DeSantis Hangs On in Iowa Despite Campaign Turmoil

There’s good news and bad news for Team DeSantis. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Two national stories in the news this week about Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign tell you everything you need to know about where he stands fewer than eight weeks before the Iowa caucuses formally kick off the voting phase of the 2024 Republican nomination contest. The first is that he has snagged the coveted endorsement of Iowa conservative Evangelical kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats. The second is that members of his campaign’s high command are almost literally at each other’s throats. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether the good news will offset the bad news for a presidential candidacy that has steadily lost altitude through most of 2023.

The Vander Plaats blessing was not unexpected (the president of the powerful Family Leader organization has been dissing Trump for months and saying nicer things about DeSantis than about his rivals), but it’s arguably a pretty big deal. BVP, as he is known in the Hawkeye State, has famously backed the ultimate winners of the past three competitive Iowa caucuses (Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016). All three were underdogs; all three deployed the same retail-heavy, Iowa-focused strategy DeSantis has used in this cycle. All three, it should be added, failed to win the nomination. But DeSantis can’t afford to worry about that right now. His prime directive is to finish ahead of the fast-rising Nikki Haley in Iowa and survive to somehow challenge Donald Trump elsewhere. The Vander Plaats endorsement will clearly help, as evidenced by Trump’s almost immediate blast alleging a corrupt bargain between the Florida governor and his new ally, as Newsweek reported:

“Ron DeDeSanctimonious, in an act of sheer desperation, paid Iowa preacher Bob Vander Plaats $100,000, and then got his Endorsement? We did not seek it. What is going on here?” wrote Trump on Truth Social, referring to a donation reportedly made to the Evangelical leader’s foundation.

DeSantis currently trails Trump by 30 points and leads Haley by three points in the RealClearPolitics polling averages for Iowa. While Vander Plaats’s endorsement (along with an earlier nod from Iowa governor Kim Reynolds) can be spun as showing the DeSantis campaign to be a machine humming along as designed, there’s trouble at the very top. Earlier this week, political observers noted that a second pro-DeSantis Super-PAC (in addition to the Never Back Down operation that has been the principal engine of his campaign from the beginning) was running anti-Haley ads in Iowa. The emergence of the new group, called Fight Right, doesn’t make a lot of sense this late in the game. But as NBC News reported, it is a sign of the internal turmoil that has bedeviled the DeSantis campaign periodically all year:

Leaders of Ron DeSantis’ Never Back Down super PAC met privately last Tuesday to hash out a strategy for fighting Nikki Haley’s rise in the polls. Instead, two of them nearly came to blows.

Jeff Roe, the top consultant for the super PAC, got into a heated argument with longtime DeSantis confidant Scott Wagner while a small group of nine board members and senior staff were discussing budgeting.

“You have a stick up your a- -, Scott,” Roe fumed at Wagner, who is a member of the Never Back Down board.

“Why don’t you come over here and get it?” Wagner responded, rising from his chair. He was quickly restrained by two fellow board members. The interaction was relayed to NBC News by a source who was in the room.

Fight Right is the product of this nasty infighting:

After tempers flared at last week’s meeting, three close DeSantis allies — David Dewhirst, Jeff Aaron, and Scott Ross — launched a second super-PAC, Fight Right, Inc., in part at their urging.

Dewhirst until recently was an adviser in DeSantis’ gubernatorial office, and he is a close ally of James Uthmeier, who was DeSantis’ chief of staff before becoming his campaign manager. Aaron is a Florida lawyer, and Ross is a lobbyist.

“This is James taking over the money,” one Republican source familiar with the decision-making process said of the power struggle that has emerged in the wake of Fight Right’s creation.

If you take the view that the DeSantis candidacy has been slowly sinking like a stone for months and faces imminent extinction, then this messy backstabbing could reflect the old adage about politics being especially vicious when the stakes are low. But there have indeed been presidential campaigns (e.g., John McCain’s in 2008) that overcame the worse sorts of internal turmoil to get back on the road to victory (in the primaries, at least).

You have to wonder if Vander Plaats and Reynolds view themselves as representing a rescue mission for DeSantis or fear they have boarded a sinking ship. But every bit of turmoil afflicting Trump’s rivals just makes his likely nomination a bit more certain.