Ron DeSantis flounders after cash-strapped campaign fired half its staff, top brass were at each other’s throats and big GOP donors fled over his war on woke
Ron DeSantis’ campaign is coughing up blood, say several individuals who have or are doing work for the Florida governor’s ongoing search for the Oval Office, according to NBC.
Last week, the popular conservative governor was rejected by (most) Republican voters in Iowa in favor of a new Trump nomination.
The result wasn’t unexpected, but still stung in a campaign that sunk most of its efforts and resources into the first-in-the-nation state, only to fall far behind and uncomfortably close to a third-place finish .
It was a campaign full of blunders, including viral videos of DeSantis laughing and deciding to announce a move on Twitter, which was riddled with glitches and technical problems.
They have bled staff and donors as DeSantis continued to push for a wake-up call and fall at the polls.
A former adviser to the DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down told NBC about the campaign: “When they decided to do the Twitter Spaces launch, maybe I knew at that moment that they were stupid.”
The once shiny and hopeful idea of ββa DeSantis campaign was at its peak in the weeks following his astonishing 20-point victory in the state of Florida in November 2022 β the presidential campaign never came together as well as it seemed at the time.
Now, days before the New Hampshire primary, where DeSantis is expected to come in third place (of the three remaining candidates), former supporters are hoping for a quick end to the campaign
Despite the struggles, DeSantis maintained until the end that he would win Iowa. He toured the state to meet with voters and received the support of both the state’s highly popular governor, Kim Reynolds, and influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats.
But his play on retail politics, often rewarded by Iowa voters, failed to deliver for the 45-year-old father of three.
The New Hampshire primary is this week, but DeSantis has all but ignored it. βWe haven’t spent a lot of money here,β he told Fox News from the Granite State last week.
βNikki Haley is spending an inordinate amount of money here,β he added, noting that Donald Trump is benefiting from New Hampshire’s momentum in Iowa.
After New Hampshire, where he will likely finish third of three, DeSantis’ team will focus on South Carolina, a Trump-loving state where Haley served six years as governor.
Now that it’s becoming a bitter reality, not a probability, that DeSantis can’t beat Trump, his only remaining hope for the nomination is that something will knock the front-runner out of contention.
One supporter told NBC that as he has long said publicly on the campaign trail, DeSantis “believes there are multiple scenarios in which Trump would not be the nominee.”
Trump is vibrant and charismatic β perhaps in a way that DeSantis is not β but he is old and that makes his candidacy inherently risky and unpredictable.
But more importantly, the former president remains in serious, ongoing legal trouble, which won’t stop him from winning the nomination, but could potentially prevent him from accepting the nomination.
DeSantis is positioning himself at this point in the race as the strong alternative to the frontrunner if for some reason he becomes unavailable to run.
Needless to say, this is not the way things would turn out for the man who won the previously purple state of Florida by 20 points for re-election in 2022 and seemed poised to give Trump a serious challenge.
DeSantis has taken on Nikki Haley and scored a win against her Iowa camp, but whether he can beat her in her own home state of South Carolina remains to be seen
Vivek Ramaswamy (left), who dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucus, immediately endorsed Donald Trump and is likely to become a campaign surrogate
Some speculate that DeSantis is holding out for now due to the potential that Trump could drop out due to unforeseen circumstances related to his age or legal troubles
A month after his unprecedented victory in Florida, polls showed DeSantis beating both Trump and Biden in potential election cycle matchups.
At the time, support for Trump appeared to be waning after another tough election cycle for Republicans β at least for those outside the state of Florida.
DeSantis was positioned as the heir apparent of Trump’s Republican Party, but the chances of Trump actually withdrawing never seemed very high.
There was a point at which DeSantis was so significantly hogging Trump’s numbers that a compelling argument could clearly be made, and was made to key backers, for his candidacy.
But he would wait another six months before officially running for office. Momentum had already been lost, and a stuttering, disappointing campaign rollout on Elon Musk’s newly revamped Twitter spaces was a bad omen for what was to come.
βA total launch failure,β is how one former DeSantis adviser described it.
βThis thing blew up on the launch pad,β he continued. An appropriate metaphor considering the announcement was presented by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who certainly has experience with such things.
It didn’t take long after the messy start to May 2023 to cause unrest among the ranks of the DeSantis campaign and super PAC.
Personality clashes would spark thousands of lawsuit stories that became a central theme in media coverage of the DeSantis camp, and the fights never really materialized.
NBC reports that the finances of both the DeSantis campaign and Never Back Down were mismanaged to varying degrees. But bad decisions led to several cycles of hiring and firing, which were widely reported as a bad look.
Ron and Casey DeSantis (left) put almost all their campaign eggs in the Iowa basket and fell tragically short
Trump, for whom DeSantis once looked like he could pose a real threat, is heading toward the Republican nomination
And then came the money problems.
According to the NBC report, when momentum within the campaign began to stall (which was almost immediately), DeSantis began to struggle to raise money directly for his team.
Notably, Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who had previously supported DeSantis’ political efforts, withdrew from the campaign, reportedly due to the governor’s focus on “culture war” battles.
DeSantis tends to side with social conservatives, which may have been a problem for him during these primaries.
βThe loss of Ken was great,β one donor told NBC. “And the bigger problem was that it sent a signal to others.”
Right now, morale is low at DeSantis headquarters. Employees aren’t sure when the road will end for DeSantis, but they’re hoping sooner rather than later.
‘It’s finished. He’s not going to win. βIf you are serious about Trump not being the nominee, I think all the energy goes to Nikki Haley, even though it pains me to say it at this moment,β said a former Never Back Down employee.
“I’m just really tired of all this infighting.”