Ron DeSantis promised a reset of his presidential campaign. Many of his campaign staffers are still waiting.
Several aides believe the Republican candidate’s bid lacks a coherent strategy and message, according to people familiar with the campaign. The operation is disorganized, with different teams pursuing their own agendas, and little communication between groups, said the people familiar, who requested anonymity to discuss the campaign’s inner workings.
Even posting an official message on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, is rife with bureaucracy, according to people briefed on the communications strategy. The governor and his wife, Casey DeSantis, must personally approve many of the messages — a process that can take two days and can slow their ability to respond to campaign developments, they said.
Some at the highest rungs of the campaign leadership consider the operation flawed and worry they are watching the Florida governor’s chances of winning the GOP nomination slip away.
Heralded as a viable challenger to front runner Donald Trump, DeSantis has slid in the polls, committed a series of missteps, and alarmed donors following his campaign kickoff with his spending and strategy. The candidate promised a reset but his own aides are frustrated and disappointed, and a sense of gloom permeates his Tallahassee headquarters, according to people familiar with the operation.
“The reset hasn’t exactly stopped him from making one unforced error after the other,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster who worked on DeSantis’s successful 2018 gubernatorial race.
“His issue is he just has a hard time dealing with people. He does not trust anyone other than his wife, Casey. You get this feedback loop between the two of them that no one can be trusted,” added Ayres, who said he had not spoken to DeSantis since that race. “He doesn’t have anyone on his campaign team who has been involved with the top levels of any presidential campaign.”
There is pressure to turn around the campaign before the first Republican debate on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee or by September, when the governor and his wife think most Americans will start paying attention to the presidential race, said a fund raiser who attended a recent DeSantis retreat for donors in Park City, Utah.
DeSantis fired one-third of his campaign staff, focused his travel to early voting states and started holding more intimate events and interacting more with mainstream media, but it is not clear to supporters or campaign officials if the reset has been sweeping enough.
Earlier: DeSantis Lays Off Third of Staff in Reboot of 2024 Campaign
“Everyone says, it is the campaign spending or the candidate’s discipline or the campaign staff’s inexperience. The answer is yes to all of it. There is not just one problem with the DeSantis campaign,” said Republican strategist Terry Sullivan, who ran Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“DeSantis was positioned better than any other challenger,” Sullivan added. “Since Jan. 1, he has done nothing to help his position and repeatedly done things to hurt it.”
A DeSantis official said the campaign is unified behind the message that it hopes to reverse the decline of the country and revive its fortunes. The official said the campaign has streamlined communications and increased collaboration in recent weeks.
“The campaign in this race that is struggling is the one that spent over $60 million on false attacks against Ron DeSantis and paying lawyers, and not a cent trying to beat Joe Biden,” said DeSantis communications director, Andrew Romeo. “By contrast, Ron DeSantis had a historic fundraising haul last quarter in which he outraised a current and former president, and our campaign remains laser-focused on taking his message to reverse the decline of this country and revive America’s future to as many voters as possible.”
One problem is that the campaign has failed to articulate why Republican voters should back DeSantis over Trump, according to allies and strategists. In focus groups, voters tell top DeSantis aides they want Trump for the nominee, even if they like DeSantis.
Several donors have been heartened in the last two weeks by the governor’s recent trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, where they say he has performed well and had more informal interactions with voters. They credit the governor with quickly and decisively laying off campaign staff once the cash crunch became apparent, and say taking on both Trump and Biden is no easy task.
They are looking forward to the governor rolling out a detailed foreign policy proposal, which he is expected to do before the first debate, with an energy policy proposal also in the works.
The DeSantis campaign has also stepped up its donor outreach in the past few weeks, arranging Zoom calls between top fund raisers and the campaign’s policy experts, said one top fund raiser and private equity executive, Jay Zeidman, and providing talking points for donors when controversy erupts, like the tumult in Florida over the African American history curriculum and its teaching of slavery.
“I think the reset is going great. He is getting out in front of the media a whole lot more and rolling out more policy proposals in the near future,” said Hal Lambert, a donor and Texas finance executive.
Some campaign officials want the reboot to go further. Donors and allies are urging the governor to stop talking so extensively about his record in Florida and culture war fights and broaden his message to appeal to the concerns of voters in places like Iowa.
Robert Bigelow, the biggest individual donor to the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down Super-PAC, told Reuters Friday he won’t give any more money unless the governor attracts new major backers and adopts a more moderate approach.
Earlier: DeSantis Pivots to Economy as Trump Strengthens Hold on GOP
But at three appearances in rural Iowa last Thursday, DeSantis relied on his Florida-centric stump speech, even as voters at the events said they wanted to hear him talk about the war in Ukraine, education, ethanol policy and immigration.
One donor said he and other supporters largely ignore the polls, which show DeSantis trailing Trump by a wide margin both nationally and in early voting states, because the governor has enough money to sustain his operation.
Supporters know the first debate will be a critical moment for DeSantis to introduce himself to Americans who are not familiar with him, several donors said, and they are eager to see how he stacks up.
