DeSantis has turned Florida into a Banana Republic. No wonder the whole Trump family lives there now.
The biggest donors in Republican politics largely shunned Ron DeSantis after his presidential campaign began to falter last summer. So his allies turned to donors the Florida governor still held sway over because of his day job.
A state coronavirus response contractor, CDR Enterprises, gave $1 million to his aligned super PAC Fight Right in the final weeks of the campaign. The DeSantis administration has issued purchase orders to the company worth $158 million to help distribute vaccines, treat patients and provide other services,sometimes through no-bid contracts, according to state records.
Herzog Railroad Services — a Missouri company the DeSantis’s team hired to build a $35 million Orlando commuter rail extension — gave $250,000 around the same time to Never Back Down, another aligned super PAC.
And a casino magnate, Jeffrey Soffer, gave $1 million in late July — on the same day that the campaign announced massive layoffs. DeSantis came out in support of Soffer’s controversial bid to transfer a casino license to his Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach weeks after leaving the presidential race.
People involved in the DeSantis fundraising effort described the dependence on donors with business before Florida as part of a strategic shift born of necessity. Lobbyist friends and fundraisers of DeSantis called Florida clients asking them to contribute to the super PACs paying for television ads and field operations — and many of those people gave, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. The pitch, according to one person who received a call, was that DeSantis was likely to remain a powerful governor in the state.
DeSantis had entered the presidential campaign as the richest candidate in politics, with $82.5 million in state campaign funds that seeded one of his super PACs, Never Back Down. But the governor raised relatively little from major donors between June 30 and the end of the year, when most deep-pocketed Republicans who play in national politics looked elsewhere, eventually settling on the campaign of former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.
Only 11 percent of the $147 million raised in 2023 by Never Back Down and Fight Right came in the second half of the year, according to campaign finance records. Many of the biggest donations had deep interests in Florida. Never Back Down, which raised nearly all of the funds, took in 37 percent of its haul from Florida-based donors in the first half of the year, not counting the transfer from the governor’s own political committee, according to campaign finance filings. The group raised 57 percent of its funds from Florida-based donors in the second half of the year.
James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s chief of staff and former campaign manager, said in response to a request for comment that “the premise of your article is entirely false.”
“Anybody working closely with the governor, such as I do, knows he is a man of unwavering principle and he would be the last person to grant access or state favor in exchange for political support, as your article suggests,” he said in a statement. “However, it is the case that many people who work in and around Florida supported his campaign because they genuinely believed he was the best candidate, and many have seen firsthand the incredible results of his leadership in our state.”
Uh huh. The system is corrupt, at every level. But these Republicans don’t even try to hide it. They just take vast sums of cash and then scream “I know you are but what am I!”