Bay Area fundraising tour

Ron DeSantis ends Bay Area fundraising tour by dumping on San Francisco 'riffraff'

Alex Shultz

After fundraising in a wealthy Bay Area enclave on Monday, Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made a stop in San Francisco to film the requisite “San Francisco is dying” campaign ad on a distressed street corner.

DeSantis, polling a distant second in the Republican primary behind twice-indicted Donald Trump, shot his ad on Geary Boulevard and Hyde Street, with a big pile of trash in the background. He referred to San Francisco as a “once-great city,” presumably hearkening back to 1964, the last time a Republican was mayor here.

“We came in here, and we saw people defecating on the street. We saw people using heroin. We saw people smoking crack cocaine,” DeSantis said. “You look around, and the city is not vibrant anymore. It’s really collapsed because of leftist policies. These policies have caused people to flee this area. They don’t prosecute criminals like they do in most parts of the country. And the wreckage has really, really been sad to see.

“I’ve seen so many businesses boarded up. I’ve seen so much riffraff just running around,” he continued, adopting the rhetorical stylings of a 1940s police officer. “It just shows you, these policies matter, leadership matters, they’re doing it wrong here. No wonder why we’ve had so many people move from San Francisco to Florida over the last few years. We gotta stop this madness. We need to restore sanity to this country.”

DeSantis’ ad was also another opportunity to thumb his nose at California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, with whom he’s had a long-standing public feud. DeSantis has joked that Newsom should just run for president already, given his insistence on wading into national politics, and Newsom’s counter of late is that Trump will crush DeSantis in the GOP primaries.

Like President Joe Biden, DeSantis was in town to raise lots of money. He rubbed shoulders with his high-society peers, far away from the riffraff, at the Woodside home of commercial real estate investor John Hamilton, according to Puck News.