The Florida Republican Governor REALLY has a campaign that has gone sideways…..
His experimenting effort to do campaign financing ‘his way’ has fallen apart….
Washington Post: “Under campaign finance rules, the two operations could not privately coordinate most of their spending. But they aimed to function as an integrated whole — built with the candidate’s approval, advised by a single law firm, overseen by a board that included DeSantis confidants and seeded with $82.5 million that DeSantis had raised for his gubernatorial reelection. It was the first time a major campaign ceded so much of its operations to an entity it could not legally control.”
“With just weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, the experiment is now in tatters. The super PAC that funded almost all of the DeSantis advertising and field programs and much of the candidate’s travel and events has been sidelined by the people that created it.”
“On Saturday evening, about four hours after this story first published, Jeff Roe — a key architect of Never Back Down’s strategy — joined a string of departures, announcing he was resigning and further deepening the group’s tumult.”
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More on the Washington Post view….
Five other senior officials have left Never Back Down since late November. Three officials with Roe’s firm were fired, and the board chairman and the founding chief executive both resigned, amid internal concerns about legal compliance. A verbal conflict from inside the group’s Atlanta offices became public, as did DeSantis’s own misgivingsabout the outside group’s leadership. The governor and his campaign staff have been frustrated by reporting on the drama around Never Back Down and critical of the group’s ad strategy, with DeSantis’s second campaign manager, James Uthmeier, publicly instructing donors to give elsewhere for TV ads.
Rather than a new playbook for presidential campaigns, the broader DeSantis project has exposed the dangers of depending on emerging loopholes in campaign finance law that allow candidates to turn over traditional election efforts to groups that can take donations of any size from corporations or individuals.
“The super PAC model of winning a presidential primary, I think, is staggering, if not on the ropes,” said one DeSantis donor. “And if you’re going to have a successful presidential primary campaign you need to be able to raise hard dollars.”….