Will DeSantis make it to Iowa?

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign is imploding spectacularly. His first mistake was waiting too long to announce his intention to run while traveling the country for a “book tour,” which allowed former president Donald Trump to sully his name unanswered for weeks. Then when he did jump in, he made his announcement on a glitchy, botched Twitter Space with Elon Musk. In the months that followed, DeSantis struggled to adopt a clear strategy and seemed uncomfortable with the basic prospect of running a national campaign, perhaps best exemplified by an anecdote from 2018 when an advisor told him to write “LIKABLE” at the top of his debate notepad. Most of the “buzz” generated by the DeSantis campaign came from low-stakes Twitter fights between his online surrogates and Team Trump. Naturally, neither those squabbles nor DeSantis’s lackluster debate performances translated to any real gain in the polls in early primary states. 

By early December, Never Back Down PAC had fired several top officials and cycled through multiple CEOs. A Washington Post article published last week featured a ton of finger-pointing between Never Back Down and the DeSantis campaign, but at its core, crucified DeSantis’s plan to outsource most of his campaign infrastructure and fundraising to the Super PAC. Jeff Roe, founder of Axiom Strategies and top advisor to Never Back Down, announced the next day that he was leaving the PAC over “not true” accusations that it was his chosen officials that plagued Never Back Down with “mismanagement and conduct issues.” 

Things went from bad to worse on Friday when news broke that Never Back Down canceled $2.5 million in ad buys in Iowa and New Hampshire. Those buys will reportedly be repurchased by another pro-DeSantis PAC, Fight Right, as Never Back Down says it will be “laser-focused” on its ground game.

Meanwhile, Nikki Haley’s PAC, Stand for America, ran its own ad comparing the DeSantis campaign to a dumpster fire. It featured a comment from yours truly, from the Hill’s Rising back in August: “His campaign has been floundering basically since he announced.”

At this point, GOP strategists I’ve spoken to say the question is not if DeSantis will make it to Super Tuesday, but if he will even make it to Iowa. If DeSantis’s crumbling campaign infrastructure indeed causes him to drop out of the race ahead of the first GOP primary state, it will be one of the most brutal downfalls of a onetime star. 

-Amber Duke

On our radar

STEELING TIME A Biden administration official said Thursday that a deal for Japanese company Nippon Steel to acquire US Steel deserves “serious scrutiny” due to its potential impact on national security and American supply chains. 

‘I’M NOT A STUDENT OF HITLER’ President Donald Trump rejected being compared to Adolf Hitler by his critics, who took issue with his remarks that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”. Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt that he has “never read Mein Kampf.”

SMOKE FREE President Joe Biden pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands in Washington, DC and granted clemency to eleven others who he says were given “disproportionately long” sentences for non-violent drug offenses.  

Democrat DEI push goes haywire

When Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt abolished taxpayer-funded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in his state, he probably wasn’t anticipating that the state’s Democratic Party would cancel their own DEI push in a comedy of errors. 

The Oklahoma Democratic Party partnered with Young Democrats of Oklahoma to host a DEI panel in opposition to Stitt’s announcement. But things went awry when their graphics featured five white dudes: four current state representatives and the state’s former governor. 

Following outcry about the optics of the event, the elected officials pulled out. According to state representative Jacob Rosencrants, “We backed out, for all the right reasons. I get what they were trying to do, but roll out/marketing was a fail.”

Alicia Andrews, the head of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, explained that “the impact of my promo overshadowed an important topic and subjected folks who were supporting me to ridicule,” she wrote. Ironically, the event was supposed to be a partnership between elected officials and activists but became viewed as, in Rosencrants’s words, “us white male cisgender electeds vs. [Young Democrats].” 

Instead of a successful partnership, the Young Democrats’ stream has forty-eight views as of publication. 

Meanwhile, the state’s Republicans are relishing the Democrats’ DEI debacle.

“DEI policies have become such a drain on government resources, with no benefit to taxpayers, that even Democrats are starting to admit they’re unnecessary,” Representative Kevin Hern noted to me. 

–Matthew Foldi

Fetterman on the hunt for new staff

Senator John Fetterman’s viral X account won’t run itself. 

The Senate’s latest bipartisan dealmaker is up with a job posting for a digital manager responsible for managing his online presence and overall internet strategy. 

The opening comes at an interesting time for the lumbering Pennsylvanian, as he is openly breaking with his former left-wing allies. In recent interviews with NBC News and the New York Times, Fetterman said he no longer identifies as a “progressive,” slamming that ideological wing of the Democratic Party for opposing Israel and allegedly wishing him dead. 

“There are ones that are rooting for another blood clot,” he told the New York Times.

Hiring aligned staff shouldn’t be hard for the Bernie Sanders-loving sweatshirt-clad icon, but Fetterman alums have been openly bashing the Democrat, demanding he reverse his longstanding pro-Israel bona fides to appease their yearning for an Israeli peace agreement.

Perhaps Fetterman will have to rely on his newfound Republican friends to sign up — and we’ve already found one potential volunteer. 

“As Senator Fetterman continues his ongoing lurch to the right following revelations that many of his colleagues support antisemitic terror, I’ve thought about applying to his office if only to make the lives of pro-Hamas Senate Democrats much harder as they hope and pray to maintain the slimmest of majorities,” a senior GOP digital strategist said.  

–Cockburn