in particular are often relegated to the background, smiling and waving and not saying much. Former Gov. Jeb Bush's wife, Columba, was famously withdrawn from politics. But not Casey.
A few months later, Casey appeared in a campaign ad for the first time. In it, her hands rested gently on her postpartum stomach. She smiled wryly and said: "Everyone knows my husband, Ron DeSantis, is endorsed by President Trump, but he's also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids." The camera cut to Ron playing blocks with his daughter Madison and saying, "Build the wall," then reading to his infant son, Mason, from "The Art of the Deal." "People say Ron's all Trump," Casey concluded. "But he's so much more."
Ron told Dagen McDowell on Fox Business Network that he saw the ad as a way to introduce voters to his children and to Casey, whom he called "my best friend and best supporter." Yet it's clear the spot was designed to do what Trump himself did best: enrapture, enrage, grab some headlines, and trigger the libs. It worked. "Ron DeSantis has released an ad indoctrinating his children into Trumpism" read the Guardian headline. HuffPost called it "creepy," and even the libertarian bastion Reason labeled it "cringeworthy." State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat, tweeted, "Children don't come into this world knowing how to hate — they learn how from adults like @RonDeSantisFL."
Casey took the criticism in stride, pointing to the millions of dollars in attack ads against her husband and telling First Coast News, "We responded with humor." When put that way, Ron DeSantis doesn't sound like a cringey shitposter so much as a funny dad doing right by his family.
"She humanizes Ron, and humanizing Ron is a pretty difficult thing to do," a former DeSantis congressional aide said. "He is a pretty robotic person. She was the softer touch to everything he did. He can do the buzzwords, but she was the one at fundraisers talking to people and doing the face-to-face interactions much better than he ever could or ever will."
Ron has never been known for his personal interface. Every successful politician has advisors, a scrum of the loyal and the faithful. But Ron's isolation is political lore: The New Yorker reported that he often wore ear buds to keep people away. Politico reported that scarred DeSantis staffers formed a support group. (Phil Cox, Ron's senior campaign advisor, has called these characterizations "bullshit.") One of Ron's former aides told Insider that the governor was singularly focused on his job and his campaign and didn't invest in the relationship-building aspect of politics or develop a close rapport with staffers and colleagues.
But where Ron fails, Casey succeeds. Plenty of men who enter politics have the military, Ivy League, and conservative credentials that Ron does, Schorsch said. What they don't have, he added, is Casey to give them "a little spit polish" and to effectively manage their "public and private personas."
"Ron DeSantis would be a very good candidate for the St. Johns county commission if he did not have Casey DeSantis in his life," Schorsch said.
On May 10, 2022, it was the governor's turn to introduce his wife. Ron was at the beginning of his reelection campaign, and rumors about a White House run were churning through the media. But that day, he was there to announce Casey's clean bill of health. Since her breast-cancer diagnosis, the first lady had gone through six rounds of chemotherapy, surgery, and six weeks of radiation, and now she was back on the campaign trail.
As she took the podium, Casey was polished and radiant in a red blouse. "Governor, I don't know if this sounds very first ladylike," she said, "but damn, it feels good to be here." She urged the crowd to "fight like hell!" no matter what life threw at them. The message was clear: Casey was back, and she was going to battle for Florida and for freedom.
This summer, as Florida passed laws restricting the way teachers discuss gender identity and sexual orientation and barring transgender girls from girls sports, Casey launched Mamas for DeSantis, a group designed to mobilize nice, concerned, "fierce" mothers. These women wanted to protect their kids from mask mandates and "liberal indoctrination" in schools. Theirs was a politics of weaponized female grievance dressed in pearls and jewel tones, channeled by Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, and now, ever so gently, by Casey DeSantis. She always defends as though her kids and her family are personally under attack — a good producer knows how to shape a story.
Of course, Casey has policy initiatives of her own. As Florida's first lady, she focused on childhood mental health, developing tools and resources for struggling kids. Two weeks before Election Day, she announced new changes to the state mental-health program to build resilience and "grit" in children, a kind of bootstrapping approach to wellness.
When Ron was elected governor, he appointed Casey the chair of the Florida Children and Youth Cabinet, though she resigned the post after her cancer diagnosis. When she returned from chemotherapy and radiation, she announced more funding for cancer research and launched a new state website to connect people with medical care and stories of survival.
Casey hasn't spoken at length about her own cancer treatment. What was it like — those dark months? Was she always confident she'd live? Did she have moments of doubt and fear? We may never know; the DeSantis campaign repeatedly turned down interview requests.
Certainly no woman owes the world her vulnerability. Yet this is a woman who by all accounts closely helps govern the nation's third-largest state, tempering the sharp edge of her husband and his politics. And her political power will only grow along with her husband's career. Thousands of words have been written about whether Trump "made" Ron DeSantis, but few have asked how Ron knew what to do — perfect his makeup, script his ads, court the conservative world while maintaining his family-man image — to grab Trump's attention. Because of Casey, Ron could be in the White House one day.
It may not be clear what Casey owes us, but it's clear what she gives us: a perfectly controlled image of a powerful couple on the rise. If there is any division between the woman behind the scenes and the one we see in front of the camera, it hasn't shown itself yet.
All of Casey's accomplishments, charisma, and innate talent have plenty of people wondering about her future. Schorsch, for instance, predicted that if Ron didn't run for president in 2024 because of Trump, and is term-limited out as governor in 2028, then Casey could succeed him as governor.
For now, Ron holds the spotlight, the youngest state governor in America. His children are the youngest to live in the Florida governor's mansion in 50 years. Imagine if Ron DeSantis does enter the race for the White House — his young, beautiful family up against the oldest president in history. A conservative John F. Kennedy made possible by his stylish wife. That's a story that almost writes itself.
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