Don’t know DeSantis’ campaign manager? Generra Peck would like to keep it that way

Generra Peck had just finished a 5K spartan race at Nationals Park in Washington in September 2021 when the phone call came from Ron and Casey DeSantis.

Seeking to rebuild a political operation left dormant by internal dissension and the pandemic, Florida’s first couple were ringing to ask Peck to steer the governor’s re-election campaign.

Peck took all of a few moments to get to yes.

She drove back to her home in Richmond, packed her suitcase, scooped up her dog and began the 11-hour drive to Tallahassee the next day.

Peck has been back home only twice since, fully vested as DeSantis’ top political lieutenant as he embarks on a White House run that will require him to vanquish not only a sitting president, but more immediately, a towering former one inside his own party.

But as she directs a daunting primary campaign in which DeSantis is fighting from a deficit of more than 20 points with less than six months before votes are cast in Iowa, the cucumber-cool, hyper-insular mantra of Peck and her team is already being tested by the unforgiving onslaught of national media scrutiny.

Nearing two months into his launch, DeSantis has endured a glitchy Twitter-based roll-out, dipping poll numbers, questions about his personal relatability on the stump and critiques about the campaign’s choice to wage an aggressive cultural contrast with Donald Trump — online and from the hard right.

Last week, as news broke that DeSantis was already shedding staff to control costs, it became the first time Peck’s own leadership decisions had landed under the microscope.

With even some DeSantis allies openly expressing frustration about the direction of the campaign, questions are intensifying about Peck’s ability to survive DeSantis’ summer slump.

“They’ve never been comfortable relying on or delegating to staff,” said a former DeSantis campaign staffer, referring to the governor and his wife. “It’s a culture where everyone’s looking over their shoulder.”

In a statement released through a spokesperson, Peck pointed to DeSantis’ fundraising and a plan to ramp up his in-person campaign activity as bright spots.

“The generous support we received this quarter will be critical as we continue to capitalize on the momentum shift that occurred in Iowa this week and deploy the Full Grassley,” Peck said, referring to the decision to send DeSantis to each of Iowa’s 99 counties. “Americans across the country are about to see a whole lot more of Ron DeSantis. Get ready.”

But DeSantis is entering the crucial third quarter with just $12 million in his warchest, burning through cash at a rate that is reminiscent of Scott Walker’s 2016 campaign, which shuttered after just two months.

EARLY HEADWINDS

If Trump’s political journey has created a band of dishy operatives both famous and infamous, Peck, 36, has attempted to embrace the opposite posture: Low-key, drama-free and exceedingly media wary.

Despite being tapped as DeSantis’ presidential campaign manager, Peck’s media presence has — until recently — been nearly invisible.

It was an intentional, if not untenable, decision to try and keep the focus on DeSantis and away from personnel and personalities. The vacuum prompted some in the press to crown the consultant running the governor’s Never Back Down super PAC, Jeff Roe, as DeSantis’ shadow strategist, pulling the strings behind the curtain.

But those inside and around DeSantis’ orbit say that Roe was never in contention to run the campaign, largely because DeSantis and his wife cherish discretion and loathe the model of the uber political consultant who strives to see their name in headlines and their commission fees hitting six or seven digits.

Roe declined to comment.

While some close to Roe were pushing for the Axiom Strategies founder to sit atop the official campaign, several DeSantis advisers and allies contend, he never was mentioned by the governor or Casey DeSantis in meetings revolving around campaign leadership.

The consensus: It was always going to be Peck, with Roe blessed as the outside operator.

“The biggest reason why the First Family chose Generra is she’s very low key and doesn’t make it about herself. That’s probably the most important aspect,” said Nick Iarossi, a Tallahassee lobbyist, DeSantis supporter and fundraiser. “The fact that people don’t know her tells you how understated she is.”

Neither Peck — nor DeSantis’ other most senior adviser, pollster Ryan Tyson — carry prior national campaign experience.

“Typically the candidate that wins doesn’t have the establishment staff that has done presidentials before,” Tyson said. “Winners are usually scrappier and less concerned with the limelight.”

But in recent weeks as DeSantis appeared to be back-sliding in his campaign against Trump, Peck and her lieutenants began to gradually open up to reporters to demonstrate confidence and placate mounting requests for access to look under the hood of the political operation.

In a background call with McClatchyDC in late June, top DeSantis aides touted a campaign organization that intentionally integrated most of the necessary functions — ad makers, digital wizards, data scientists and communications consultants — under one roof. They argued that sitting alongside each other in Tallahassee would create a special synergy that is missing when the tasks are farmed out to separate political consulting vendors with myriad clients and various interests.

Yet only a few weeks later, David Abrams, the senior communications and messaging staffer, departed the campaign to join an outside political group. His replacement has yet to be named.

“The complaints I have heard come from finance types who have problems with the overall strategy and not the general implementation,” said Bob Heckman, a well-wired Republican operative who worked on the White House campaigns of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

PECK’S PATH TO MANAGER

The person most responsible for Peck’s original integration into DeSantis’ world is Phil Cox, the veteran Republican consultant who was tasked by then-Republican Governors Association executive director Dave Rexrode to help DeSantis refurbish his political team in the spring of 2021.

Peck was essentially Cox’s No. 2, having known her since they both worked on Bob McDonnell’s 2009 campaign for Virginia governor. It was there where they began to form a bond akin to siblings.

“I’ve been at this for nearly three decades and she’s the most talented, hard-working person I’ve had the privilege to work with. Period,” Cox said of Peck. “She has that unique ability to both master the operational details of the campaign as well as zoom out and see the bigger picture and provide sound strategic advice. That’s pretty rare in this business to do both, but she has it.”

Cox added: “She has something that many in this business lack — which is a degree of humility.”

As a 22-year-old recent college graduate, Peck served in a low-level, unpaid operations role on the McDonnell campaign, but Cox, the campaign manager, soon noticed she was mature far beyond her years.

After McDonnell won the election and Cox was tapped as transition director, he effectively enlisted Peck as his chief of staff. Continually impressed, Cox conveyed to the governor-elect she should be in his administration.

Peck went on to serve as an assistant to the state’s commerce secretary before ascending to McDonnell’s team of policy advisers.

Following the McDonnell governorship, she went to work for the corporate behemoth McGuireWoods and pursued a MBA from the Darden School of Business in Virginia, a rare resume achievement among campaign operatives.

But she never nipped the political bug, going back to work in Cox’s consulting firm in 2018.

She helped to burnish support for the Trump administration’s new international trade agreement — USMCA — even traveling with former Vice President Mike Pence to sell the details of the highly technical deal around the country.

She kept her hands in the campaign world as well, working mid-level positions on the unsuccessful Virginia gubernatorial campaigns of Ed Gillespie and Pete Snyder, where she earned a reputation of extreme loyalty to the principals.

During the 2020 presidential race, she conducted months-long qualitative research on swing voters and released a post-mortem report for a center-right nonprofit that concluded that Trump’s persona was the kryptonite that seeded his defeat. “Suburban voters,” Peck said, “did not always agree with the style the president took.”

Those suburban voters — whose habits and preferences have homogenized appreciably across the country in recent election cycles — became a minor obsession of Peck’s as she put together the game plan for DeSantis’ re-election.

It was a re-election that everyone involved knew had to be emphatic in order to serve as a precursor of what was to come.

2022 PRELUDE

When Cox first landed in Tallahassee in 2021, he quickly realized that what DeSantis needed most was not strategic political or communications advice — on messaging, the governor acts intuitively and autonomously — but an operating infrastructure that could support and amplify his policies and record.

DeSantis had ousted longtime Florida Republican operative Susie Wiles and her associates not even a year after he won his first term once the governor suspected her of disloyalty, aggressive gate-keeping and profiting on his name.

Wiles, who is now co-managing Trump’s third White House campaign, has denied charges of such a betrayal to friends. “As you likely know, his staff turns over like pancakes so nobody from my iteration still works there,” she told McClatchyDC.

Cox realized DeSantis had no one left in his political shop other than longtime fundraiser Heather Barker. He saw Peck as best-suited to putting together the nuts and bolts of a campaign infrastructure and constructing a long-term strategy.

By quietly but doggedly solving a series of problems and presenting actionable solutions in 2021, Peck quickly earned the trust of DeSantis and, particularly, his wife, who remains the governor’s chief confidante and political enforcer.

Peck rose to her position in the governor’s campaign when Thomas “TJ” Fuentes, a California-based operative who was brought into the fold on the recommendation of Michael McClellan, a longtime friend of the governor, was eventually pushed aside, dismissed as a poor fit by the DeSantis’ measure.

The search for a manager — an ongoing project during the first half of the year — abruptly halted when Florida’s governor and first lady realized she was sitting right in front of them on a weekly basis.

While DeSantis’ re-election was never genuinely in doubt, Peck’s job was to help orchestrate the biggest win possible amid the drumbeat of 2024. Through the summer of 2022, the campaign turned down invites to the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire to remain laser-focused on Florida.

Tyson, formally brought on to the re-elect, told the governor in 2021 he’d win by at least 10 points. In September 2022 as Election Day approached, Tyson dramatically revised his forecast to a victory margin of 18 to 22 points, an extraordinary margin in a state that had previously been a perennial battleground.

DeSantis largely eschewed polling, particularly when it came to the most contentious issues facing the state.

“He would not consume polling. He never considers message or issue polling,” Peck said in an interview with McClarthyDC. “Six or eight weeks later, you’d see the polling shift. On COVID, on the Disney fight. It puts steel in your spine.”

The final result of the $150 million campaign was a 19-point romp that earned Peck an Election Night shout-out from DeSantis for helming “the best run campaign in the history of Florida politics.”

Still, to many Florida Republican insiders, Peck remains an unknown.

“I’m not sure who gets credit more for his landslide victory than DeSantis himself,” said Peter Feaman, an unaligned Republican National Committee member from Palm Beach County. “She’s not plugged in in Florida. But because he won by such a large victory in 2022, it’s natural that she’d just transition to the national position.”

TURNOVER TREND

DeSantis is known for having a history of distant if not altogether chilly relationships with his staffers, resulting in an environment where turnover is rampant.

Brad Herold, the original campaign manager for DeSantis’ 2018 gubernatorial primary run, helped devise the strategy to methodically place the underdog candidate on Fox News in order to catch the attention of Trump and his ardent supporters.

But Herold was ultimately replaced by Wiles in the closing month of that general election campaign, when DeSantis was seen as running behind Democrat Andrew Gillum.

According to two Republican operatives familiar with the 2018 campaign, Herold was unfairly “played” out of the apparatus, with his layering becoming an archetype of DeSantis’ lack of loyalty.

A year later, it was Wiles who was excommunicated, for perceived disloyalty. Fuentes was next to be sidelined heading into the re-elect.

And just days after DeSantis launched his 2024 campaign, it was Cox — the original aide who initiated the DeSantis rebuilding effort — who would exit his role as an informal, unpaid adviser to the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down.

Cox’s departure came after ABC News published a story detailing his presence at a LIV Golf Tournament at Trump National Golf Club, quoting unnamed “sources” close to DeSantis who were uncomfortable with Cox’s private consulting work on behalf of the Saudi Arabian-bankrolled league that has since merged with the PGA Tour.

Cox, who remains supportive of the governor, declined to comment on the circumstances surrounding his exit.

DESANTIS VS. THE PRESS

No matter what one thinks of the DeSantis campaign, vanquishing Trump’s grip on the Republican base was never going to happen quickly.

The DeSantis braintrust still notes that at least half of the GOP wants a Republican nominee not named Trump and that over time, the governor will show himself to be the most appealing and last-standing option.

But there’s another animating feeling that’s taken hold within the DeSantis campaign and its allies: That the establishment media is stacked against him. That Trump makes for better content, but is also a surer loser to President Joe Biden next year.

“I think the media is against him, I think they want the governor to lose. If the governor becomes the nominee, he’ll win. If it’s Trump, Trump will lose and Biden will win. That’s something that we expected, so it’s just about weathering that storm and charging on brick by brick,” said Adrian Lukis, a former chief of staff to DeSantis. “And he has the right person at the helm of his campaign in Generra to do that.”

Navigating a negative news cycle is a ritual any top flight campaign must endure. The clearest past to reversing it is to demonstrate progress in chipping away at Trump’s lead.

While letting go of staffers and reframing the media strategy can be presented as a reboot, making a change in campaign managers in the opening months would serve as the clearest sign of a campaign in freefall — something DeSantis himself has dismissed as a “corporate” media “narrative.”

Peck remains the lone “funnel” which every person who wants to reach Ron or Casey DeSantis goes through, according to a pro-DeSantis Republican outside the operation.

That unparalleled proximity to DeSantis means it is Peck who will ultimately receive credit for what would be the biggest upset since Barack Obama dislodged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination in 2008, or the burden of defeat for a governor fending off a summer of political heat.

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