Ron DeSantis’s political woes have deepened further in the wake of the surprise resignation of a chief strategist at a leading campaign fund dealing yet another blow to the rightwing Florida governor’s rapidly waning 2024 presidential hopes.
Jeff Roe, the chief strategist for the DeSantis-backing Super Pac Never Back Down, said he was stepping down from the $269m fund that was billed as a novel application of campaign finance laws that prevent the integration of a Pac and its spending with a candidate’s campaign.
Roe stepped down weeks before DeSantis’s first big test in Iowa in the Republican presidential nomination race, where he is currently battling the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for second place behind the overwhelming frontrunner, Donald Trump.
DeSantis’s approval has dropped from 18% to 17% between November and December while Haley grew from 12% to 15% as likely Iowa caucus-goers’ first pick, according to the latest Iowa State University/Civiqs poll. Fifty-four per cent of Iowa Republicans polled said Trump was their first pick.
“I can’t believe it ended this way,” Roe said in a statement posted on X. He said he was “so proud to have worked alongside these men and women at NBD 24/7 the past nine months to save the country. Good luck the next 28 days and a wake up. I’m so sorry I can’t be there with you.”
Roe is only the latest and perhaps most significant departure from Never Back Down, which has run a vast door-knocking and get-out-the-vote operation as well as coordinating spending on political advertising. It was seeded with more than $80m from DeSantis’s political accounts this year.
The departure came hours after the Washington Post pointed to disputes between the fund and the Tallahassee-based campaign, including accusations of “mismanagement and conduct issues, including numerous unauthorized leaks containing false information”.
“The team in Tallahassee could not understand how NBD’s staff could not forfeit their own brand and desire for control,” a person said to be familiar with the campaign’s thinking told the Post. “It was like men are from Mars, women are from Venus during the first months of the campaign.”
Roe, who previously ran the Texas senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign and worked as an adviser on the election operation of the Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, said the description in the story were false but he “cannot in good conscience stay affiliated with Never Back Down given the statements”.
Over recent weeks, senior members of the fund have been fired or resigned, including the group’s chairman and its communications director. DeSantis’s Florida allies have created a new Super Pac, Fight Right, which had earned the public blessing of the DeSantis campaign.
Never Back Down has been hit with accusations that contacts between DeSantis’s campaign and a network of outside groups were blurring the lines of what is legally permissible.
Several people cited as familiar with DeSantis’s political network said that the governor and his wife had expressed concern about Never Back Down’s messaging as his Iowa poll numbers stagnated. Those concerns were reportedly transmitted to members of Never Back Down’s board.
DeSantis’s campaign has denied any wrongdoing.
DeSantis began the 2024 race with a high profile and a widespread expectation he would pose a dangerous threat to Trump who is hampered by multiple legal woes. But his campaign stuttered early on and has so far failed to break through, either nationally or in key early-voting states.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
