Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can’t seem to catch a break, despite entering the 2024 GOP primary two months ago favored as the candidate most likely to topple former President Donald Trump.
In just the last week, DeSantis’s campaign finance reports have indicated that he’s blowing through cash. There have been staffing shake-ups. Even his big mainstream media debut on CNN Tuesday was overshadowed by Trump’s announcement that he could soon be indicted for his involvement in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. DeSantis remains more than 30 percentage points behind Trump on average in the polls.
The timing of the CNN interview was an unforeseen misfortune, much like the technical problems that plagued DeSantis’s campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces. But some of what has gone wrong with his campaign stems from his own mistakes. The question is whether he can come back from his troubles given that it’s still early days in the 2024 campaign.
“A presidential campaign is a lot different than a gubernatorial campaign. And his staff is just not measuring up in the same way that he’s not measuring up,” said Mac Stipanovich, a former GOP strategist in Florida who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. “His incompetence is compounded by his bad luck.”
A pile-up of bad news for DeSantis
DeSantis’s latest campaign finance report, which came out last week, showed warning signs for the GOP hopeful. While he raised more than any other Republican candidate, bringing in $20 million, he has also spent almost $8 million since launching his campaign in late May. What’s more, he isn’t attracting the kind of grassroots donors that Trump has, with less than 15 percent of DeSantis donations coming in amounts of $200 or less.
The campaign has cut staff to keep costs down, suggesting that he hired too many people too early. And the kind of people he’s hired tend to be “obsequious” at a moment when he needs the people around him to challenge the status quo,…
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