One of the minor dramas underlying the major spectacle of Donald Trump’s comeback bid has been the steady unraveling of the once-powerful Ron DeSantis campaign, which is now holding on with grim determination to its one shot at temporary survival in Iowa. The candidate has rashly predicted victory in the caucuses, though a distant second-place finish is the only realistic positive outcome; anything less would presumably mean The End.
After the Florida governor’s big reelection win in 2022, some thought his 2024 campaign looked so intimidating that Trump might throw in the towel rather than challenge him. But once the race actually got underway, DeSantis’s chances of beating the 45th president looked increasing far-fetched.
So what has gone wrong? Well, a lot of things. The DeSantis campaign clearly underestimated Trump and the hold he has on Republican voters, particularly (as DeSantis has acknowledged) after the former president’s serial indictments. Its strategy of running to Trump’s ideological right to peel off MAGA voters has only made DeSantis less and less palatable to the non-MAGA Republicans backing other Trump rivals, whom DeSantis failed to marginalize. His heavy emphasis on an electability rationale backfired as Trump (and then Nikki Haley) outperformed him in general-election trial heats against Joe Biden. And the candidate’s own personality — half-con man, half-robot — has been a problem in settings where voters get to assess his authenticity up close.
But as the day of judgment in Iowa approaches, the problem in DeSantis-land that’s getting the most attention is the conspicuous collapse of his once-vaunted organization, which depended to an unusual degree on offloading core campaign functions to a super-PAC (named “Never Back Down”) that could receive unlimited contributions in exchange for keeping some distance from the candidate himself. This structure did indeed make it possible for Team DeSantis writ large to bank an awful lot of money (including tens of millions left over from his 2022 gubernatorial campaign) and plan a very labor-intensive early-state field operation. But Never Back Down also excessively depended on past Republican super-PAC-based campaign models. The results from that approach have ranged from mixed, like Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign (in which Never Back Down CEO Jeff Roe and many of his associates were prominent), to disastrous (the 2016 Jeb Bush campaign). One of the latter campaign’s veterans, Tim Miller (now an anti-Trump writer at The Bulwark), had a lot to say recently to the Daily Beast about the DeSantis operation’s flaws:
Though DeSantis is a flawed candidate, Miller said, Roe’s mistake with the PAC was doubling down on a “hybrid Jeb-Ted [Cruz] strategy eight years later,” and then “after it was clear the strategy was failing, they went out again to ask for more money.”
“I think there was a fundamental structural problem with having a strategist at a super-PAC — who can’t legally talk to the candidate — having so much control,” Miller said, “and having that strategist not be a close personal aide who has a close relationship with the candidate.”
The recent resignation of Roe from Never Back Down after DeSantis World figures dished to the Washington Post about the dysfunctional relationship between the campaign and the super-PAC more or less decapitated DeSantis’s do-or-die effort in Iowa. What’s left of Never Back Down is now confined to implementing the field strategy Roe and other departed figures set up. And while, as a knowledgeable Iowa Republican source put it to me, “the boots are still on the ground,” you have to figure it’s like a machine without an “off” button clanking toward an eventual burnout. It’s unclear whether that will happen before Caucus Night on January 15, when DeSantis may also benefit from high-profile endorsements like those he received from Iowa governor Kim Reynolds and conservative Evangelical pooh-bah Bob Vander Plaats.
All the attention the campaign/super-PAC dysfunction has attracted has led, ironically, to a campaign-watchdog organization complaint to the Federal Election Commission that there’s been too much coordination between Team DeSantis and Never Back Down. If that’s the case, it hasn’t been very effective.
The deeper problem may be a mismatch between the organization and a campaign that now depends on a degree of passion and commitment that is hard to muster after so much misfortune and infighting. Trump allies told the Daily Beast how they believed Roe — in bankrolling a DeSantis machine for the primary — “brought a mercenary army to a holy war.” Even if the Floridian’s candidacy survives Iowa, what will be left organizationally and psychologically for what would then be an insanely long-shot effort to overcome Haley in New Hampshire and her own South Carolina, and then catch Trump? He can’t claw back the many millions he channeled through a semi-defunct super-PAC run by people who are no longer on his team, pursuing a strategy that now looks obsolete. And it’s very late in the game to start all over. Maybe it would be merciful to Ron DeSantis and his more devoted associations if it all ended on January 15.
