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      DeSantis Campaign Raises $20 Million in Race to Beat Trump

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      The Florida governor had an impressive quarter, but the fund-raising numbers also raised questions about his ability to keep pace over the course of the Republican primary.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raised $20 million in the first six weeks of his presidential run, his campaign said Thursday, a substantial sum that solidifies his place as the leading rival to former President Donald J. Trump.While the number falls short of the $35 million that Mr. Trump’s campaign said the former president raised in the three months ending June 30, Mr. DeSantis had only half the time to bring in campaign funds after officially entering the race in mid-May.In addition to the $20 million the DeSantis campaign said it had raised, a super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis, Never Back Down, said Thursday that it had collected $130 million since March. But nearly two-thirds of that sum was transferred to the group from a state committee that had supported Mr. DeSantis’s re-election bid last year.The totals supplied by the campaigns — more detailed numbers don’t have to be filed with the Federal Election Commission until July 15 — provide the first glimpse into the fund-raising battle between the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, a race that could set records for spending.The $20 million raised by Mr. DeSantis includes $8.2 million that his campaign said it had taken in on its first full day of fund-raising in late May, suggesting that the pace of its fund-raising tapered off significantly thereafter.Excluding the transfer from Mr. DeSantis’s state committee, the latest numbers also show that Never Back Down raised more money in its first three weeks than it did over roughly the last three months.The fund-raising slowdown comes after a bumpy campaign rollout that has brought about questions from donors and supporters about its direction.But Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down, said that the money raised “shows an unparalleled, unprecedented and massively successful fund-raising operation no other candidate in this race has.”Mr. Trump has raised most of his campaign’s cash through his leadership PAC, Save America. In recent months, The New York Times reported, Mr. Trump has diverted a greater portion of donations he receives to the PAC, which he has used to pay his personal legal fees.Mr. Trump’s campaign said on Wednesday that it had raised a total of $35 million between April and June — nearly double what the committee had raised in the first quarter of the year, reflecting hefty fund-raising bumps in the wake of his two indictments, in New York City and Florida.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Ron DeSantis Finds a New Set of Laws to Ignore

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      There once was a Florida fund-raising committee called Friends of Ron DeSantis, which was overflowing with the $142 million it had raised. Mr. DeSantis used it personally for his campaign to be re-elected governor of Florida in 2022, but that was far more than he needed for that race, and when he was done he still had $86 million left over.But one day that committee disappeared. In fact, it was on May 15, just nine days before Mr. DeSantis announced that he was running for president. In paperwork filed that day, the committee changed its name to Empower Parents PAC and the governor’s name appears nowhere on the website’s home page. And just as that filing was made, the super PAC that is supporting Mr. DeSantis’s presidential ambitions said that it would be getting more than $80 million in leftover money transferred from Empower Parents.That transfer represents a new frontier in the long-running battle to undermine presidential campaign finance laws. And it is only one example of the many ways in which Mr. DeSantis, in particular, has tried make a mockery of those laws. If you want a preview of how Mr. DeSantis views the government’s limits on power and plutocracy — as feeble as they are already — there’s no better place to look than his campaign.There’s a reason that state political committees can’t just transfer their money into presidential super PACs. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which led to the creation of super PACs, said plainly that those committees had to be independent of a candidate’s campaign in order to receive unlimited contributions.But Friends of Ron DeSantis, as a state committee, was never independent of its namesake. He signed the paperwork to set it up in 2018, and listed himself as the person to solicit and accept all of its contributions. That was true until May 5 of this year, when he filed another official letter with the state saying that he was no longer soliciting or accepting contributions.The state committee had already become something of a slush fund for donors who wanted to help Mr. DeSantis’s long-term ambitions, which were never well disguised. Consider this: Mr. DeSantis was re-elected on Nov. 8, and is prevented by law from running for a third consecutive term. But the committee took in more than $15 million after the election. Why, for example, would Gregory P. Cook, whose essential-oils company, doTERRA, received a warning letter in 2020 and a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission for making false claims about preventing Covid, donate $1.3 million to Friends of Ron DeSantis on Feb. 22 of this year? Is it possible that he might want better treatment from a DeSantis presidency?The State of Florida certainly knew it was wrong to transfer money from a state campaign fund to a federal one. Since at least 2016, the biennial handbook issued by the Florida Division of Elections had expressly prohibited that move. “A Florida political committee must use its funds solely for Florida political activities,” the handbook said. But as NBC News reported, the DeSantis administration quietly deleted that wording, and this year’s version of the handbook conveniently says for the first time that such transfers are allowed. The new handbook bases its reasoning on the Citizens United decision — which of course had been in effect for 13 years, including when the handbook prohibited the move.The Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group that closely monitors these kinds of transactions, has filed a complaint against the DeSantis campaign with the Federal Election Commission, saying the transfer is illegal. But as Team DeSantis knows, the commission has deadlocked so often — with three Republicans countering three Democrats — that it has become toothless. In a similar but smaller case last year when a Republican member of the House tried to transfer state campaign funds, the commission refused to take action after the usual 3-to-3 vote.The transfer is only one of the ways Mr. DeSantis is pushing the limits of the campaign finance system. The super PAC supporting his presidential run, bearing the schoolboy name of “Never Back Down,” has made it clear that it has a dangerously broad view of what its role should be.Up to now, the main role of super PACs in elections has been to run TV ads in favor of a candidate or against an opponent, with an unconvincing disclaimer in small print at the end that the ad sponsor is not associated with any campaign or candidate. Super PACs can take in contributions of unlimited size, so they’ve been a great vehicle for wealthy donors, unions and corporations to demonstrate loyalty to a candidate without bumping up against the $3,300 individual donation limit per election for giving directly to a campaign.Those ads are bad enough, but Never Back Down is going much further by essentially taking over many of the main functions of the DeSantis campaign itself. As The Washington Post recently reported, the super PAC is opening office space in each of the early primary states, organizing a corps of door-knockers and volunteers, and launching a “Students for DeSantis” effort on university campuses, among other grass-roots organizing work. “This is going to be expansive and a completely different kind of super PAC,” Kristin Davison, the chief operating officer of Never Back Down, told The Post.The Times reported that Never Back Down is preparing to spend more than $100 million on the DeSantis field operation, hiring 2,600 workers by Labor Day to “knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.” The report quoted another leader of the super PAC as saying that no one had ever tried an effort like this before.One reason for that may be its dubious legality. No definition of a super PAC — technically defined as an “independent expenditure committee” (emphasis added) — can conceivably include that much detailed organizing work on behalf of a candidate, and it is impossible to imagine it can be done without silently coordinating with the “real” DeSantis campaign. By having wealthy donors, some of whom make multimillion-dollar contributions, pay for such fieldwork, the campaign can spend more money on things that only it can do, such as transporting the candidate and getting on 50 state ballots. That’s why donations given directly to a campaign, known as “hard money,” are much more valuable to a candidate, as well as being harder to raise because of the contribution limits.But as Mr. DeSantis has demonstrated repeatedly in Florida, he’ll just blow past the guardrails of the law if it suits his purposes. In his latest attempt to shatter the concept of independence, his super PAC has been put to work raising money directly for Mr. DeSantis’s campaign.Before the governor’s official announcement last month, Never Back Down raised $500,000 in hard money for a “draft committee,” all of which was to be transferred directly to the campaign once it became official, CBS News reported. For the draft committee, the super PAC limited contributions to the $3,300 limit, but by doing the work of fund-raising, and using its list of donors, the super PAC was in essence making a huge but unreported contribution to the campaign. One campaign finance expert described this effort by the super PAC as “unprecedented.”And the closeness between Never Back Down and the campaign continues to this moment. If you go to Never Back Down’s website, and click on the big red “donate” button at the top, it takes you to a page that collects donations for the campaign, not the super PAC.“This is effectively a huge in-kind gift to DeSantis’s campaign and will subsidize his fund-raising costs considerably, which is exactly the sort of role a super PAC should not be allowed to play,” said Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center.On top of all that, the governor’s chief of staff, James Uthmeier, was used as one of the presidential campaign’s biggest fund-raisers, as NBC News reported Thursday. Breaching any ethical barrier between public service and politics, Mr. Uthmeier had administration officials around Florida pressure lobbyists to contribute to Mr. DeSantis’s campaign.Mr. DeSantis is hardly the only politician in the race who has demonstrated contempt for basic ethics and campaign finance laws. Donald Trump has funneled money from his leadership PAC to his super PAC, a different kind of abuse that has also drawn a complaint before the F.E.C. But Mr. DeSantis’s actions are pathbreaking in an unusually wanton and disdainful way. If that path should lead to the White House, it’s clear that big money will have a welcome place in American politics under his administration.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How DeSantis Allies Plan to Beat Trump in the 2024 Presidential Election

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      As the Florida governor prepares to enter the 2024 race, his allies are building an army of organizers to flood the states with the first nominating contests.A key political group supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential run is preparing a $100 million voter-outreach push so big it plans to knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.The effort is part of an on-the-ground organizing operation that intends to hire more than 2,600 field organizers by Labor Day, an extraordinary number of people for even the best-funded campaigns.Top officials with the pro-DeSantis group, a super PAC called Never Back Down, provided their most detailed account yet of their battle plan to aid Mr. DeSantis, whom they believe they can sell as the only candidate to take on — and win — the cultural fights that are definitional for the Republican Party in 2024.The group said it expected to have an overall budget of at least $200 million, including more than $80 million to be transferred from an old DeSantis state political account, for the daunting task of vaulting the Florida governor past former President Donald J. Trump, who has established himself as the dominant early front-runner.Mr. DeSantis is set to enter the presidential race on Wednesday in a live audio conversation on Twitter, and the super PAC’s enormous cash reserves are expected to be among the few advantages that Mr. DeSantis has in the race.The group is already taking on many tasks often reserved for the campaign itself: securing endorsements in early primary states, sending mailers, organizing on campuses, running television ads, raising small donations for the campaign in an escrow account and working behind the scenes to build crowds for the governor’s events. Hiring is underway in 18 states and officials said plans were in the works to assemble various pro-DeSantis coalitions, such as for voters who are veterans or those focused on issues like abortion, guns or agriculture.“No one has ever contemplated the scale of this organization or operation, let alone done it,” said Chris Jankowski, the group’s chief executive. “This has just never even been dreamed up.”In Iowa, the group has opened a boot camp on the outskirts of Des Moines, giving the facility the code name “Fort Benning,” after the old Army training outpost, with 189 graduates of an eight-day training program the first wave of an organizing army to follow. Door knocking begins on Wednesday in New Hampshire.The endeavor echoes the “Camp Cruz” that Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign set up near Des Moines.As Mr. DeSantis prepared for his first campaign events as a declared candidate, his allies for the first time detailed the show of force they are mustering to advance their strategy for prying away supporters of Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis at a round-table discussion last week in New Hampshire. Before his 2024 campaign is official, he has been making routine stops on the campaign trail.Sophie Park for The New York TimesAt the helm of the DeSantis super PAC is Jeff Roe, a veteran Republican strategist who was Mr. Cruz’s campaign manager in 2016. In an interview, Mr. Roe described an ambitious political apparatus whose 2,600 field organizers by the fall would be roughly double the peak of Senator Bernie Sanders’s entire 2020 primary campaign staff.Mr. Roe also previewed some of the contrasts that Never Back Down planned to draw with Mr. Trump. He argued that Mr. Trump had shied away from key fights that motivate the Republican base and on which Mr. DeSantis has led, including on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, schools and taking on corporate America.“How do you beat Trump?” Mr. Roe said, pointing to 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 want him to do the most.”Mr. DeSantis has steadily lost ground so far in 2023 and is trailing Mr. Trump nationally in polls by an average of 30 percentage points. And as the governor’s standing has diminished, more candidates have jumped into the race, an ever-expanding field that could make the sheer math even harder for Mr. DeSantis to topple a former president with a significant base of loyalists.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, mocked the group as “Always Back Down,” calling it “a clown show of epic proportions.”Mr. DeSantis at a speech last week in Orlando. “Ultimately, politics is a team sport,” he told donors recently.Saul Martinez for The New York Times“If DeSantis runs his campaign the same way as his super PAC, he’ll be in for a rude awakening,” Mr. Cheung said.In framing the 2024 race, Mr. Roe acknowledged that Mr. Trump has been “the leader of a movement.” But, in Mr. Roe’s telling, it is Mr. DeSantis alone who “has the opportunity to be the leader of the party and the movement.”“That is a key difference,” he said. “I don’t believe 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 does not.”That is a line that Mr. DeSantis himself articulated last week in a private call with donors that was organized by Never Back Down. He played up the money he has raised for state parties, including in New Hampshire.“Ultimately, politics is a team sport,” Mr. DeSantis told donors, adding an oblique shot at Mr. Trump. “You know, there’s some that kind of raise money just for themselves.”Republican primary voters, Mr. Roe said, see the battle against the progressive left as an existential fight. He argues that Mr. DeSantis, not Mr. Trump, has led on three touchstone issues in that fight: taking on corporate America, engaging in what is being taught in schools and confronting shifting norms and acceptance around sexual orientation and transgender medical care.The governor’s clash with Disney touches on all three: battling a big corporation over what began as a fight over classroom discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary schools. Mr. Trump sees the Disney battle as futile and has recently cheered on the company as it hit back against Mr. DeSantis.Mr. Roe added that the intensity of the threat that Republicans perceive to their way of life is what makes electability a more salient issue for the party in 2024, and what makes Mr. DeSantis’s ability to fight those fights and still win in Florida so appealing.“That is a manifest separation between the two candidates,” he said.Unlike a candidate’s campaign committee, which has to abide by strict caps for each donor, there are no limits on how much a super PAC is allowed to raise.And this one begins with unmatched financial firepower. Never Back Down is expected to begin with around $120 million — $40 million it says it already raised and $80 million from Mr. DeSantis’s old state political committee — a sum that is equal to what Jeb Bush’s super PAC spent in total 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 the campaign staff. Of course, if Mr. DeSantis disagrees with any super PAC decisions, he can always say so publicly and urge them to change course.As a result, the biggest super PACs — entities that have existed for just the last roughly 12 years — have often essentially become independent vehicles to buy expensive television advertising. That model, however, is extremely inefficient. When the election nears, the airwaves are cluttered and candidates are guaranteed, by law, far lower rates than super PACs. It is one reason the pro-DeSantis group plans to spend so heavily on its field program, officials said, citing studies that show personal voter contact has far greater return on investment.Hiring is underway in 18 states and officials said plans were in the works to assemble various pro-DeSantis coalitions, such as for voters who are veterans or those focused on issues like abortion, guns or agriculture.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“That’s not to say that we won’t do TV, it’s that it’s not all that we’ll do,” said Kristin Davison, the chief operating officer of Never Back Down. “We understand that in the first four states that peer-to-peer, neighbor-to-neighbor conversation and conversion is going to be extremely important.”Strategists with Never Back Down have been consulting lawyers and studying precedent to see exactly how far the group can stretch the legal bounds of what tasks it can perform without tripping any legal wires. One overlooked twist in election law is that super PAC advisers can move to the campaign, so it is possible entire departments at Never Back Down could eventually join the DeSantis campaign.The hand-in-glove efforts were on display during Mr. DeSantis’s recent trip to Iowa. After Mr. Trump canceled a rally near Des Moines, the governor decided he wanted to swoop in for a last-minute event in the area. But it wasn’t the governor’s staff that scrambled to bring people to the location but employees of the super PAC, who, working with Mr. DeSantis’s team, sent a flurry of texts and calls to assemble a crowd at Jethro’s BBQ that evening.“On like two hours’ notice, at some local pizza joint or barbecue joint, we got like 200 people to show up,” Mr. DeSantis raved to donors on the call, which The New York Times listened to.Despite Mr. DeSantis’s professed aversion to political consultants, particularly those who work around Washington, and his history of asking questions about what people who work for him are making, his team has anointed one of the Republican Party’s most famous consultants to oversee Never Back Down.Mr. Roe has emerged as an unusual lightning rod, among DeSantis allies and rivals alike. His aggressive approach to both campaigning and business development was the subject of a recent Washington Post article that detailed his firm’s efforts to vacuum up ever more revenue, including from its political clients.Mr. Trump himself obsesses over Mr. Roe, who is the only political consultant that he regularly talks about, according to people who have discussed the matter with the former president. Advisers so regularly feed him stories about the money spent on Mr. Roe’s losing campaigns that Mr. Trump has coined a nickname for him: “the kiss of death.”Never Back Down has already spent more than $10 million on pro-DeSantis television ads this spring. The early spending has been the subject of second-guessing from some DeSantis allies as it coincided with a drop in the polls. But Never Back Down advisers defended the ads as not just propping up Mr. DeSantis before he enters the race but as part of an enormous experiment — including mail, text messaging and control groups — to study what means of communicating works against Mr. Trump.Officials said voters were surveyed before and after in tens of thousands of interviews to determine the impact. More

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      Trump and DeSantis Super PACs Duel in TV Ads

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      As the Republican primary field takes shape, the groups supporting the top two hopefuls are already spending millions.The super PACs supporting the top two Republican presidential hopefuls have opened a wave of TV attack ads, part of a multimillion-dollar attempt to control the political narrative in the early days of an increasingly likely primary matchup.The two groups — MAGA Inc., which is backing former President Donald J. Trump, and Never Back Down, supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — have already spent over $7.5 million combined.MAGA Inc. has spent exclusively on cable networks, while Never Back Down has targeted states that have traditionally held the party’s earliest presidential nominating contests, according to spokesmen for the two super PACs and data from AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm.The groups’ opposing methods reflect the politicians’ disparate standings in the party. Mr. Trump, a businessman-turned-TV star who has led two national political campaigns and announced his third last year, is universally recognized inside the party and seeking to leverage that advantage with a broad attack against Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis, who has all but declared his 2024 candidacy and who remains a distant second to Mr. Trump in most public opinion polls, is still introducing himself to voters. A poll by the Republican research firm Cygnal in Iowa this month showed 18 percent of respondents said they had either never heard of Mr. DeSantis or didn’t know much about him.If he opens a presidential campaign in the coming months, as expected, his chance of defeating Mr. Trump will depend largely on his performance in the early primary states.Mr. DeSantis should have the resources to make up ground. Never Back Down has said it has already raised $30 million, part of a $110 million war chest available to his allies.MAGA Inc. reported $54.1 million on hand at the end of 2022. The group has been criticizing Mr. DeSantis in ads for more than a month. The first spot targets Mr. DeSantis’s support for cutting Social Security and increasing the retirement age for Medicare benefits while he was a member of Congress. “The more you learn about DeSantis, the more you see he doesn’t share our values,” the narrator says in the ad.The most recent spot attacks him over his supposed eating habits and his policy positions. It has aired on CNN, Fox and Newsmax.The ad accuses Mr. DeSantis of sticking his “dirty fingers” into senior entitlement programs, referring to his support for changes to Medicare and Social Security when he was a member of Congress. The spot also mocks Mr. DeSantis, a fast-food and snack enthusiast, for supposedly once eating pudding with three fingers instead of waiting for a spoon. (Mr. DeSantis has denied this.)“Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong, and we’re not just talking about pudding,” a narrator says as an anonymous man in a suit sloppily eats pudding with his hands. “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements like cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security, even raising the retirement age.”The super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis, Never Back Down, returned fire this weekend with a spot aiming at Mr. Trump. Its ads are focused on Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, all likely to hold early primaries.The pro-DeSantis ad opens by reminding viewers of Mr. Trump’s legal troubles. The former president was arrested on April 4 and charged with 34 felonies as part of an investigation into hush-money payments to a porn actress during the 2016 presidential campaign.The spot, titled “Fight Democrats, Not Republicans,” argues that Mr. Trump should be focused on those legal fights instead of attacking a fellow Republican and asks, “What happened to Donald Trump?”“Donald Trump has been attacked by a Democrat prosecutor in New York. So why is he spending millions attacking the Republican governor of Florida?” the narrator asks. “Trump’s stealing pages from the Biden-Pelosi playbook, repeating lies about Social Security.” More