Thanks.

Nice round of applause for you. Before we get to the folks of the audience, governor, I want to ask a couple questions about the results in Iowa last night. As I mentioned, you were the second-place finisher in the Iowa caucuses last night, but Donald Trump cruised to a historic victory. What can you do to stop him from scoring another big win here in New Hampshire next week?

Well, look, I think that he was the former President of the United States. He's one of the most famous people that's ever been He was involved in American politics. There's obviously a lot of Republicans that appreciated his policies, but you still had roughly half of the Iowa caucus goers that made another choice. That shows me, that tells me that there is an appetite for a different leader. I think what I represent is somebody that has delivered on those key conservative policies that we've all been wanting to see in Washington, DC. In Florida, think about what we've done with our taxes and budget. Massive tax cuts. Every year, I've been governor, but budget surpluses, and we've paid down 25% of our state's total debt. That's all the debt we've had since statehood. I've knocked out 25% of it. Florida state government, low largest number of state employees per capita in the country. Our budget, even though we have millions of more people than New York, our budget is half the size of New York state's budget. I represent the fulfillment of a lot of what we want to do. Honestly, a lot what Donald Trump promised to do but didn't deliver, whether that's the border wall, whether that's reducing debt, whether that's draining the swamp.

I think as the field is narrowed, we're now in a position where people are going to be able to make even better choices. But I'll tell you, I've had almost $50 million spent against me so far in this presidential election campaign. That's more than has been spent against Donald Trump and Joe Biden combined. One's the current President, one's the President. But I think that should tell you something. They don't do that unless they think you're a threat. I think they see me rightfully as somebody that's going to go to Washington and not just rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, not just be a potted plant, but be a change agent. Because we all know Washington is not working for the American people, and we need to change that.

Governor, instead of flying directly here to New Hampshire right after the Iowa caucus, you immediately went to South Carolina, which doesn't hold its primary, as you know until the end of February. What message does that send to the folks here in New Hampshire?

Well, what it says is we had a town hall scheduled earlier today in the afternoon in New Hampshire, and then this. So I had the morning where usually candidates sleep in a little bit after a hard fought caucus. But I said, let's make use of that. We weren't sure how the weather was going to be here in New Hampshire. So we said, why don't we dip into South Carolina, make an appearance, and then come up to New Hampshire? So I think what it says is that we consider New Hampshire, South Carolina to both be important, as well as Nevada, by the way. Nikki Haley, for example, she didn't even get on the Nevada caucus ballot. So she has zero delegates out of Nevada. No matter what happens, I'm competing for delegates. And yes, the party went to a caucus to try to rig it for Trump. But as Republicans, it's not always going to be fair for us. You got to be willing to fight in all these situations. So we're doing that. I think all three of those states are all going to happen over the next six weeks. I think that'll be really, really important.

But clearly, the tradition here with first in the nation, I think, is something that's very significant. I agreed to do a debate with WMUR and ABC on Thursday and with CNN on Sunday. I'm the only candidate that actually agreed to come to New Hampshire to debate. What does that say? We have four candidates for President now, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, and me. I'm the only one who's not running a basement campaign at this point. You deserve as a voter to have the candidates come up, answer your questions in forums like this, have somebody like Wolf moderate a debate where you go back and forth. I think we've gone away from, and obviously, Donald Trump didn't debate the whole time, we've gone away from, Hey, let's let people make these decisions, to almost like, just let the media coverage determine what's going on. I don't think that's what we want in a Republican form of government.

Governor, I want to turn to our voters now who are here with us in the audience. I want you to meet Caleb Lombard. He's a college student here in New Hampshire who's originally from Hingham, Massachusetts. He's an undeclared voter who says he is currently undecided. Caleb, go ahead.

President Trump has a lot of ads highlighting your endorsement of Trump years earlier. How have you changed since then to become a better candidate for President than Trump and the others? Well, Caleb, thanks for that. It's interesting. Look, I'm a Republican. I know in 2016, Trump was controversial, but I looked at it, I was like, with Hillary, we're not going to get anything I believe in. With Trump, even though he had a liberal pass, I was like, maybe we can get some good stuff. To his credit, he did have some good policies. I support him, of course, for re-election in 2020, even though we had disagreements. For example, I disagreed with him turning over the government to Dr. Anthony Fauci during COVID. That created huge problems for this country. Donald Trump and Dr. Fauci plunged our nation into a lockdown. We in Florida dragged this country out of lockdown. We made sure schools were open. We made sure businesses were open. We opposed any type of forced COVID vaxes. Those are just big-time differences. Donald Trump did not fire Dr. Fauci, of course. I know most Republicans think that should have happened. His explanation was that, well, the media and the left would have gotten upset at him, which is absolutely true.

But you know what? As a leader, you got to be willing to stand in there, do what's right, and take the heat. I can tell you, when we were fighting in Florida in those early days to have schools open, have businesses open, all that, I was getting an immense amount of pressure from the media, attacked by the left, even by people in my own party. I had a lot of supporters of mine that said, You need to reverse course because they are fileting you and your political career isn't going to be long for this world. But you know what? A leader is going to put the interests of the people, their jobs and their freedoms, ahead of protecting his own political hide. So I was willing to let the chips fall where they may to do the right thing.

Governor Let me follow up. Earlier today, Governor Haley spoke to our Dana Basch here on CNN in New Hampshire today and said this about you. This is what Governor Haley said, He is not my concern. I'm going after Trump. What do you say to her?

She said in her campaign said that there's only two tickets out of Iowa, that the top two out of Iowa would be viable, and that she would finish at least second, and then that would be the race. Well, guess what happened? Even though she spent 100% of her money attacking me and not one red cent attacking Donald Trump, and I faced almost 50 million in total, I got in second, and she did not. That's just the reality. Here's the thing. In Iowa, you can actually show up as a Democrat on the day of the caucus, change your registration, and then participate in the Republican caucus. In New Hampshire, you can't do that. If you're a declared Democrat, then you can't vote in the primary. She was relying on her support for a lot of these Democrats changing their registration on the day of the caucus. Here's the thing. In Florida, I want a lot more Democrats than previous governors have been able to do. I think it's great in a general election to build a big tent, but to win a Republican primary, you can't rely on Democrats coming in and changing their registration. You got to be able to win core Republicans.

You got to be able to win Conservatives. She cannot do that. You look at a lot of those folks, because I spoke at these caucuses. I spoke at two caucus sites. A lot of the Trump voters were coming up to me saying, You know what? I'm for you in '28, or I love what you're doing. They know that I have a great record. None of them like Nikki Haley because they don't think she shares her values. She does not have the ability to build the type of coalition that you need to win a Republican primary period, much less take on Donald Trump.