Is DeSantis campaign dead in the water? The money says yes

Republican presidential candidates had to release their quarterly finance reports on Friday. Given that there will be no real contests until February of 2024, fundraising and polling tend to be the most accurate barometers for how a candidate is doing in this early stage. In the same token, a strong first fundraising quarter tends to show that a candidate can last for the long haul.

For the longest time, Florida Gov Ron DeSantis has been hailed as a fundraising juggernaut. His message of being a “competent Trump” has given him access to the upper echelons of the Republican donor class, the very folks who may not have liked former president Donald Trump but who voted for him nonetheless because of his judicial nominations and signing massive tax cuts.

But, as with most things, his fundraising significantly trails Mr Trump. Whereas Mr Trump raised $35m in the last fundraising quarter, Mr DeSantis only raised $20m in his first quarter as a candidate.

In fairness, Mr Trump has been an officially declared candidate since November, whereas Mr DeSantis declared somewhat in the middle of the fundraising cycle. In the same respect, Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, raised roughly $130m this last quarter, a sign of significant interest. But candidates are legally not allowed to coordinate with super PACs, making it much more difficult for them to determine how the money will be spent.

In the same respect, Mr DeSantis faced a flurry of stories during the weekend noting how much trouble he faces. NBC News reported that nearly $14m of the money he raised came from donors who gave him the legal maximum of money they can donate to a candidate per cycle. Meanwhile, his campaign burned through $7.9m.

Essentially, that means he is spending a large amount of money but can no longer go back to many of the donors who helped him in the first place. Meanwhile, only about a third of his campaign contributions came from smaller donations, meaning he can keep going back to them to ask for cash.

Similarly, the NBC report said that he had a whopping 92 staffers on his payroll. By comparison, the candidate with the second most staff, Sen Tim Scott (R-SC), has only 54 staff while Mr Trump has only 40 people on his staff. Already, he’s faced comparisons to former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s doomed 2016 campaign, who like Mr DeSantis was a governor who was popular in right-wing circles but who announced his candidacy much later and faced accusations of running a bloated campaign by the time he dropped out before the Iowa caucuses.

That leads to his next problem: Politico’s Alex Isensadt reported that his campaign has begun to shed staff, albeit fewer than ten staffers are leaving and some might depart to Never Back Down.

Losing staff is fairly normal in many campaigns and John McCain faced some rough exits early in his 2008 campaign before he made his comeback in New Hampshire and captured the GOP nomination. But generally, losing staff amid stories of cash shortages just adds to an image of a candidacy that fails to meet expectations.

All of this doesn’t even count his biggest obstacle to the GOP nomination: Mr Trump. Typically, presidential primaries are exercises in hypotheticals; but because Mr Trump is a former president whose policies pleased many conservatives, Mr DeSantis is in the difficult position of having to denounce him where he came short while also praising him.

A perfect example came in the past two days. On Sunday, he appeared on Fox News Sunday where he criticised Mr Trump, saying the former president has“promised to drain the swamp – it got worse,” and added that “He promised to have Mexico pay for a border wall. They did like 50 miles of wall. There's massive expanses still there.” (He also denounced Mr Trump for adding to the national debt but omitted the fact he voted for the Trump tax cuts, which added to the ballooning debt.)

But the next day, he appeared at Christians United for Israel. During that time, he largely avoided mentioning Mr Trump but couldn’t help but talk about the 45th president’s policies toward Israel such as relocating the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and the Abraham Accords, the peace agreements Mr Trump’s administration brokered with Israel’s Arab neighbours.

Mr DeSantis needs to win over these types of voters: white (and increasingly Latino) evangelical Christian voters who want to elect a true Christian conservative. But Mr DeSantis will have trouble peeling off these voters despite the fact he’s a devout Catholic and Mr Trump is a less than pious leader.

Toward the end of his speech, Mr DeSantis talked about Israel’s 75th anniversary and how everyone counted the country out.

“Yes, they had an ally in the United States of America, but most true allies were few and far between but they fought,” he said. “They've been willing to stand up for what's right. And they've said that they are going to make sure that they are never displaced from the land of Israel ever again.”

One might say he sees himself in the same light as he hopes to stand up to the Trump Goliath.