SALENA ZITO: The great underestimation of DeSantis starts to unravel.

The Florida governor began the weekend Friday in Illinois as the keynote speaker at the Lincoln Day Dinner for Peoria and Tazewell counties. The Peoria Journal Star said he drew a crowd of more than 1,100 to the Peoria Civic Center.

Early Saturday morning, DeSantis started his first campaign event in Sioux Center, Iowa, as a guest at Rep. Randy Feenstra’s annual Feenstra Family Picnic, spent time greeting folks at a classic car museum, stopped at a Pizza Ranch, and finished out the day at an unplanned event, standing on a table with his wife at Jethro’s BBQ.

All of DeSantis’s headline events went off without a hitch. In that regard, they were very similar to speeches I attended several weeks ago that he gave in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, and Akron, Ohio, where he was greeted with robust support after delivering speeches that outlined his aspirations for the country, his accomplishments as a governor, and his promise to take on the cultural headwinds in our country.

DeSantis and Trump were scheduled on Saturday to be in Iowa, the state with the first-in-the-country contest for 2024, but Trump’s team canceled the event after the threat of a tornado warning. DeSantis took full advantage of his absence with an impromptu stop in the same area Trump was supposed to be, thus casting shade on the former president, who has spent months maligning DeSantis’s character.

DeSantis certainly shows more discipline than Trump usually does, and he’s scored important legislative victories on forward-looking issues. What he hasn’t done yet is win with voters outside of Florida.