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      How DeSantis’s Hyper-Online 2024 Campaign Strategy Fell Flat

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      The G.O.P. contender’s campaign tried to take on Donald Trump’s online army. Now it just wants to end the meme wars.In early May, as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prepared to run for president, about a dozen right-wing social media influencers gathered at his pollster’s home for cocktails and a poolside buffet.The guests all had large followings or successful podcasts and were already fans of the governor. But Mr. DeSantis’s team wanted to turn them into a battalion of on-message surrogates who could tangle with Donald J. Trump and his supporters online.For some, however, the gathering had the opposite effect, according to three attendees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to damage their relationships with the governor or other Republican leaders.Mr. DeSantis’s advisers were defensive when asked about campaign strategy, they said, and struggled to come up with talking points beyond the vague notion of “freedom.” Some of the guests at the meeting, which has not previously been reported, left doubtful that the DeSantis camp knew what it was in for.Four months later, those worries seem more than justified. Mr. DeSantis’s hyper-online strategy, once viewed as a potential strength, quickly became a glaring weakness on the presidential trail, with a series of gaffes, unforced errors and blown opportunities, according to former staff members, influencers with ties to the campaign and right-wing commentators.Even after a recent concerted effort to reboot, the campaign has had trouble shaking off a reputation for being thin-skinned and meanspirited online, repeatedly insulting Trump supporters and alienating potential allies. Some of its most visible efforts — including videos employing a Nazi symbol and homoerotic images — have turned off donors and drawn much-needed attention away from the candidate. And, despite positioning itself as a social media-first campaign, it has been unable to halt the cascade of internet memes that belittle and ridicule Mr. DeSantis.These missteps are hardly the only source of trouble for Mr. DeSantis, who is polling in a distant second place. Like the rest of its rivals, the DeSantis campaign has often failed to land meaningful blows on Mr. Trump, who somehow only gains more support when under fire.But as surely as past presidential campaigns — such as Bernie Sanders’s and Mr. Trump’s — have become textbook cases on the power of online buzz, Mr. DeSantis’s bid now highlights a different lesson for future presidential contenders: Losing the virtual race can drag down an in-real-life campaign.“The strategy was to be a newer, better version of the culture warrior,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist. “But they did it to the exclusion of a lot of the traditional campaign messaging.”The DeSantis campaign disputed that it was hurt by its online strategy, but said it would not “re-litigate old stories.”“Our campaign is firing on all cylinders and solely focused on what lies ahead — taking it to Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” said Andrew Romeo, a campaign spokesman.Pudding FingersThe trouble began immediately. When Mr. DeSantis rolled out his campaign in a live chat on Twitter, the servers crashed, booting hundreds of thousands of people off the feed and drawing widespread ridicule.When his campaign manager at the time, Generra Peck, discussed the fiasco at a meeting the next morning, she claimed the launch was so popular it broke the internet, according to three attendees, former aides who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal for discussing internal operations.Each recalled being flabbergasted at the apparent disconnect: Senior staff members seemed convinced that an embarrassing disaster had somehow been a victory.Ms. Peck exercised little oversight of the campaign’s online operations, which were anchored by a team known internally as the “war room,” according to the three former aides. The team consisted of high-energy, young staffers — many just out of college — who spent their days scanning the internet for noteworthy story lines, composing posts and dreaming up memes and videos they hoped would go viral.At the helm was Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantis’s rapid response director. Ms. Pushaw has become well known for her extremely online approach to communications, including a scorched-earth strategy when it comes to critics and the press. As the governor’s press secretary, she frequently posted screenshots of queries from mainstream news outlets on the web rather than responding to them and once told followers to “drag” — parlance for a prolonged public shaming — an Associated Press reporter, which got her temporarily banned from Twitter.Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantis’s rapid response director, has become known for a scorched-earth strategy when it comes to critics and the press.Marta Lavandier/Associated PressLong before the presidential run was official, Ms. Pushaw and some others on the internet team — often posting under the handle @DeSantisWarRoom — aggressively went after critics, attacking the “legacy media” while promoting the governor’s agenda in Florida.At first, they conspicuously avoided so much as mentioning Mr. Trump, and appeared completely caught off guard when, in March, pro-Trump influencers peppered the internet with posts that amplified a rumor that Mr. DeSantis had once eaten chocolate pudding with his fingers.The governor’s campaign dismissed it as “liberal” gossip, even as supporters of Mr. Trump began chanting “pudding fingers” at campaign stops and a pro-Trump super PAC ran a television ad that used images of a hand scooping up chocolate pudding. Seven months later, #puddingfingers still circulates on social media.The episode looks like little more than childish bullying, but such moments can affect how a candidate is perceived, said Joan Donovan, a researcher at Boston University who studies disinformation and wrote a book on the role of memes in politics.The best — and perhaps only — way to counter that kind of thing is to lean into it with humor, Ms. Donovan said. “This is called meme magic: The irony is the more you try to stomp it out, the more it becomes a problem,” she said.The DeSantis campaign’s muted response signaled open season: Since then, the campaign has failed to snuff out memes mocking the governor for supposedly wiping snot on constituents, having an off-putting laugh and wearing lifts in his cowboy boots.Pink Lightning BoltsAttempts to go on the offensive proved even further off the mark. In June, the war room began creating highly stylized videos stuffed with internet jokes and offensive images that seemed crafted for a very young, very far-right audience.One video included fake images of Mr. Trump hugging and kissing Anthony S. Fauci — a dig at the former president’s pandemic response. Many conservatives were offended, calling the post dishonest and underhanded.“I was 55/45 for Trump/DeSantis,” Tim Pool, whose podcast has three million subscribers across multiple YouTube channels, wrote in response to the video. “Now I’m 0% for DeSantis.”Another video cast Mr. Trump as too supportive of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and mashed up images of transgender people, pictures of Mr. DeSantis with pink lightning bolts shooting out of his eyes and clips from the film “American Psycho.”That was followed by a video that included a symbol associated with Nazis called a Sonnenrad, with Mr. DeSantis’s face superimposed over it.A screenshot from a video posted online by the “DeSantis War Room” account over the summer. The campaign has since toned down its online videos.DeSantis War RoomAlthough many of the videos were first posted on third-party Twitter accounts, they were made in the war room, according to two former aides as well as text messages reviewed by The New York Times. Drafts of the videos were shared in a large group chat on the encrypted messaging service Signal, where other staff members could provide feedback and ideas about where and when to post them online.As public outrage grew over the Sonnenrad video, the anonymous account that posted it — called “Ron DeSantis Fancams” — was deleted. The campaign, which was in the process of laying off more than three dozen employees for financial reasons, took steps to rein in the war room, according to two former aides. And although the video was made collaboratively, a campaign aide who had retweeted it was fired.The online controversy roiled the rest of the campaign. In early August, the aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, who had been by far the largest contributor to Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, said he would halt donations, saying “extremism isn’t going to get you elected.” Money from many other key supporters of Mr. DeSantis has also dried up, including from the billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin.Terry Sullivan, a Republican political consultant who was Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign manager in 2016, said the bizarre videos amounted to a warning sign for donors that Mr. DeSantis’s campaign was chaotic, undisciplined and chasing fringe voters.“Most high-dollar donors are businesspeople,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Nobody wants to buy a burning house.”‘Counterproductive or Annoying or Both’Videos haven’t been the only problem. The campaign has struggled to build a network of influencers and surrogates that could inject Mr. DeSantis’s message into online conversations and podcasts dominated by supporters of Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis had won over many of those voices in his re-election campaign last year. But repeated attempts at courting additional influencers for his presidential campaign — including the poolside dinner in Tallahassee — fell flat.Benny Johnson, a former journalist with nearly two million followers on X, Twitter’s new name, resisted overtures from the DeSantis team, remaining a vocal Trump supporter. Chaya Raichik, whose Libs of TikTok account has 2.6 million followers, was at the Tallahassee dinner, according to two attendees, but has remained neutral.Neither Mr. Johnson nor Ms. Raichik responded to requests for comment. Other influencers said they were repelled by the combative, juvenile tenor of the campaign and unwilling to abandon Mr. Trump, who seemed to be only gaining momentum with each passing week.“It feels like the campaign has been reduced to little more than bickering with the Trump camp,” said Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer with a large social media following. He said the campaign had reached out to him about being a surrogate, but he declined and has since been turned off by its aggressive tactics online.“Its tactics are either counterproductive or annoying or both,” he said.Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer with a large social media following, says he was turned off by the DeSantis campaign’s tactics.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Getty ImagesThe existing network of DeSantis influencers has presented challenges for the campaign. Online surrogates for Mr. DeSantis have repeatedly parroted, word for word, the talking points emailed to them each day by the campaign, undermining the effort to project an image of widespread — and organic — support.Last month, for example, three different accounts almost simultaneously posted about Mr. Trump getting booed at a college football game in Iowa. Bill Mitchell, a DeSantis supporter with a large following on X, said the identical posts were coincidental.“I talk with all of the team members when necessary but other than the daily emails get no specific direction,” he said. Ending the Meme WarsThe campaign has lately tried to switch course. Under the direction of James Uthmeier, who replaced Ms. Peck as campaign manager in August, the campaign has shifted to a more traditional online strategy.“I should have been born in another generation,” said Mr. Uthmeier, 35, in an interview. “I don’t even really know what meme wars are.”Recently, the campaign has more closely aligned its online messaging with the real-world rhetoric Mr. DeSantis delivers on the stump. It has installed new oversight over its social media team and more closely reviews posts from the DeSantis War Room account, according to a person familiar with the campaign. It also has dialed down the often combative tone set by many of its influencers and staff members and scaled back its production of edgy videos, dumping lightning-bolt eyes for more traditional fare.A video released this week, for example, used clips of television interviews to suggest that Nikki Haley, who has been challenging Mr. DeSantis for second place in Republican polls, had reversed course on whether to allow Palestinian refugees into the United States.“For a while, they struck me as being more interested in winning the daily Twitter fight than in winning the overall political campaign,” said Erick Erickson, an influential conservative radio host. But now, he said, Mr. DeSantis finally seemed to be running for “president of the United States and not the president of Twitter.”Rebecca Davis O’Brien More

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      DeSantis Says He Would Cancel Student Visas of Hamas Sympathizers

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      At a G.O.P. candidate showcase in Iowa, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his rivals repeatedly sought to one-up one another on support for Israel.In a competition of hawkish messages on Israel, Ron DeSantis pledged on Friday night to revoke the student visas of Hamas sympathizers if elected president, while Tim Scott said he would withhold Pell grants from universities that failed to stamp out antisemitism.At an Iowa showcase featuring most of the top Republican presidential contenders, the Florida governor and the South Carolina senator engaged in one-upmanship about who would best support Israel, America’s closest Middle East ally.With their focus on students and academic institutions, they repackaged a traditional line of attack for Republicans: that liberal college campuses foster “woke” extremism, which they said was now taking the form of anti-Israel expressions.“You see students demonstrating in our country in favor of Hamas,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Remember, some of them are foreigners.”Mr. DeSantis then warned that if he became president, “I’m canceling your visa and I’m sending you home.”His remarks, during a tailgate at a construction plant in Iowa City, echoed recent talking points of former President Donald J. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken this week urging him to rescind the visas of “Hamas sympathizers.”Mr. Trump, who did not attend the event, had issued a similar pledge to expel student sympathizers of Hamas.Tim Scott, a South Carolina senator, said he had sponsored a bill to deny Pell grants to colleges that failed to stamp out antisemitism.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Scott, who has been polling in the low single digits, said that he had already sponsored a bill — which he would sign if elected president — that would deny Pell grants to colleges and universities that shirk responsibility for condemning support for terrorist groups.By their inaction, he said, they were sending a message that “it’s OK to be anti-Israel.” He continued, “I say no.”At a town hall earlier on Friday in Cedar Rapids, Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, delivered a similar warning and accused some colleges and universities of promoting violence.“We have got to start connecting their government funding with how they manage hate,” she said. “Because when you do that, you are threatening someone’s life when you do that. That’s not freedom of speech.”Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, said Israel should wipe out Hamas.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMs. Haley, who has been sparring with Mr. DeSantis over the Israel-Hamas conflict as she threatens to eclipse him in some polls, also spoke at the showcase on Friday night. The event was hosted by Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican from a competitive district in Iowa. The state holds its first-in-the-nation presidential caucus in mid-January.At the event, Ms. Haley called for Israel to wipe out Hamas, a militant group backed by Iran.“Stop acting like it’s Sept. 10,” she said.But Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur, struck a contrast with his G.O.P. rivals, calling for restraint toward an imminent ground invasion by Israel in Gaza. He said that Israel should heed the lessons of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.“To what end?” he said.Mr. Scott took the opposite view.”I am sick and tired of people saying to Israel, ‘Settle down,’” he said.Jazmine Ulloa More

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      DeSantis-Haley Rivalry Heats Up, With Attacks Focused on Israel

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      As they vie to be the race’s Trump alternative, the two Republican rivals have been trading barbs, zeroing in on each other’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict.Once distant rivals in the 2024 presidential race, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are now locked in a heated battle to become the most viable Republican alternative to former President Donald J. Trump, seizing on the Israel-Hamas conflict to hurl broadsides at each other.In a flurry of mailers, online posts and media appearances this week, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, have feuded over their positions on U.S. humanitarian aid and accepting refugees as Israel prepares to invade Gaza.A super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis ran the first attack ad of the cycle this week, contrasting his tough talk on the issue with remarks from Ms. Haley urging empathy for the civilians thrust into the middle of the conflict. Mr. DeSantis himself has portrayed Ms. Haley as saying that Gazan refugees should be resettled in the United States, which she has not done.Ms. Haley’s campaign in turn has responded by blasting Mr. DeSantis for falsely describing her comments, firmly reiterating her opposition to resettling Gazan refugees in the United States and pointing to her rejection of displaced people from the Syrian civil war during the Obama administration. A super PAC backing Ms. Haley has rushed to cast Mr. DeSantis as desperate and bleeding donors.It is all part of a clash that has also been escalating behind the scenes, as the two camps have ramped up their pitches to top donors and endorsers. With less than 100 days before the Iowa caucuses, both sides know they are running out of time to consolidate support in a crowded race that has largely been dominated by Mr. Trump.“We are three months away from caucus,” Ms. Haley told voters on Friday at a town hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she did not name Mr. DeSantis. “We can do this — without question.”Until recently, Ms. Haley had mostly been ignored by her rivals in the 2024 presidential race. But after two strong debate performances, Ms. Haley is heading into the third debate with a boost of momentum. In polls of the early voting states New Hampshire and South Carolina, she has surpassed Mr. DeSantis as the runner-up to Mr. Trump. And according to her campaign, she entered October with significantly more cash on hand that can be spent on the 2024 primary — $9.1 million to his roughly $5 million — even as he out-raised her overall.Who Has Qualified for the Third G.O.P. Debate?Just three candidates appear to have qualified so far for the third Republican debate on Nov. 8. Donald J. Trump is not likely to participate.With that upward climb, she has come under more scrutiny. After the second debate last month, the former president attacked her as a “birdbrain” on social media, and Ms. Haley accused his campaign of sending a birdcage and birdseed to her hotel.Though Mr. DeSantis has drawn attacks from his rivals on the debate stage — including some from Ms. Haley — he has largely avoided initiating heated exchanges, a stance in keeping with his long-running insistence that the primary is a two-candidate contest between him and Mr. Trump. But Ms. Haley’s surge — and her decision to focus her fire on the Florida governor — have clearly forced the DeSantis campaign and its allies to recalculate.Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, reported spending nearly $1 million against Ms. Haley this week, after devoting just $29,000 to anti-Haley messaging during the first half of the year.The recent exchanges were spurred by dueling television appearances over the weekend on the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Last week, Mr. DeSantis doubled down on his opposition to helping some of the nearly one million people contending with shortages of food, clean water and shelter in the region. He described the culture in the Gaza Strip as “toxic” and argued that the people of Gaza “teach kids to hate Jews.” Ms. Haley pushed back against this view, saying that large percentages of Palestinians did not support Hamas and that “America has always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists.” (Polling in Gaza supports Ms. Haley’s claim.)But in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis cast her words as evidence that she supported allowing refugees from Gaza to come to the United States. The Never Back Down ad from this week spliced the clips from Ms. Haley with comments from Mr. DeSantis criticizing her in an NBC interview. “She’s trying to be politically correct,” he says in the ad. “She’s trying to please the media and people on the left.”Ms. Haley’s campaign has countered with several emails to supporters and the news media, citing fact checkers who have found that Mr. DeSantis got her statements wrong and rejecting what her campaign officials have described as Mr. DeSantis’s consistent mischaracterizations of her statements and her record.Spokespeople for both Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and Never Back Down maintain that their critiques of Ms. Haley are accurate.As governor, Ms. Haley at times voiced the need for the United States to be a welcoming nation for immigrants and refugees. In 2015, she supported the efforts of faith groups to resettle people in South Carolina. But Ms. Haley took an aggressive stance against resettling Syrians in her state after the terror attacks in Paris that same year, citing gaps in intelligence that could make the vetting process difficult.Now, under fire from Mr. DeSantis, her campaign has underscored her hard-line track record as governor on immigration policies and portrayed her as nothing but staunchly opposed to taking in people from the Middle East. “The truth is, Haley has always opposed settling Middle East refugees in America, believing that Arab countries in the region should absorb them,” read one email to reporters.The disputes highlight how even as Republicans remain divided on other features of Mr. Trump’s isolationist “America First” agenda, they have unified behind its hard-line approach to immigration and the nation’s borders, with Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley largely aligned in their calls to keep out refugees from the conflict zone.It is widely seen as unlikely that Gazan refugees will be headed for the United States anytime soon. Still, at a DeSantis campaign event in South Carolina on Thursday, the crowd applauded when Mr. DeSantis pledged that as president, he would accept “zero” people from Gaza, adding that he opposed “importing the pathologies of the Middle East to our country.” He also said that any American aid sent to Gaza would end up in the hands of Hamas.Rick McConnell, a 70-year-old Air Force veteran who heard Mr. DeSantis speak, said he understood that Gazans needed food, water and medical supplies. But Mr. McConnell said that Iran — which he believed was responsible for Hamas’s brutal attacks — should provide that aid.“Why can’t they help them?” Mr. McConnell said. “We have veterans sleeping on the streets — our veterans.”The concerns were echoed at Ms. Haley’s events. “If you are living in Gaza, I don’t think you love America or are Christian,” said Corrine Rothchild, 69, a retired elementary school teacher who was still weighing her vote between Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis, who served on the Foreign Affairs Committee during his time in the House of Representatives, has sought to distinguish himself on foreign policy, pointing to restrictions he signed in Florida that banned land purchases by many Chinese nationals and calling for the use of military force against Mexican drug cartels. In the last week, he also has used state funds to charter flights that have brought home hundreds of Americans stranded in Israel.Ms. Haley also has sought to make her foreign policy credentials, her hawkish stances on China and her staunch support of Israel central to her campaign. As Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador, Ms. Haley forcefully spoke out in support of his formal recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, as well as his decision to cut American funding to Palestinian refugees.The two have sparred on foreign policy before. She has criticized Mr. DeSantis for his support of Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and his hold on military nominations over a policy that covers the travel expenses of service members who seek reproductive health care services, including abortions, in other states. She also attacked Mr. DeSantis’s stance on the war in Ukraine, which he called a “territorial dispute” that was not central to U.S. interests — a characterization he later walked back.In recent days, both have also turned their scorn on Mr. Trump for remarks that he made after the Hamas attack criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and referring to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, as “very smart.” Mr. Trump has since retreated from his comments. He, too, has pledged to reject refugees from Gaza. More

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      DeSantis Campaign Offloads Costs for Private Flights to Super PAC

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      The Florida governor’s campaign, facing a cash crunch, has found a way to offload the steep costs of private air travel. Campaign finance experts say the arrangement could test the limits of the law.Short on cash, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign has found an unusual way to pay for his habit of flying in private planes: passing the cost to the better-funded super PAC that is increasingly intertwined with his operation.The practice, described by three people who spoke about the arrangement on the condition of anonymity, appears to have cut the campaign’s travel bills by hundreds of thousands of dollars in September alone. It could test the limits of campaign finance laws, experts said.“This is old news, and it’s entirely appropriate for N.B.D. to be covering the costs of their events,” said Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign, using shorthand for the super PAC, Never Back Down. “The campaign is firing on all cylinders, and as we see a considerable uptick in fund-raising, we are continuing to identify cost savings, run an efficient operation, and focus resources on Iowa and the early states.”Asked on Friday about the flights as he visited a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Murrells Inlet, S.C., Mr. DeSantis said, “Everything is checked by lawyers,” adding, “I don’t move without lawyers signing off.”Never Back Down pays for Mr. DeSantis’s travel only on days when the events he is attending are hosted solely by the group, the people familiar with the arrangement said. The super PAC now hosts many of his events in early primary states.A representative for Never Back Down declined to comment on the arrangement.Federal candidates can appear as “featured guests” of super PACs, but whether a super PAC can also pay for transportation is less clear cut. Super PACs are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns, and campaign finance experts say that Mr. DeSantis’s arrangement — in which he is campaigning for president as a guest of a super PAC — could test that rule.“I think what DeSantis is currently doing is an abuse of this law to benefit his candidacy — paid for by his super PAC and its special-interest donors,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission lawyer and the director of federal campaign finance reform for the Campaign Legal Center.The Campaign Legal Center filed an ethics complaint in July with Florida officials against Mr. DeSantis for failing to disclose gifts of plane travel — made before he formally declared his candidacy for president — that was arranged by a nonprofit group, an arrangement described by The New York Times in May.Aside from comfort, private air travel can be a tremendous help to candidates as they move quickly from state to state in the thick of primary season. Many of the other Republican presidential candidates have often flown commercial, including Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who has taken jabs at Mr. DeSantis for his well-known preference for flying private.The travel expenses for Mr. DeSantis’s campaign have previously drawn scrutiny.In July, his campaign’s first report showed that he had spent $179,000 on chartered planes, as well as $483,000 to a limited liability company for “travel.” Never Back Down paid that same company $343,000 in June.In August, The Washington Post reported that Never Back Down and the campaign had become joint investors in a private transportation management company that provided lower-cost airplane rental leases for Mr. DeSantis, citing people familiar with the deal. The Post reported that Mr. DeSantis had used planes from the company in July; in its October filing, the campaign lists the last payment to the company, Empyreal Jets, as $41,433 on August 10.A shrinking campaignCampaign finance filings show just how much Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has transformed since late July, when sagging poll numbers and astronomical spending forced him to pare back his operation and reboot his bid for the White House.Mr. DeSantis, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2019, began his run for president in May campaigning as a front-runner, with money to burn. With a large entourage in tow, he traveled to big venues, delivering his stump speech in highly stage-managed appearances; he kept the news media at arm’s length and spent millions on consultants.In July, records show, the campaign spent $5.5 million. Bills that month included nearly $1 million for travel, including hundreds of thousands to jet rental companies; $1.8 million to consultants specializing in areas like survey research, media and fund-raising; and $828,000 in payroll expenses.Then came the financial report for the second quarter of 2023, which revealed an unsustainable level of spending. At the end of July, Mr. DeSantis cut more than a third of his staff, hired a new campaign manager and handed over most of his event planning to Never Back Down, which was already managing operations traditionally handled by a campaign, like field work.By the end of September, he was running like an insurgent: leaner, more accessible and much less expensive.The campaign spent 75 percent less in September than it did in July, the records show, even as Mr. DeSantis toured Iowa, traveled to New York and Texas for donor events, and delivered speeches in California and Washington, D.C. Travel costs plummeted to $130,000 in September from about $1 million in both July and August.The campaign’s top expenses in September were relatively modest: $100,000 for media placement, $70,000 for postage, $70,000 for digital fund-raising consulting. Payroll costs fell to $532,000.The downsizing was in part strategic, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and his surrogates have said, positioning him as a nimbler, scrappier presence on the trail. They say it has been a success, allowing Mr. DeSantis to engage with voters directly and saving campaign funds.Lingering cash problemsBut Mr. DeSantis’s financial situation remains strained. Averaged over the entire quarter, the campaign spent 99 cents of every dollar it brought in, a worrisome burn rate. The campaign entered October with only $5 million in cash on hand for the primary election, and $1 million in debts, which appear to be unpaid bills.His fund-raising from July through September declined by about 25 percent from the previous quarter.More than 80 percent of all the money Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has raised since entering the race in May has come from people who have given more than $200, and at least two-thirds came from people who have given at least the maximum $3,300 allowed for the primary, a greater share than any other Republican candidate, the filings show.This is a sign of enthusiasm for Mr. DeSantis among large donors, but it suggests a weakness among smaller donors. While it is impossible to say how many individual small donors he has — his campaign has an arrangement that prevents the disclosure of donors of less than $200 in official records — such donors are critical to the long-term success of a campaign, since they can be tapped for repeated contributions, and can be an indicator of broader enthusiasm for a candidate.The campaign’s Oct. 15 filing does not provide a full picture of its financial health. Some of the campaign’s expenses may not have appeared, because campaigns sometimes defer paying bills until after the quarter is over.And some larger expenses have been shifted over to Never Back Down, which for months has been acting as a shadow campaign operation. In July, the campaign said Mr. DeSantis would shift focus to smaller, intimate events, and would rely on invitations from outside organizations rather than hosting events itself.Shifting the strategyMr. DeSantis is now running the type of campaign befitting a candidate low on cash, who is trailing the front-runner, Donald J. Trump, in national polls by more than 40 percentage points, and has lost ground to other candidates who are raising — and saving — money faster.In Iowa this month, after a full day of campaigning, Mr. DeSantis stopped at a small diner in Fort Madison to meet a group of roughly two dozen voters, patiently taking their questions in an impromptu question-and-answer session outside.In New Hampshire, he gabbed with clusters of voters at gas stations and convenience stores in the state’s remote North Country. It was a shoestring approach that felt worlds removed from a campaign that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in May to court donors at the Four Seasons in Miami.Mr. DeSantis has also significantly adjusted his press strategy, becoming a constant presence in the mainstream news media and regularly taking questions in person from reporters.His newfound accessibility has earned him reams of free media, even if it means he now must take tougher questions.Some questions, though, can be deferred — like details about who is covering his flights. His campaign, the super PAC and other committees supporting him do not have to file financial reports again until Jan. 31, after the first nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.Rachel Shorey More

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      Republicans Use Israel Attack to Stoke Fears About U.S.-Mexico Border

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      G.O.P. lawmakers and candidates regularly invoke record-high border crossings to address a range of issues, including crime and jobs.Crime in American cities. The national opioid crisis. Election integrity. And now a terror attack considered the deadliest day for Jews in Israel’s 75-year history.Not long after Hamas terrorists killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis this month, a wave of Republicans — on the presidential campaign trail, in state and congressional races and in the far-right corners of conservative media — reached for a familiar playbook: tying the issue to the nation’s southern border.“What happened to Israel could happen to America because our country has been invaded by millions of people from over 160 different countries,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said on Fox News more than 24 hours after the attack.“We know that there’s an open border, and I know that the biggest national security threat is if those terrorists come into America, and we have another 9/11,” Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador under former President Donald J. Trump, told reporters last week in Concord, N.H.“You cannot forget that the same people that attacked Israel are right now pouring at levels that nobody can believe into our beautiful U.S.A. through our totally open border,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, a baseless claim that was met with applause at a campaign event in Clive, Iowa, a Des Moines suburb.While Republicans are otherwise reckoning with deep divisions, the remarkable unity on this front underscores the degree to which the 2,000-mile dividing line between the United States and Mexico remains a potent political symbol for the party. Since Mr. Trump paved his way to power on a nativist and hard-line approach to immigration, Republicans have invoked fortifying the border to address nearly every issue, in increasingly militant terms and often exaggerating the facts.There are some indications that message is resonating. A national NBC News poll taken in September suggests that voters overwhelming trust Republicans over Democrats when it comes to handling the economy and crime — as well as immigration — heading into the 2024 election.Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and a former adviser to Senator Marco Rubio, said the aggressive turns toward the border could be particularly effective now as the Biden administration grapples with two very real humanitarian crises: record numbers of migrants trying to cross the border and a fight against fentanyl that has become an urgent public health problem.“The border is something that concerns a majority of Americans, especially when you can tie it to problems they see in their own neighborhoods,” he said.After Donald J. Trump won the presidency on a hard-line approach to immigration, Republicans have tied border policies to countless other issues.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHomeland Security officials have said they have found no specific or credible threat to the United States tied to Hamas. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, responded to Republicans in part by saying there is “strict national security vetting to determine whether individuals coming from anywhere in the world have ties to terrorist organizations.” Immigration experts said that the government cannot screen people who enter undetected but that the large numbers of migrants turning themselves in at the border are subjected to screening processes.Since the southern border was drawn, American politicians have sought to wring political advantage by tapping into xenophobic fears, at times aimed at Chinese laborers, or young German men believed to be spies, or Jews and Catholics, historians and political analysts said.Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a government professor at George Mason University in Virginia and who tracked the rise of the Mexican criminal organization Los Zetas, said the latest Republican rhetoric took cues from three distinct moments in U.S. history: the migration of Mexican laborers who became the economic engine of the Southwest, the government’s war on drugs that began in the 1970s, and the 9/11 terror attack and the so-called war on terror. All resulted in an increased military presence at the border, the building of physical barriers and an expansion of the U.S. deportation system.Ms. Correa-Cabrera said that, much like now, those earliest border enforcement measures were mostly based on political arguments, not data that migrants increased crime or posed a greater threat to public safety. Many studies have shown this is not the case. “It had to do with prejudice,” she said.Attempts by politicians to link Mideast terror groups and Mexican criminal organizations have at times gained traction over the past two decades, but no substantial evidence has surfaced to support the claim, counterterrorism and insurgency experts said. The two kinds of groups have vastly different objectives and operate in cultural and economic borderland regions that do not share remotely similar dynamics.With apprehensions at the southern border up overall, U.S. officials this year have recorded an increase in apprehensions of people whose identities match those on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list — 160 migrants in the 2023 fiscal year as of July, up from 100 the fiscal year before, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Such rolls constitute a small fraction of the millions of people seeking to cross the southern border and do not significantly measure the terror threat against the United States, terrorism and insurgency experts said. The uptick may be owing in part to the broad nature of the lists, they added, ensnaring people wanted for terrorist activities against their home countries but not aimed at the United States, as well as relatives or associates not accused of wrongdoing. Although experts do not completely rule out the threat of a terror attack launched from the southern border, they described it as unlikely.If Mideast terror organizations ever did plan an attack, “the northern border may even be more vulnerable,” said Bruce Hoffman, professor and director of the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University who specializes in terrorism studies. And such a plot would not necessarily be connected to illegal immigration, he added.The 9/11 hijackers entered the United States on tourist, business and student visas. The last man to physically cross the border with materials for an explosive — Ahmed Ressam — was arrested in 1999 after he came in from Canada.Still, the southern border remains a powerful symbol, for politicians and voters. When Mr. Trump adopted his “America First” slogan during his 2016 presidential campaign, he used it to harness grievance, xenophobia and fears about threats from abroad, economic competition from China on trade, and the potential economic and social consequences of increases in new immigrants.On Monday, Mr. Trump, under fire for his criticism of Israel and for calling Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organization, “very smart,” invoked the deadly Hamas attacks on the Jewish state to stoke fears of terrorism at home. Returning to some of his most inflammatory themes on illegal immigration, he also took aim at legal pathways by pledging to reinstitute the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries and expand the freeze on refugees he enacted during his presidency.“We aren’t bringing anyone from Gaza,” he said at his rally in Clive.Mr. Trump is not alone. Republican candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida often steer conversations with voters back to immigration. At a town hall in Iowa in August, when he was asked two questions in quick succession on unrelated issues, Mr. DeSantis managed to hit on the border. On the issue of eminent domain, he said he would support it “for the border wall down south.” Asked about the war in Ukraine, he said that as president, his “first obligation” would be “to protect the American people and to protect our border.”In mailers, television ads and remarks, Republicans in state and congressional races regularly fault border enforcement. They cast blame on Mexican criminal organizations and undocumented immigrants for the fentanyl crisis — but not the American pharmaceutical companies that fueled the legal market for the drugs or the U.S. citizens who law enforcement officials say typically bring the harder narcotics across the border. They have claimed without basis that unauthorized immigrants are gaining access to the ballot box, while claims that widespread numbers of undocumented immigrants are voting have been consistently discredited.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene quickly invoked the U.S.-Mexico border after the attack in Israel.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesHistorians and political analysts warned that much of the heated language on immigration plays into far right and sometimes explicitly racist tropes that fuel fear with the potential for violence.Two white supremacist shooting suspects in the last five years, Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh and Patrick Crusius in El Paso, Texas, cited “invaders” and a “Hispanic invasion” in the lead-up to their crimes.On Saturday, the authorities in suburban Chicago said, Joseph Czuba, 71, fatally stabbed a 6-year-old boy and seriously wounded the child’s mother because of their Palestinian background. Officials tied the attack to what Mr. Czuba was hearing on conservative talk radio about the fighting overseas.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Trump’s Giant Lead Is Financial, Too: 6 Takeaways From 2024 Filings

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      Ron DeSantis has spent heavily and Nikki Haley has padded her war chest. On the Democratic side, President Biden continues to show overall strength, and the party’s incumbent senators fared well.Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign entered October with nearly as much cash on hand for the Republican primary race as the rest of the field combined, underscoring the former president’s dominance as the contest enters its critical final stretch before the Iowa caucuses in January.The financial picture, laid out in quarterly fund-raising and spending reports filed by campaigns on Sunday, shows just how uphill Mr. Trump’s challengers are fighting, with some of them appearing to hemorrhage cash. Still, others showed signs of momentum. More

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      DeSantis Will Participate in Nevada Caucuses Despite Criticizing Them

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      The state party enacted new rules that the Florida governor and his rivals say are designed to help former President Donald J. Trump.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida plans to participate in the Nevada Republican Party caucuses, his campaign said on Sunday, taking part in a system that he and his rivals have said was designed to benefit former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. DeSantis’s team had not said previously whether he would take part in the party’s Feb. 8 caucuses in the state, which Republican political officials structured to supersede the state’s primary election.“Ron DeSantis is committed to earning every single delegate available as he works to earn the Republican nomination for president, and Nevada is no exception,” said Andrew Romeo, the communications director for the DeSantis campaign.In a swipe at the state party, he added: “It is disappointing that the Nevada Republican Party changed the rules against the will of the people just to benefit one candidate. However, Ron DeSantis will fight to overcome these tactics.”A statement from the party’s press office about Mr. DeSantis’s concerns said that caucuses are almost exclusively how Nevada Republicans have selected their nominee for decades.“We are aware that the Never Back Down super PAC that is supporting Governor Desantis had concerns with rule changes,” the statement said. “However, his campaign never took action to influence these rules. All official campaigns were invited to the meeting where these common sense, RNC-supported rules changes were voted on, and passed by overwhelming majority.”Officials in Nevada had made a bipartisan move to put a primary in place instead of caucuses, trying to increase participation. But Republican Party officials refused to accept that, and decided to go ahead with caucuses of their own.The decision to deliver all of the state’s delegates through its caucuses instead of through its primary has been widely seen as helping Mr. Trump — he continues to have a strong hold on the party’s most animated voters, who typically turn out for such contests.It was influenced by Michael McDonald, the state party chairman and a Trump ally, who was a fake elector for Mr. Trump in the state when the former president tried to subvert the results of the 2020 election.Taking part in the primary — which will be held two days earlier on Feb. 6 — instead of the caucuses would mean a candidate would be passing up the chance to accrue delegates, which are necessary in order to be nominated at the Republican National Convention.The rules were also changed to bar super PACs from sending speakers or literature to caucus sites, after Mr. Trump’s team warned state parties about possible legal challenges to allowing the outside groups to have a role. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has relied heavily on his super PAC, Never Back Down, so the rule also puts him at a disadvantage.Mr. Trump’s team has worked aggressively with allies to change rules in various states to be more beneficial to him in apportioning delegates.Though the caucuses are still months away, the decisions by the Nevada Republican Party have already caused some consternation for the rest of the field. Mr. DeSantis’s team had held off on committing to the caucuses, while former Vice President Mike Pence decided to skip the caucuses in favor of the primary.Mr. DeSantis’s team is trying to demonstrate that it still plans to fight on various fronts, even with Mr. Trump well ahead in public opinion polls of Republican primary voters. The goal, campaign officials said, is to make the Trump team fight as hard as possible for every delegate, and to stave off a sense of inevitability that Mr. Trump has projected for months.To that end, Mr. DeSantis qualified for the Virgin Islands caucuses and will headline a virtual event there tomorrow. He was the first of the candidates to qualify there for the caucuses, to be held on Feb. 8, 2024, party officials there said. He has also filed for the primaries in South Carolina, New Hampshire and Virginia, and his team is working to file full slates in states like Tennessee. More

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      DeSantis and Haley Diverge on Help for Gaza Refugees

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      The two Republican candidates appeared to diverge on attitudes toward civilians in the Gaza Strip who are bracing for an invasion by Israel.The deepening humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip is driving a wedge between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, two of the leading Republican presidential candidates, who deviated sharply on Sunday over whether the United States should help Palestinian refugees from the region ahead of an expected Israeli invasion.In an appearance on the CBS morning show “Face the Nation,” Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, doubled down on remarks he had made one day earlier in Iowa, espousing a hard-line opposition toward helping civilians who have been thrust into the middle of the conflict.“They teach kids to hate Jews,” he said. “The textbooks do not have Israel even on the map. They prepare very young kids to commit terrorist attacks. So I think it’s a toxic culture.”Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador under President Donald J. Trump, pushed back against that view during a CNN interview on Sunday with Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”“America has always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists,” she said after being shown a clip of Mr. DeSantis’s initial comments on Saturday.Nearly one million people are grappling with shortages of food, clean water and shelter in Gaza, which is bracing for a land invasion by Israel in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attacks and the taking of hostages by Hamas, an Iran-backed militant group.Mr. DeSantis argued on Sunday that it would be detrimental to the United States to “import” large numbers of refugees and would fuel antisemitism, echoing comments he made about people in Gaza the day before that drew scrutiny.At a campaign event on Saturday, Mr. DeSantis said, “If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic. None of them believe in Israel’s right to exist.”He added: “The Arab states should be taking them. If you have refugees, you don’t fly people in and take them into the United States of America.”When the CBS anchor Margaret Brennan pointed out to Mr. DeSantis that Arabs are Semites and replayed his remarks, he stood by his words.Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor at the First in the Nation Leadersip Summit in Nashua, New Hampshire on Friday.John Tully for The New York TimesGovernor Ron DeSantis of Florida at the First in the Nation Leadership Summit in Nashua, New Hampshire on Friday.John Tully for The New York Times“There was a lot of celebrating of those attacks in the Gaza Strip by a lot of those folks who were not Hamas,” he said.Ms. Brennan suggested that it was a remote possibility that refugees from Gaza could resettle in the United States, saying that they could not even evacuate from their immediate area. Still, Republicans have used the broader conflict to frame their postures on military action and humanitarian aid.In the House, Representatives Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin and Andy Ogles of Tennessee, both Republicans, have announced that they plan to introduce a bill they say would block the Biden administration from issuing visas to Palestinian passport holders.Mr. DeSantis, who served in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps in Iraq, was also asked whether he would advise the Israeli military to stop their attacks on the infrastructure that provides water and electricity to Gaza.“I don’t think they’re under an obligation to be providing water and these utilities while the hostages are being held,” he said.Ms. Haley struck a more sympathetic chord earlier on Sunday, saying that large percentages of Palestinians and Iranians did not support the violence being perpetrated against one another.“There are so many of these people who want to be free from this terrorist rule,” she said.While the Republican candidates have expressed solidarity with Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks, they have also clashed with each other over who is most loyal to Israel, America’s closest Middle East ally, and what the role of the United States should be in conflicts overseas.Ms. Haley on Sunday continued to condemn Mr. Trump, her former boss and the Republican front-runner, for referring to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, as “very smart” while criticizing Israel’s prime minister and Israeli intelligence. She accused Mr. Trump of emboldening U.S. adversaries and drawing attention to himself.“You don’t go and compliment any of them because what that does is that makes America look weak,” she said on CNN, adding: “This isn’t about Trump. It’s not about him.”A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.Ms. Haley also leveled fresh criticism toward President Biden, saying that he should never have agreed to free up $6 billion in frozen oil revenue money for Iran for humanitarian purposes as part of a hostage release deal that was announced in August.Facing blowback over the money’s release, the Biden administration and Qatar agreed last week to deny Iran access to the funds, which White House officials had said had not been spent.“You empowered Iran to go and strengthen Hamas, strengthen Hezbollah, strengthen the Houthis to spread their terrorist activity,” Ms. Haley said.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.Haley Johnson More