Some people say your super PAC is to blame, but it’s probably your own damn fault
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This entertaining story about how Ron DeSantis’s vaunted Death Star turned out like, er, the Death Star, shows there’s still some serious delusion within the DeSantis camp:
But few in Republican politics expected just how spectacularly this vaunted Death Star would ultimately implode.
“This will go down as maybe the worst-orchestrated effort in modern presidential history,” said a person familiar with Never Back Down’s operations.
After months spent out of sync with the campaign, a number of officials with Never Back Down have either resigned or been fired; top PAC strategists have cursed at each other and nearly come to blows in private meetings; and a new breakaway PAC has formed.
Most troubling of all, DeSantis might be sliding backward in his quest for the presidency despite the staggering sum of nearly $100 million that his PAC has spent to support him.
With DeSantis struggling to maintain even second place as the Iowa and New Hampshire contests near, the governor’s sympathizers are fully considering the consequences of his team’s big bet that they could outsource a huge primary victory to a super PAC.
“It is gonna cost us the election,” the DeSantis supporter, who later switched allegiance to a rival non-Trump campaign, recalled thinking to themselves several months ago, now describing the decision to outsource so many critical functions to Never Back Down as “a huge, huge mistake, and we could not afford one on this.”
“We’ll never win another election if we don’t stop PACs trying to become the campaign,” the former DeSantis supporter said.
Naturally, there has been plenty of blame to go around. After a Washington Post story dissecting the drama was published on Saturday, Jeff Roe—the power strategist who was supposed to orchestrate DeSantis’ victory—resigned from Never Back Down. He cited the organization’s statements to the Post, which he saw as disparaging toward his firm’s operatives who got fired from the PAC.
Talking about the marginal strategic and tactical decisions made by either your personal or shadow campaigns makes sense if you narrowly lose. When you’re struggling to beat Chris Christie in New Hampshire, I don’t think you’re focusing on the real issue. Fortunately, unlike a lot of inside-baseball reporting this one goes right there:
Yet even as dysfunctional as Never Back Down proved itself to be, other Republicans who spoke to The Daily Beast for this story pointed to DeSantis as a fundamentally flawed candidate, one who even the most well-funded operation could have only taken so far.
The idea that the Cedar Rapids Planetarium’s Led Zeppelin Laser Show was going to beat Led Zeppelin was always a huge longshot, and the only reason to think that this yutz was going to overcome the odds is the bizarre conviction of many elite Republicans that only the rarest of political ultra-talents can win a statewide election in Florida as a Republican. I hope Rick Scott runs in ’28 so we can see who gets blamed for him never getting any traction.