A key political group supporting Ron DeSantis’ presidential bid is preparing a $100 million voter outreach campaign so big it plans to knock on the door of every likely DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, and five times in Iowa’s initial caucuses.
The effort is part of a field organizing operation that aims to hire more than 2,600 field organizers before Labor Day, an extraordinary number of people for even the best-funded campaigns.
Top officials from the pro-DeSantis group, a super PAC called Never Back Down, have provided their most detailed version yet of their battle plan to help Mr. DeSantis, whom they believe they can sell as the only candidate to face and gain. the cultural struggles that are defining for the Republican Party in 2024.
The group said it hoped to have an overall budget of at least $200 million, including more than $80 million to be transferred from a former DeSantis state political account, for the daunting task of getting the Florida governor to top former President Donald. J. Trump, who has established himself as the top favorite of the former.
Mr. DeSantis is scheduled to enter the presidential race on Wednesday in a live audio conversation on Twitter, and the super PAC’s massive cash reserves are expected to be among the few advantages Mr. DeSantis has in the race. .
The group is already taking on many tasks that are often reserved for the campaign itself: getting endorsements in the early states of primary elections, sending mailers, organizing on campus, running television ads, collecting small campaign donations into an escrow account, and working behind the scenes to gather crowds for the governor’s events. hiring is underway in 18 states And officials said plans were in the works to bring together various pro-DeSantis coalitions, such as for voters who are veterans or those who focus on issues like abortion, guns or agriculture.
“No one has ever contemplated the scale of this organization or operation, let alone done so,” said Chris Jankowski, the group’s chief executive. “This has never been even dreamed of.”
In Iowa, the group has opened a training camp outside Des Moines, codenaming the facility “Fort Benning” after the former Army training outpost, with 189 graduates of a training program Eight days later, the first wave of an organizing army to follow. The knock on the door begins Wednesday in New Hampshire.
The effort echoes the “Camp Cruz” that Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign established near Des Moines.
As DeSantis prepared for his first campaign events as an outspoken candidate, his allies detailed for the first time the show of force they are mustering to advance their strategy to alienate Trump supporters.
Leading DeSantis’ super PAC is Jeff Roe, a veteran Republican strategist who was Cruz’s 2016 campaign manager. In an interview, Roe described an ambitious political apparatus whose 2,600 field organizers for the fall would be roughly double the peak of the entire staff of Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign.
Mr. Roe also anticipated some of the contrasts Never Back Down planned to draw with Mr. Trump. He argued that Trump had walked away from the key fights that motivate the Republican base and in which DeSantis has led, including on LGBTQ issues, schools and taking on corporate America.
“How do you beat Trump?” Mr. Roe said, noting Mr. DeSantis’s assertiveness on those cultural issues. “Well, you beat Trump by beating Trump. And where Ron DeSantis has beaten Trump is by doing what Republican voters most want him to do.”
Mr. DeSantis has steadily lost ground so far in 2023 and trails Trump nationally in polls by an average of 30 percentage points. And as the governor’s standing has declined, more candidates have entered the race, an ever-expanding field that could make the math even more difficult for DeSantis to unseat a former president with a significant base of loyalists.
Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, mocked the group by calling it “always backing down,” calling it “a clown show of epic proportions.”
“If DeSantis runs his campaign the same way his super PAC runs, he’s in for a rude awakening,” Cheung said.
Framing the 2024 race, Roe acknowledged that Trump has been “the leader of a movement.” But, according to Roe, it is only DeSantis who “has the opportunity to be the leader of the party and the movement.”
“That is a key difference,” he said. “I don’t think people fundamentally understand that you can be a leader of a movement and not be the leader of your party. Ron DeSantis has the ability to be both. Trump doesn’t.”
That’s a line Mr. DeSantis himself articulated last week in a private call with donors hosted by Never Back Down. He played with the money he has raised for state holidays, including in New Hampshire.
“Ultimately, politics is a team sport,” DeSantis told donors, adding a sideways look at Trump. “You know, there are some who raise money just for themselves.”
Republican primary voters, Roe said, view the battle against the progressive left as an existential struggle. He argues that Mr. DeSantis, not Mr. Trump, has led three key issues in that fight: taking on corporate America, engaging with what is taught in schools, and confronting changing norms and acceptance around guidance. sexual and transgender healthcare.
The governor’s clash with Disney touches on all three: fighting a major corporation over what started as a fight over classroom discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary schools. Mr. Trump sees Disney’s battle as futile and recently buoyed the company when he fired back at Mr. DeSantis.
Mr. Roe added that the intensity of the threat Republicans perceive to their way of life is what makes electability a more prominent issue for the party in 2024, and what makes Mr. DeSantis’ ability to fighting those fights and still winning in Florida is so attractive. .
“That is a manifest separation between the two candidates,” he said.
Unlike a candidate’s campaign committee, which has to adhere to strict limits on each donor, there are no limits on how much a super PAC is allowed to raise.
And it starts with unmatched financial power. Never Back Down is expected to start with around $120 million, $40 million it says it has already raised and $80 million from DeSantis’ former state political committee, a sum that’s equal to what Jeb Bush’s super PAC spent on fully in 2016.
But there are several legal impediments to this financial freedom. The people who run super PACs are prohibited from discussing strategy with the candidate or campaign staff. Of course, if Mr. DeSantis doesn’t agree with the super PACs’ decisions, he can always say so publicly and urge them to change course.
As a result, the larger super PACs, entities that have been around for the past 12 or so years, have often essentially become independent vehicles for buying expensive television advertising. That model, however, is extremely inefficient. As the election approaches, the airwaves are saturated and candidates are guaranteed, by law, much lower rates than super PACs. It’s one reason the pro-DeSantis group plans to spend so much on its field program, officials said, citing studies showing that personal contact with voters has a much higher return on investment.
“That’s not to say we won’t do television, it’s just that it’s not all we’ll do,” said Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s director of operations. “We understand that in the first four states, peer-to-peer, neighbor-to-neighbor conversation and conversion will be extremely important.”
Never Back Down’s strategists have been consulting lawyers and studying precedents to see exactly how far the group can push the legal limits of the tasks it can perform without tripping over any legal wires. An overlooked twist in the election law is that PAC super advisers can cross over to the campaign, making it possible for entire departments at Never Back Down to eventually join DeSantis’s campaign.
The mano a mano efforts were on display during Mr. DeSantis’ recent trip to Iowa. After Trump canceled a rally near Des Moines, the governor decided he wanted to participate in a last-minute event in the area. But it wasn’t the governor’s staff who rushed people to the scene, but super PAC employees, who, working with Mr. DeSantis’s team, sent out a flurry of text messages and calls to assemble a crowd at Jethro’s BBQ that night.
“About two hours notice, at a local pizza place or barbecue joint, we got about 200 people to show up,” DeSantis said enthusiastically about the donors on the call, which The New York Times heard.
Despite Mr. DeSantis’s stated aversion to political consultants, particularly those who work in Washington, and his history of asking questions about what people who work for him make, his team has appointed one of the most famous consultants of the Republican Party to oversee Never Back Down. .
Mr. Roe has become an unusual lightning rod, both among DeSantis’s allies and rivals. His aggressive approach to both campaigns and business development was the subject of a recent Washington Post article detailing his company’s efforts to hoover up more and more revenue, including from his political clients.
Trump himself is obsessed with Roe, who is the only political consultant he speaks to regularly, according to people who have discussed the matter with the former president. Advisers so regularly feed him stories about the money spent on Roe’s losing campaigns that Trump has nicknamed it “the kiss of death.”
Never Back Down has already spent more than $10 million on pro-DeSantis television ads this spring. The initial spending has been the subject of doubt from some DeSantis allies, as it coincided with a drop in polls. But Never Back Down advisers argued that the ads are not just endorsing DeSantis before he enters the race, but are part of a huge experiment, involving email, text messages and control groups, to study which media outlets communication works against Trump.
Officials said voters were polled before and after in tens of thousands of interviews to determine the impact.