Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s already trailing Donald Trump by a lot in the GOP run for president, lost a voter on Thursday after a conversation about the Israel-Palestine conflict. (Watch the video below.)
“You had my vote, but you don’t now,” Ron Lahout, an Arab American Republican local ski shop owner, told DeSantis at a market in Littleton, New Hampshire.
DeSantis had just recounted the Hamas rampage that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and criticized Palestinians in Gaza for aligning with the militant group, The New York Times reported.
That’s when Lahout chimed in during an exchange shared by CBS News’ Aaron Navarro.
“Well, Ron, what do you think about the annihilation and the decapitation of all the Palestinians in Gaza right now?” Lahout, 65, asked.
“They are not decapitating babies’ heads,” DeSantis said of Israel’s forces. “They are not intentionally doing that.”
(Unconfirmed reports of Hamas beheading Israeli babies have made the rounds.)
“They are blowing up entire residential buildings,” Lahout said of the Israeli retaliation in Gaza.
DeSantis argued that the Israelis warned civilians in Gaza to leave before the shellings and that Hamas has told them to stay because “Hamas wants them to be human shields.”
“How many other armed forces give warnings to get out?” DeSantis asked.
Lahout, who mentioned he worked in Gaza refugee camps in the 1980s, countered that he didn’t “condone the killing of any innocent civilians.”
“And I don’t condone what Hamas did in the kibbutzes,” he continued. “But Israel is doing the exact same thing with Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a radical, right-wing, crazy person. And I see hundreds of Palestinian families that are dead, and they have nowhere to go because they can’t leave Gaza because no one’s opening their borders.”
DeSantis replied: “Why aren’t these Arab countries willing to absorb some of the Palestinian Arabs?”
DeSantis talked over Lahout as the local man tried to answer with historical context.
Finally, Lahout informed DeSantis that he had lost another supporter.
DeSantis trails GOP frontrunner Trump by dozens of points in the polls, and he’s apparently trying to make up ground by attacking the ex-president for his criticism of Netanyahu and praise of Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.
“Terrorists have murdered at least 1,200 Israelis and 22 Americans and are holding more hostage,” DeSantis wrote on social media, “so it is absurd that anyone, much less someone running for President, would choose now to attack our friend and ally, Israel, much less praise Hezbollah terrorists as ‘very smart.’”
Israel’s counter-offensive in Gaza in advance of a possible ground assault has pushed the death toll on both sides into the thousands.