As Hurricane Milton bears down on the U.S, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has accused Kamala Harris of politicizing storm preparations, after the vice president called the Republican “selfish” for reportedly ignoring her calls.
“We’ve been on emergency footing around the clock, two weeks straight,” DeSantis told Fox News on Tuesday. “That’s been my sole focus. My focus has not been on dealing with Kamala Harris. I saw the news report. I didn’t know she tried to contact me. It’s not about you, Kamala. It’s about the people of Florida.”
The governor then alleged that Harris never took an interest in Florida’s hurricane response until she began running for president.
“Why all of sudden is she trying to parachute in and inject herself when she’s never shown any interest in the past?” DeSantis said, adding, “I have zero time to entertain these political games.”
In fact, in 2022, Harris visited South Florida to announce $1bn in federal aid to prepare for extreme weather.
During a Tuesday appearance on The View, vice president Harris said she has always tried to work with leaders from all parties on disaster response, and said she made a point of reaching out to DeSantis because of the unprecedented threat from Milton.
“This one is going to be different,” she said. “That’s why I called the governor about what Florida has received in terms of impact. We have to have an agreement that at some point we all need to work together.”
“When I’m president, I will continue to call him and continue to see what he needs in terms of help,” she added.
The war of words traces back to news reports on Monday that DeSantis declined to speak with Harris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
“Kamala was trying to reach out, and we didn’t answer,” a DeSantis aide told NBC News, adding that the calls “seemed political.”
In response, the vice president accused DeSantis of “political gamesmanship.”
“Moments of crisis, if nothing else, should really be the moment that anyone who calls themselves a leader says, I’m going to put politics aside and put the people first,” Harris told reporters on Monday.
“It’s utterly irresponsible and it is selfish and it is about political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do,” she added.
The tension between the White House and the Florida governor’s office comes as Tampa prepares for the arrival of Hurricane Milton, which is expected to be the region’s worst storm in a century when it makes landfall tomorrow.
The state is also still rebuilding from the recent Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 20 people in the Sunshine State and initially left nearly 1m Floridians without power.
Partisanship has also inflected the Helene response elsewhere, with top Republicans like Donald Trump spreading conspiracy theories about disaster aid in places like North Carolina, including that federal officials were ignoring GOP-leaning locales.
