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      Liberal Super PAC Is Turning Its Focus Entirely Digital

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      No more television ads from Priorities USA: The group is planning a $75 million online effort to help President Biden and Democrats up and down the ballot.Priorities USA, one of the biggest liberal super PACs, will not run a single television advertisement in the 2024 election cycle.Instead, the group announced Tuesday, Priorities USA is reshaping itself as a digital political strategy operation, the culmination of a yearslong transition from its supporting role in presidential campaigns to a full-service communications, research and training behemoth for Democrats up and down the ballot.The move reflects a broad shift in media consumption over the past decade, away from traditional broadcast outlets and toward a fragmented online world. It also shows the growing role played by big-money groups in shaping campaigns and American political life: Priorities USA says it will spend $75 million on digital “communications, research and infrastructure” in the next year.“We have learned that the internet is evolving too quickly for the traditional campaign apparatus to keep up in two-year cycles,” Danielle Butterfield, the group’s executive director, said in an interview. “We have committed to not just closing the gaps, but building infrastructure. We are not just focused on single-candidate investments.”She added, “We are, I think, teaching folks how to fish.”Ms. Butterfield said that more than half of that $75 million would be direct investments supporting President Biden’s re-election efforts and the campaigns of other Democrats on the ballot. Those plans, she said, will also have “embedded experiments” that will provide feedback on how people are responding to their efforts.The organization said it was developing relationships with influencers and other “content creators” to spread campaign messages on platforms like TikTok. The group has also been working on “contextual targeting,” which it defined as presenting ads to voters based on what they were watching on their devices at any given moment.Priorities USA also has a nonprofit arm that focuses on litigation and voter protection work.Because of its size, the organization is essentially without peer or competitor in its new role, but Ms. Butterfield likened its new focus to that of the Center for Campaign Innovation, a conservative nonprofit group — not a super PAC — that is focused on digital politics.Eric Wilson, the founder of the Center for Campaign Innovation, said Priorities USA’s change of focus “clearly shows that the way campaigns are going is around content creation and digital platforms.” While television advertising remains the best way to get a message in front of the most people, he said, “we are seeing diminishing returns on TV advertising — it’s becoming more expensive and less effective.”“Media fragmentation is a big challenge for campaigns,” Mr. Wilson said, noting that the Center for Campaign Innovation does not work with campaigns. “You’ve got platforms that are banning political advertising. How do we teach campaigns to create their own content? What are the ways you can get political ads distributed, in a world that’s set up to block political messages?”He added, “We spend a lot of time and investment figuring out how voters get information and why they make decisions.” (The Center for Campaign Innovation does not work with any campaigns.)Priorities USA was formed in 2011 and supported Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign. It has relied on support from major Democratic donors; in 2020, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York gave more than $19.2 million, campaign finance records show.The group has expanded in recent years and has run digital training programs and an ad tracking service for strategists. It has also reached beyond presidential campaigns to work on Senate campaigns and state elections, including the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court race. More

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      Nikki Haley Makes a $10 Million Move, Hoping to Gain Against Trump

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      The former ambassador to the U.N. is reserving her first ads in Iowa and New Hampshire as she looks to outstrip Gov. Ron DeSantis in the race for second place.Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign plans to reserve $10 million in television, radio and digital advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire starting in the first week of December — its first investment in advertising this cycle and a move meant to give the candidate a boost as the clock ticks for the field to make significant gains against former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, has seen steadily rising numbers in surveys of early voting states. A series of standout debate performances has brought in grass roots donors and more high-dollar backers after months of campaigning, with campaign officials saying it raised more than $1 million in the 24 hours after the debate last week.She is now polling second in New Hampshire and third in Iowa, according to some surveys, but Mr. Trump remains the dominant front-runner in those states and nationally.Ms. Haley after the Republican primary debate last week.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesHer campaign is betting on an eventual Haley-Trump showdown in South Carolina, her home state and the third on the nominating calendar. Senator Tim Scott, her home state rival, dropped out of the race late Sunday, without endorsing anyone. But Ms. Haley is now looking to outstrip her main challenger for second place, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, to become the clear alternative to Mr. Trump.The Associated Press first reported the ad buy on Monday. It far outpaces Mr. DeSantis, who plans to spend more than $500,000 starting in December, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.Ms. Haley, a former accountant, has stuck to her playbook for winning tough races in the past: keeping costs low while saving the money she had for television ads.While the super PAC backing her has already spent more than $22 million on advertising in early primary states, according to AdImpact, her campaign has not reserved advertising until now.Alyce McFadden More

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      Why Doug Burgum Is Staying in a Race He Can Afford to Lose

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      With a substantial personal fortune, the North Dakota governor is insistent on spreading his message despite calls to drop out.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota knows that many people, including powerful voices in his own party, think he should quit the Republican presidential primary, abandoning his quixotic bid so that momentum can gather behind a challenger to Donald J. Trump, and ultimately President Biden.“This seems like they’re trying to do the job of the voters,” he said in an interview on Saturday. But Mr. Burgum is committed to staying on the ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he says he regularly meets people who are eager to vote for him. “They are the ones that are going to decide how the field gets narrowed, not some other group,” he said.Mr. Burgum, 67, was sitting in a stately conference room, somewhere in the carpeted labyrinth of a convention center in Las Vegas, which was hosting a major gathering of Jewish donors. Less than an hour earlier, in a ballroom upstairs, former Vice President Mike Pence had dropped out of the race, yielding to the reality that he was short on votes and running out of money.Mr. Burgum’s reality is different in at least one critical respect: Though he is barely cracking 1 percent in Iowa polls, his net worth is in the hundreds of millions. He has largely self-financed his campaign, lending it more than $12 million — a further $3 million has come in from donations, according to the campaign’s most recent filing.He can afford to be quixotic. As of the end of September, his campaign had spent $12.9 million — more than the campaigns of Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and Mr. Pence combined. About a third of that was spent on television advertising time.He is a testament to the power of private wealth to sustain a campaign, and to elevate a largely unknown, business-minded conservative from a largely rural U.S. state to the national stage — or, at least, the edge of the stage.“I think he does bring perspective and experience that resonate with a lot of voters,” said Miles D. White, the former chairman and chief executive of Abbott Laboratories and a longtime friend of Mr. Burgum. “I think the early process doesn’t give a lot of opportunity to demonstrate that.”Mr. White, who gave $2 million to a super PAC backing Mr. Burgum, said Mr. Burgum’s financial resources meant he could stay in and raise awareness of himself as a potential alternative to Mr. Trump, outside the confines of the debate stage.“His biggest challenge is being known, nationwide, and getting known, which takes a lot of time, a lot of ads, which in turn takes a lot of funding,” Mr. White said.Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist, said that most candidates, at this point, were merely helping Mr. Trump. On Monday, in an editorial in The Bulwark, he called for all of them except Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor, to drop out.“I like Burgum,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview. “He is in a desperate battle with the margin of error in the polling. Because the stakes with Trump are so high, he’s got to step back.”He added, “When your argument is, ‘Let me flame out in Iowa, where I’ll do collateral damage to others,’ you don’t have an argument.”Mr. Burgum said he first sought the governor’s seat in 2015 because he felt he could have more of an impact on North Dakota from Bismarck than he could from his perch of private enterprise. The same thing motivated him to seek the presidency — but first he had to persuade his 25-year-old son, he said, who was concerned about the attention it might bring to his family.Finally, his son told him, “You should run, because my friends would have somebody they can vote for, instead of voting against.” Telling the story, Mr. Burgum began to cry.Friends from the business community have also jumped in with support. The super PAC backing him, called Best of America, had taken in more than $11 million as of the end of June from about two dozen wealthy supporters, including people with links to his business world.“Anybody who’s donated significantly so far is someone who’s known us for a long time,” Mr. Burgum said. “Because they’re like, OK, this is the real deal.”Mr. Burgum entered the race in June on a platform that focused on his economic acumen and business record as a software executive, as well as his conservative record as governor.“People are yearning for leadership, and leadership to them does not mean a life spent as a career politician in North Dakota,” he said. “It means someone who’s got the characteristics of integrity and honesty. Someone you can trust and someone who’s willing to take risks, someone who can take a leap and not know where they’re going to land.”He added, of his competitors, “Just factually, I’ve created more jobs than everybody else on that stage combined, in the private sector.”Since entering the race, Mr. Burgum has spent heavily to introduce himself to voters and to draw support.In the early nominating states, Mr. Burgum’s business bona fides, horseback skills and distinctive eyebrows have been fixtures on television, set against the scenic backdrop of North Dakota — he said he saw his campaign in part as an opportunity to introduce his state to the rest of the country.(As for the eyebrows, Mr. Burgum credits them to his mother’s side of the family, and acknowledges the uncanny likeness to the comedian Eugene Levy. Along with his flowing mane of hair, they get a lot of attention on the campaign trail: “If the only people voting were women over 75 or 80 years old, then we’d have a lock on it,” he said.)Mr. Burgum’s campaign has bought $4.3 million of local and national advertising time, according to an analysis by AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. Since July, the super PAC backing him has bought nearly $13 million in ad time.The PAC’s ads describe him as “the only conservative business leader running for president,” promising that he can bring “small-town common sense back in Washington, D.C.”Advertising spending by the super PAC is the fifth-highest in the race, according to the AdImpact analysis, which also includes outlays for ads in the coming weeks. Never Back Down, a super PAC backing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has spent $35.6 million. A super PAC for Mr. Trump has spent $27.6 million; one for Ms. Haley, $22.8 million; and one for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, $19.8 million.Before the first debate, in late August, Mr. Burgum’s campaign offered $20 gift cards to anyone who donated a dollar to his campaign so that he could meet the threshold of 40,000 individual donors to earn a spot onstage.The gambit worked. Then, the day of the debate, he ruptured his Achilles’ tendon in a game of pickup basketball with his aides. He showed up anyway. Two months later, he still uses a knee scooter to move around.A major hurdle lies ahead: While Mr. Burgum’s campaign has the requisite number of donors, it has not yet met the Republican National Committee’s polling threshold for the third G.O.P. debate, next week in Miami.He described the threshold as an arbitrary bar set by the party leadership. “It might achieve a winnowing, but it may not produce what Iowa or New Hampshire would produce, where people are actually investing time,” he said. More

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      What Happened When Fake Trump Signs Appeared in Greenwich, Connecticut

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      The placards were up in a wealthy town for less than a day. The fight over them lasted years.The sudden sprouting of red-and-white campaign signs upended one autumn morning in the affluent Connecticut town of Greenwich. It was as if the valuable ground had been sprinkled overnight with political pixie dust.The signs seemed at first to blend into the election-time foliage, conveying customary solidarity between a local Republican candidate and his party’s standard-bearer. “Vote Republican — Vote Team,” they said. “Trump/Camillo.”But instead of instilling pride of party unity, the signs caused local Republicans to lose their Connecticut Yankee cool. How dare someone link a Greenwich Republican candidate with the Republican president of the United States!Outraged texts, emails and phone calls heated up that chilly October morning in 2019. “It was a general frenzy and maybe panic,” a party leader later recalled. “Like: ‘What are these?’ ‘Where did they come from?’ ‘What do we do about them?’”The Greenwich tempest that came to be known as “Signgate” was, in some ways, larger than Greenwich itself, touching on national politics, election integrity and free speech. But it was also exquisitely parochial, reflecting the acutely petty vibe of local politics, the clash of big personalities in a small space — and sweet, delicious revenge.Politics in this town of about 63,000, once a bastion for Republican moderates, have gotten complicated in recent years, with Trumpian Republicanism emerging like a wet Saint Bernard galumphing through a staid garden party.Mr. Trump had lost Greenwich by a sizable margin in the 2016 presidential elections; in many ways he was the antithesis to the town’s favored Republican son, George H.W. Bush. Still, your dog is your dog, leashed or unleashed.By 2019, local Republican discomfort in the Age of Trump seemed overripe for Democratic mockery, so a certain Greenwich police captain — an outspoken Democrat when off-duty — took it upon himself to exercise the time-tested political ploy of satire. He chose as his subject the Republican candidate for the mayor-like position of first selectman, Fred Camillo, who was consistently deflecting calls to either embrace or denounce Mr. Trump.Some residents had even threatened to pull their support if the generally well-liked Mr. Camillo did not reject the generally not-liked Mr. Trump and his policies. His response, he later recalled, was: “That’s not my concern. Your concern should be how I vote. Do I respond to you? What my beliefs are.”Seeing opportunity in Mr. Camillo’s sidestepping, the police captain, Mark Kordick, spent about $250 on 50 campaign signs from a website called Signs On the Cheap. The signs, featuring the obligatory Republican elephant mascot, said in full:Local Elections MatterVote Republican — Vote TeamTRUMP/CAMILLOMake Greenwich Great AgainAt the bottom appeared “www.FredCamillo.com,” a domain name purchased months earlier by Mr. Kordick. The address redirected viewers to a militantly pro-Trump website.In the weeks to come, people would debate whether the police captain’s furtive planning was dastardly and underhanded, or merely akin to high schoolers preparing a prank before the big homecoming game. Either way, now he was set.At first, the signs seemed to blend in with other campaign placards.Leslie YagerSigngate began around midnight in late October, as an old, red Ford Escort stopped and started along the darkened streets. With Mr. Kordick behind the wheel, his college-student son, Matthew, hopped out to plant 37 Trump/Camillo signs on public property already adorned with campaign placards, adding red hues and cheeky mischief to autumn in Greenwich.The sun hadn’t yet risen when Mr. Camillo’s campaign chairman, Jack Kriskey, received his first complaint. “Then they just kept coming,” he later told investigators. Describing the reaction among Republicans as a “frenzy,” he said: “I was just getting barraged with: ‘Where did these come from?’”In frantic texts and calls to town and police officials, Republicans sought permission to remove signs they called unauthorized and deceptive. But they faced an obstacle: Campaign signs are protected speech under the First Amendment.As First Selectman Peter Tesei, a fellow Republican, explained to them in a text, “Town cannot touch political signs unless for mowing or sight line issues.”Mr. Camillo showed up at the police station to file a complaint, after which a police captain, Robert Berry, issued an internal memo that said, “We will not be getting involved in managing sign content or the removal of alleged fake signs.”But Republicans continued all day to pressure the Republican-controlled town hall. Finally, around 6 p.m., Captain Berry issued a second memo saying that the town’s law department and the Democratic and Republican town committees had agreed that the signs were “not legitimate and should be removed” — though the local Democratic leader later clarified that his committee had only determined that it had no standing since it had nothing to do with the signs.The Republican Town Committee quickly issued a statement urging supporters to take action: “Please make every effort to remove all of these signs as soon as possible.”The prank now stifled, the Camillo camp set out to expose the anonymous antagonist. A paid campaign worker identified SignsOnTheCheap.com through a Google search, then hired someone in Texas to go to the company’s shop in Austin and get a copy of the invoice by pretending to represent the customer.The impostor was paid $450, plus a $50 bonus, for securing an invoice bearing a familiar Greenwich name.A week after the offending signs were placed, Fred Camillo won the election.Jane Beiles for The New York TimesMr. Camillo already disliked Mr. Kordick, who often criticized him and other Republicans on social media; in a recent text to a town lawyer, he had called the police captain a fat so-and-so who would “get his too.” Now that Mr. Kordick had been outed, the candidate wrote to a supporter: “He is the biggest scum bag of all. He better pray that I do not win because I would be police commissioner and he will be gone.”Mr. Kordick was called into the deputy chief’s office, a few doors down from his own. When asked whether he knew anything about those Trump/Camillo signs, he recalled answering: “I know quite a bit about them.”Mr. Kordick joined the department in 1988, worked his way up the ranks, and received the latest of his glowing performance evaluations just four months earlier. Now he was being placed on administrative leave by a longtime colleague — and would soon be under internal investigation.A week later, Mr. Camillo was elected first selectman and, effectively, police commissioner. Not good for a certain police captain.Five months after that, in April 2020, Mr. Kordick retired with a full pension just as he was about to be fired for violating provisions of the police department’s Unified Policy Manual, including “Using Common Sense and Promoting Positive Values.” The next month, he filed notice of his intent to sue.In his lawsuit against Greenwich, Mr. Camillo and three other Republicans, Mr. Kordick alleged that he had been retaliated against for exercising his free-speech rights, and that the Camillo campaign had jeopardized his employment by using deceit to unmask him.“His speech was totally off-duty and clearly protected speech,” his lawyer, Lewis Chimes, said. “If it interferes with the performance of one’s duties, there’s a balancing test. But there wasn’t any real argument that it interfered with his duties, because he’d gotten outstanding reviews.”But the town attorney, Barbara Schellenberg, rejected the framing of the case as being about Mr. Kordick’s free-speech rights. She said the question came down to: “Can he effectively do this job after putting out what the town maintained was false speech? And hiding that? And not coming forward until he was put on the spot?“It was determined that he could not effectively continue,” Ms. Schellenberg added. “The chief lost trust in him.”Years of legal squabbling followed. All the while, local politics became more and more un-Greenwichlike, smashing the stereotype of fiscal restraint and social moderation being discussed over cucumber sandwiches and wine. Mr. Trump lost the town in the 2020 presidential election by an even wider margin than in 2016, but Trumpism had taken root. In 2022, a hard-right faction took over the Republican Town Committee — and are now planning to seize control of the Representative Town Meeting, the 230-member (!) legislative body whose powers include final say on any municipal expenditure over $5,000.As the Kordick lawsuit unfolded, things got a bit messy. Town officials gave vague, sometimes conflicting depositions. Leslie Yager, a journalist who runs a one-person news site called Greenwich Free Press, was subpoenaed by the town, which “effectively silenced me as a reporter,” she said in an email.And mortifying emails and text messages became public. Mr. Camillo, first selectman and author of the “scum bag” and fat so-and-so epithets, had to acknowledge in a deposition that his colorful words were “not language that I would condone.”A Superior Court judge dropped two defendants from the lawsuit, and Mr. Kordick reached settlements with Mr. Camillo and his campaign manager for undisclosed amounts. But the case continued against the Town of Greenwich, as its legal bills climbed into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.Just two months ago, the town sought to block Mr. Kordick’s actions from being referred to as “parody or satire,” arguing in a motion that the signs were not in the vein of “A Modest Proposal,” in which Jonathan Swift proposed to “solve” the problem of Irish poverty by killing and eating Irish children. Rather, the signs were a “dirty trick,” defined by Black’s Law Dictionary as dishonest activity “carried out to harm the reputation or success of a rival.”In other words, in Greenwich, linking a local Republican candidate to the Republican president would do that candidate harm.Mr. Kordick’s lawyer described the motion as “chutzpah,” and noted that the judge had already written that a reasonable jury might conclude the signs were “acceptable political parody.”Suddenly, last month, more than three years after the sprouting of the offending signs and just a week before the case against Greenwich was to be heard, a settlement was reached with Mr. Kordick for $650,000. The overall cost to Greenwich taxpayers: $1.5 million.Ms. Schellenberg, the town attorney, said that while she was confident Greenwich would have prevailed if the case had gone to trial, it “had no viable option but to comply with the demand of its insurance carrier to end the case.”She said the town continued to maintain that “there is no constitutional protection for speech that is intentionally false or deceptive, or recklessly indifferent to the truth,” or “for speech by an employee that disrupts or threatens to disrupt the operations of the department in which that employee works.”Mr. Kordick countered that Greenwich had infringed on his First Amendment rights and knew it would lose in court. “The reason I wanted to remain anonymous is that I feared retribution,” he said. “Which is what I got.”It’s late October again in Greenwich, with leaves turning and campaigns competing. That hard-right contingent is girding to take over the Representative Town Meeting in next month’s elections. Donald Trump is in the midst of another presidential run, notwithstanding his four criminal indictments. Fred Camillo, who declined to comment other than to say the case was resolved, is running for a third term.And Mark Kordick, forcibly retired police captain, said he is once again thinking of exercising his free-speech rights with a few campaign signs. Signs that might say, in part: “Paid for with proceeds from the settlement of Mark Kordick v. Town of Greenwich et al.” More

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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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      Tim Scott’s Super PAC Cancels Fall TV Ad Buys

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      In a memo, the super PAC told donors that it was not going to “waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative.”The main super PAC supporting Senator Tim Scott’s presidential campaign abruptly announced to donors in a memo that it was canceling millions of dollars in television ads it had reserved this fall, writing that Donald J. Trump’s strength was so ingrained among Republican voters that additional advertising would currently make little difference.“We aren’t going to waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” Rob Collins, a Republican strategist who is a co-chairman of the super PAC, wrote in the blunt memo to donors that was circulated on Monday. “We have done the research. We have studied the focus groups. We have been following Tim on the trail. This electorate is locked up and money spent on mass media isn’t going to change minds until we get a lot closer to voting.”A copy of the memo was obtained by The New York Times.The super PAC, called the Trust in Mission PAC, or TIMPAC, has been one of the largest advertisers in the race, spending roughly $5 million in Iowa alone this year. Mr. Scott’s poll numbers have hardly budged, however, and Mr. Trump remains far ahead.In addition to the super PAC, Mr. Scott’s campaign had also spent aggressively on television advertising, spending more than $12.5 million on ads to run through the end of November, the campaign said. That total far eclipses any other campaign, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. It’s not clear exactly how much the super PAC is canceling, though it could be $15 million or more. The group, according to data from AdImpact, has roughly $10 million reserved in just the next six weeks.“We are doing what would be obvious in the business world but will mystify politicos,” Mr. Collins wrote in the memo.The super PAC is likely to begin paying for some of Mr. Scott’s events as part of a move that was described as shifting resources elsewhere.The decision to cancel the ads and begin paying for some of Mr. Scott’s events comes a day after Mr. Scott revealed the deteriorating state of his campaign’s finances, which showed swelling spending and shrinking receipts.Mr. Scott had a robust $13.3 million cash on hand — including $11.6 million that can be used for the primary — but he raised only $4.6 million in the third quarter, down from $5.9 million the previous quarter. In the most recent period, Mr. Scott raised only a fraction of what former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida pulled in, and roughly one-tenth of Mr. Trump’s haul.He was even topped by Vivek Ramaswamy, who raised $7.4 million in the third quarter, about a third of which came from donors who gave less than $200.Mr. Scott’s campaign has been spending freely. When Mr. Scott entered the race in May, he brought with him $22 million left over from his last Senate re-election — and he has been steadily burning through that stockpile. In July alone, the campaign spent $5.4 million. In contrast, Ms. Haley’s campaign spent $3.5 million in the entire third quarter.Mr. Scott’s super PAC had entered July with only $15 million in cash on hand yet it soon made $40 million in television and digital reservations.That gap raised questions about how the super PAC had secured so much money so quickly. At the center of those questions is Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who previously had been one of Mr. Scott’s biggest benefactors but had not yet been among those donors who had given to the super PAC in the first half of the year. The canceled ads are likely to raise more questions about what financial role Mr. Ellison is playing.The super PAC said it would continue to spend on door-knocking programs, raising money online for Mr. Scott and holding events. The group claimed it was not giving up on the campaign entirely. Mr. Collins argued that Mr. Scott remained the “best fit” for Iowa voters and that for other campaigns and super PACs that fill the breach, “money will simply be wasted.” He wrote in the memo that two-thirds of Iowa caucusgoers will decide in the last six weeks before the caucus on Jan. 15, 2024 — not in the next six weeks.Regardless of the rationale, the decision will be seen in political circles as all but abandoning Mr. Scott.“Some will challenge our theory of the election,” Mr. Collins wrote, “but we would ask these critics to produce any evidence that shows any candidate, at this time, at any spending level, breaking through.”Matt Gorman, a spokesman for Mr. Scott, said in a statement that Mr. Scott’s campaign remained “built for the long haul — powered by the most primary cash on hand and the highest candidate favorability of anyone in the field.”He added, “On issues ranging from foreign policy to abortion, he has been the clearest and strongest voice, leading while others have followed.” More

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      Biden Will Get $80 Million Ad Boost From Climate Group

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      Climate Power says the lack of awareness and understanding of the president’s record on environmental issues is hurting him in the polls.Climate Power, a liberal advocacy group, plans to spend $80 million on advertising to lift President Biden’s standing on environmental issues and inform voters about the impact of legislation he signed last year.Polls show few voters are aware of the president’s record on climate issues, and there is a broad dissatisfaction with his stewardship of the issue, a dynamic that mirrors voters’ discontent with his handling of the economy and other concerns.This new effort also adds to the constellation of outside groups working to solve one of the Democratic Party’s most vexing problems: how to make a president widely seen by his own party as too old to seek re-election just popular enough to win a likely rematch with former President Donald J. Trump.Climate Power’s solution is to feed voters a steady stream of television and digital advertising highlighting Mr. Biden’s legislative accomplishments to protect the environment and contrasting them Mr. Trump, who mocked climate science, rolled back regulations aimed at cutting emissions and has promised to be a booster for the oil, gas and coal industries. “There is a huge swath of people who just don’t know anything. There’s also a segment of people that want him to do more. There’s also a swath that thinks he’s gone too far,” Lori Lodes, the executive director of Climate Power, said in an interview last week. “We need to make sure that the Biden coalition, the folks who got him into office in 2020, sees that he’s delivered on his promises. And he has.”As with so much of Mr. Biden’s agenda, his climate policies tend to poll well on their own but do worse when associated with the president. A Washington Post poll from July found that 70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Republicans, would like the next president be someone who favors government action to address climate change. And Climate Power’s own research showed that 67 percent of voters believe climate to be a “kitchen table issue.”Yet even though Democratic majorities in Congress last year passed, and Mr. Biden signed, the Inflation Reduction Act — legislation that invests $370 billion in spending and tax credits in zero-emission forms of energy to fight climate change — there is little evidence that he has earned the political benefits from voters who share his climate goals.Last month, The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago found Mr. Biden’s approval on handling climate change was 42 percent, similar to his overall approval rating of 40 percent, and better than the 33 percent who approved of his handling of the economy.That poll found Mr. Biden’s climate approval ratings had dropped from 52 percent in September 2021, before he signed his landmark climate legislation, and 49 percent in September of 2022, weeks after her signed it.The 30-second advertisements Climate Power has run this year, which were paid for with help from Future Forward, the independent expenditure organization blessed by the Biden campaign, have focused on efforts to lower household energy costs and create jobs in factories manufacturing renewable energy products. The ads trumpet gains “thanks to Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.”The planned $80 million will come from so-called dark money, the donors of which are not required to be disclosed under federal law, Ms. Lodes said. An affiliated Climate Power super PAC, which can also accept unlimited contributions but is required to report its donors to the Federal Election Commission, is expected to advertise on Mr. Biden’s behalf next year.The Climate Power campaign also has the praise of Mr. Biden’s top aides at the White House.“President Biden has delivered on the most ambitious agenda to fight climate change, including signing into law the largest climate investment ever,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, the White House deputy chief of staff. “Climate Power is a critical partner to continue demonstrating to the American people that the president is building a clean energy economy that benefits all Americans.”Part of the challenge in selling Mr. Biden’s strides on climate is that young voters, who polls suggest care the most about the issue, tend to be the most skeptical of his record on it. There has been significant anger over Mr. Biden’s approval of Willow, an $8 billion oil drilling project on pristine federal land in Alaska, and a pipeline that would carry natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia that has been opposed by environmentalists.Ms. Lodes dismissed left-wing anger over Mr. Biden’s climate record and said that Climate Power would seek to appeal to a broader group of voters critical to his 2024 coalition.“There are activists and then there are voters,” she said. “Climate activists are going to push and push. And you know what? The Biden campaign, the Biden administration need to be pushed to do more and to go further. But at the end of the day, the reality is that he has done more than any other president in American history on climate.”Lisa Friedman More

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      Republican Group Running Anti-Trump Ads Finds Little Is Working

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      With over 40 ads and $6 million spent, a group tied to the Club for Growth is no closer to an answer, a memo to donors says. Some ads even gave Donald Trump a boost.A well-funded group of anti-Trump conservatives has sent its donors a remarkably candid memo that reveals how resilient former President Donald J. Trump has been against millions of dollars of negative ads the group deployed against him in two early-voting states.The political action committee, called Win It Back, has close ties to the influential fiscally conservative group Club for Growth. It has already spent more than $4 million trying to lower Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters in Iowa and nearly $2 million more trying to damage him in South Carolina.But in the memo — dated Thursday and obtained by The New York Times — the head of Win It Back PAC, David McIntosh, acknowledges to donors that after extensive testing of more than 40 anti-Trump television ads, “all attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective.”The memo will provide little reassurance to the rest of the field of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals that there is any elusive message out there that can work to deflate his support.“Even when you show video to Republican primary voters — with complete context — of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it,” Mr. McIntosh states in the “key learnings” section of the memo.“Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability,” Mr. McIntosh adds. “This includes ads that primarily feature video of him saying liberal or stupid comments from his own mouth.”For the polling underpinning its analysis, Win It Back used WPA Intelligence — a firm that also works for the super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the race for the presidential nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Examples of “failed” ads cited in the memo included attacks on Mr. Trump’s “handling of the pandemic, promotion of vaccines, praise of Dr. Fauci, insane government spending, failure to build the wall, recent attacks on pro-life legislation, refusal to fight woke issues, openness to gun control, and many others.” (Dr. Anthony S. Fauci led the national response to the Covid pandemic.)The list of failed attacks is notable because it includes many of the arguments that Mr. DeSantis has tried against Mr. Trump. The former president leads Mr. DeSantis by more than 40 points in national polls and by around 30 points in Iowa, where Mr. DeSantis’s team believes he has the best shot of defeating Mr. Trump.Mr. McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman who co-founded the Club for Growth and the Federalist Society, makes it clear in the memo that any anti-Trump messages need to be delivered with kid gloves. That might explain why Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, has treated Mr. Trump gingerly, even in ads meant to contrast his character and his record unfavorably against Mr. DeSantis’s accomplishments.“Broadly acceptable messages against President Trump with Republican primary voters that do not produce a meaningful backlash include sharing concerns about his ability to beat President Biden, expressions of Trump fatigue due to the distractions he creates and the polarization of the country, as well as his pattern of attacking conservative leaders for self-interested reasons,” Mr. McIntosh writes in the memo.“It is essential to disarm the viewer at the opening of the ad by establishing that the person being interviewed on camera is a Republican who previously supported President Trump,” he adds, “otherwise, the viewer will automatically put their guard up, assuming the messenger is just another Trump-hater whose opinion should be summarily dismissed.”The polling conducted for Win It Back showed diminishing returns for the anti-Trump messaging and emphasized that Mr. Trump benefited from the fact that his rivals were still dividing up the non-Trump vote.In Iowa, Win It Back observed that in the areas where it ran ads, Mr. Trump’s likely share of the Republican vote fell by four percentage points. In the areas where the group did not advertise, Mr. Trump’s support grew by five points.Mr. DeSantis has made his handling of the pandemic a centerpiece of his campaign. But the analysis suggests that this strategy leads to a dead end.The memo says this of Win It Back’s most promising pandemic-themed ad: “This ad was our best creative on the pandemic and vaccines that we tested in focus group settings, but it still produced a backlash in our online randomized controlled experiment — improving President Trump’s ballot support by four points and net favorability by 11 points.”Win It Back did not bother running ads focused on Mr. Trump as an instigator of political violence or as a threat to democracy. The group tested in a focus group and online panel an ad called “Risk,” narrated by former Representative Liz Cheney, that focused on Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. But the group found that the Cheney ad helped Mr. Trump with the Republican voters, according to Mr. McIntosh.In a section of the memo titled “next steps,” Mr. McIntosh concludes, “We plan to continue developing and testing ads to deploy when there are signs of consolidation.” More