Welcome to Trail Mix, a fun but nutritious snack for your election news diet. See something interesting on the trail? Email me at jake.lahut@thedailybeast.com.
This week, we follow the Ron DeSantis campaign spiral to an unexpected state. Plus, we preserved a pro-DeSantis’ influencer’s now-deleted tweet broadcasting approved talking points.
With his presidential campaign laying off dozens of staffers, struggling in the polls, and already promising a full-fledged reboot, Ron DeSantis might find himself lucky to survive the summer.
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Against that dire backdrop, the Florida governor’s most important ally—an outside super PAC functioning as his shadow campaign—appears to be making a baffling strategic move.
According to internal communications obtained by The Daily Beast, the Never Back Down PAC has been telling new field organizing staffers that they can either pack their bags for Iowa—or for Texas.
Iowa, of course, is the first-in-the nation caucus state and a must-win for DeSantis. But Texas does not vote until next year’s Super Tuesday, March 5—at which point the GOP nomination might be firmly in Donald Trump’s hands.
Yet, Never Back Down has told new hires that if they do not want to be dispatched to knock doors and canvass voters in Iowa, their only other choice is Texas, according to the communications, which were shared by a Republican source with direct knowledge of the situation.
The source noted that Never Back Down had previously invested in staffing up the early states—chiefly Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina—but as the DeSantis campaign’s finances have faltered, the deep-pocketed super PAC has been assuming an increasingly larger share of the organizing work.
Earlier this month, however, Never Back Down appeared to be trying to head off the spending crisis that hit the campaign, putting some upcoming hires on hold in an effort to conserve resources, according to the source and internal communications. And the Lone Star State was one of two priorities.
Unlike Iowa, a small state where even modest investments in grassroots organizing can pay big dividends, vast and populous Texas would be an expensive and difficult place in which to make inroads, especially at this stage of the primary.
For the PAC to funnel their organizing muscle to a challenging state DeSantis may never see is, of course, about as high-risk a strategy as there is.
“Trump is obviously pummeling DeSantis, but putting it all on Texas is an interesting strategy because they’re burning cash and falling in the polls,” a GOP strategist without a candidate in the race told The Daily Beast. “So to focus on a later state like Texas when your campaign is on life support and you’ve had to reboot it twice, that’s not a good place to be.”
To an unusual degree for a presidential candidate, DeSantis is outsourcing key campaign projects, like field organizing, to a supportive outside super PAC, whose main function is typically to blanket states with TV ads backing their candidate.
Under campaign finance law, the super PAC and the DeSantis campaign are prohibited from coordinating on strategy and have to communicate with each other through signals like leaked memos to the press.
Since DeSantis launched his bid in May, there have been signs that his campaign and super PAC—which is run by top-tier GOP operatives—have not been on the same page. This week, Politico reported there has been “rising tension and distrust brewing” between the two camps, an assessment both sides denied.
But the super PAC’s move to make a beeline for Texas looks like the kind of presumptive miscalculation that has pushed DeSantis’ official campaign to the brink, long before any votes are cast in the 2024 primary.
Rival campaigns were bemused to hear the DeSantis team is targeting Texas instead of investing in other key early states, with some speculating that his campaign will collapse long before Super Tuesday.
“There is buzz they won’t make it to Iowa,” a senior staffer at a rival campaign told The Daily Beast.
Spokespeople for the DeSantis campaign and Never Back Down did not return requests for comment.
Other GOP operatives found the move to be another sign of arrogance from the broader DeSantis operation. An early state Republican briefed on the Texas push remarked that it shows that the governor’s team “would rather fly people in than deal with the grassroots.”
A top adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign recalled they had “probably only 40 people on staff total” during that primary and relied heavily on local organizers and media outlets to maximize their impact with minimal overhead.
The DeSantis team, however, “burned through cash at an alarming rate,” the adviser continued.
“The monetary aspect of a primary campaign is not the more you spend, the more you’ll win by,” the Trump alum said, pointing to Jeb Bush’s 2016 crash as a prime example. “It’s an art, and I don’t think the DeSantis people have a paint brush.”
Despite the flawed strategic logic, Texas does have some potential upside as a proverbial Alamo for DeSantis.
The governor has made hardline immigration rhetoric, and stunts like flying migrants to blue states, hallmarks of his political brand, which could appeal to Texas GOP voters. In late June, he made a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas ahead of his campaign’s first policy rollout, listed on the campaign website as “Mission: Stop the Invasion.”
Since entering the race, DeSantis and his supporters have tried to outflank Trump on immigration, emphasizing the former president’s failure to finish building the southern border wall.
Texas is also chock-full of primary delegates and could help the DeSantis campaign survive later into the contest, should he make it past the early state gauntlet. As previously reported by The Daily Beast, the Trump campaign has been preparing for a contested convention in July 2024, in part because of the former president’s mounting legal issues that could complicate his path to the nomination.
Whether DeSantis can make it through next summer—much less this one—is, of course, the biggest question.
Now that his campaign has been trimmed down by nearly 40 people—accounting for more than 30 percent of its initial headcount—Never Back Down’s deeper cash reserves and bench of ex-Trump talent will have to bear the burden of dragging DeSantis back from the depths, a taller task given the limits placed on a super PAC.
“I think it’s very normal to fire staff,” the former Trump adviser said. “I mean, look at us through 2015 and 2016. But these constant reboots do not pin down consumer confidence."
Off the Beaten Path
Bill of goods. Right-wing pundit and Twitter influencer Bill Mitchell accidentally tweeted out “daily talking points” from the DeSantis campaign on Tuesday—then abruptly deleted them.
Mitchell posted screenshots of a document with the talking points—which he called “detailed, upbeat, and encouraging!”—laid out in newsletter-like style, complete with a pithy header name, “The Table Setter.” This edition detailed a Politico story about more than a dozen Utah state lawmakers endorsing the Florida governor.
After asking his followers on Twitter to subscribe to him for more updates on the talking points, Mitchell deleted his post.
Reached by email, Mitchell seemed to acknowledge the mistake, telling The Daily Beast he was unaware he was not meant to share the talking points in that format.
“I will be integrating them in my tweets from now on,” Mitchell said of the talking points.
Once a fixture of pro-Trump social media, Mitchell switched his allegiance to DeSantis for the 2024 cycle, making him one of the most high-profile MAGA influencers to do so.
Earlier in the week, however, Mitchell sent up a flare that all might not be well with his new candidate. In a Twitter Spaces audio chat, Mitchell said he told DeSantis press secretary Bryan Griffin “we’re really getting crushed on social media,” and asked if he could relay a message to CEO Elon Musk asking if the company could “do something” to help the governor.
New sheriff in town? Far-right former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke continues to tease a 2024 campaign for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin—a development in the key battleground state that could cause headaches for GOP brass.
In talk radio interviews and social media posts over the last two months, Clarke has touted his strengths as a potential candidate, attacked incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D), attacked potential primary rivals, scorched the GOP for trying to recruit rich candidates to run in Wisconsin, and overall played up the combative persona that is his hallmark.
Last week, right-wing talker John Fredericks had Clarke on his show, where he gushed over the ex-lawman’s allegedly overwhelming approval rating and practically begged him to run.
“This race between myself and Baldwin would be huge, nationally, the Senate could be hanging in the balance,” Clarke said. While he emphasized he was far from making a decision, he declared that if he ran, he’d win—and made a preemptive call for supporters to be ready to consider giving him money to run a competitive campaign.
Debate Club
With the first GOP primary debate less than a month away, the roster of candidates who will appear onstage in Milwaukee is coming into focus.
To qualify for the debate, the Republican National Committee is requiring candidates to have at least 40,000 unique donors and hit at least 1 percent support in a smattering of national and early primary state polls.
According to FiveThirtyEight, which crunched the numbers this week, six candidates have qualified so far: Trump, DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, former Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott, and former Gov. Chris Christie. (It remains unclear if Trump will show up for the debate.)
Former Vice President Mike Pence has satisfied the polling benchmark but not the donor requirement; it’s vice versa for North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who famously gave out $20 “gift cards” to people who donated $1 to his campaign.
For the rest of the field—like Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and former Rep. Will Hurd—failing to make the first debate stage will all but end their campaigns.
Campaign lit
Follow DeMoney. The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger revealed the dark money connections surrounding DeSantis’ low-key campaign manager.
Desert freeze. Democrats, wary of getting crosswise with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema as she mulls whether to run for re-election, are staying neutral for now in the state. Local activists call it a “dangerous” move, according to The Daily Beast’s Sam Brodey.
Terminally online. One of the many DeSantis staffers who got fired this week was none other than Nate Hochman, the twentysomething once considered an emerging force on the intellectual right. According to Axios, he was busted for making and then disseminating a DeSantis hype video that used Nazi imagery and received widespread blowback.
K Street dive. Beltway lobbyists are staying on the sidelines of the 2024 presidential race, fearing they might get frozen out of a potential second Trump administration for backing the wrong horse, Politico reported.
