What reset? Republicans cast doubt on the idea that DeSantis is rebooting his campaign

A series of moves undertaken by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political team in recent days is stirring speculation of a campaign reboot. That may be easier said than done.

Facing a stubbornly persistent polling gap with his chief rival, former President Donald Trump, and early signs of financial trouble within his presidential operation, DeSantis’ campaign has taken a few steps to correct course and reassure anxious supporters in the governor’s presidential prospects.

Over the weekend, he dismissed a handful of low-level staffers, while two top advisers left the campaign last week to work for a political nonprofit supporting DeSantis’ presidential bid. On Tuesday, he sat for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, engaging with the kind of mainstream news outlet that he has publicly trashed for years.

Yet some Republicans aren’t convinced that a campaign reset is afoot, noting that DeSantis has a propensity to double down in challenging situations rather than change course.

“I don’t see him reconfiguring anything,” Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, said. “You’re not going to change Ron DeSantis’ DNA and all of sudden he’s going to become something new. He’s got to find a way to change his message without changing who he is, because that’s not going to happen.”

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, suggested that DeSantis wouldn’t be able to correct course, even if he wanted to.

“The real story here is that the DeSantis campaign doesn’t know how to turn things around with their current candidate,” Miller said in a statement to reporters.

While his campaign moved to lay off some staffers over the weekend, DeSantis’ strategy and communications teams remain largely intact. And there’s little to no evidence that he’s about to alter his messaging or public persona.

At a campaign stop in Tega Cay, S.C. on Monday, the governor continued to rail against the “indoctrination of children” and again swiped at Trump for failing to fire Anthony Fauci, the former White House public health adviser who was at the forefront of the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, DeSantis unveiled a plan to “rip the woke out of the military,” keeping in line with his long-time focus on culture-war issues and so-called “wokeness.” He vowed to reinstate service members who were let go for defying a Covid vaccine mandate and end diversity and equity programs within the military.

DeSantis’ direct engagement with the legacy and mainstream media has also been relatively limited. His CNN interview on Tuesday wasn’t exactly a prime time affair. It lasted just about 15 minutes and aired at 4 p.m. — a time slot that tends to draw a far smaller audience than the top-rated evening news shows.

His appearance on CNN was notably free of the typical grievance-airing and combativeness that has defined most of the governor’s interactions with unfriendly media. But DeSantis largely stuck to his well-worn talking points. He pushed back on the suggestion that he had moved too far to the political right to appeal to a broader electorate and brushed off questions about his sagging poll numbers.

“The reality is, this is a state-by-state process. I’m not running a campaign to try to juice whatever we are in the national polls,” he said. “It’s fine. I’m definitely doing better than everybody else.”

Campaign reboots are also notoriously risky undertakings. Alex Conant, who advised U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio’s unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nod, said that it’s not unusual for campaigns to reconfigure their strategy and staffing levels, but few have done so with great success.

He pointed to the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, who famously revamped his presidential campaign in the summer of 2007 before going on to win the GOP nomination the next year. But McCain’s shake-up is more of the exception than the rule, Conant said.

“Every campaign is different. McCain famously shook up his campaign because he had to,” Conant said. “But there’s not a lot of examples of candidates doing that. It’s hard enough to build one presidential campaign. It’s nearly impossible to build a second one in the middle of the campaign season.”

DeSantis is still facing real challenges. He waited far longer than many candidates to jump into the race, allowing Trump to attack him for months with little to no pushback. And when he finally launched his campaign in May, he didn’t see the kind of polling bump that candidates hope for in the days and weeks after they announce their candidacies.

Despite early confidence that he was the candidate best positioned to dethrone Trump as the ostensible leader of the Republican Party — especially after his massive 19-point reelection victory last year — DeSantis has struggled to break out of a distant second place.

And while he raised a hefty $20.1 million in the first six weeks of his presidential bid, a campaign finance disclosure filed over the weekend showed that he had largely tapped out high-dollar donors and burned through money at a breakneck pace. Of the $12 million he had left in the bank at the end of June, only $9 million can be used in the primary.

Andrew Romeo, a spokesperson for DeSantis’ campaign, declined to comment on whether the governor’s political operation is reevaluating its strategy. In a statement, he insisted that DeSantis remains the strongest candidate to defeat President Joe Biden next year and is well-equipped to “go the distance.”

“Americans are rallying behind Ron DeSantis and his plan to reverse Joe Biden’s failures and restore sanity to our nation, and his momentum will only continue as voters see more of him in-person, especially in Iowa,” Romeo said. “Defeating Joe Biden and the $72 million behind him will require a nimble and candidate driven campaign, and we are building a movement to go the distance.”

With the Iowa caucuses still about six months away, Republicans acknowledged that the GOP primary race is fluid and noted that DeSantis is still in a much better position than most of the party’s presidential hopefuls, most of whom have struggled to break into the low double-digits.

Still, Conant said, “negative narratives” like those surrounding DeSantis’ campaign struggles can wear on a candidate.

“The problem in presidential politics is that negative narratives can become self-fulfilling,” Conant said. “If there’s a drum beat that you’re underperforming, that scares away donors, it drives negative coverage and makes it really hard to tell a positive story.”