DeSantis group plans field program, showing the expanding role of super PACs

Activists at 27 universities will soon begin meeting twice a month to organize their peers under the banner of Students for DeSantis. Office space supporting the Florida governor’s presidential ambitions will open in each of the early-voting states. And names have already been gathered by clipboard in Iowa to launch a door-knocking army.

But none of these efforts will be a part of the as-yet-unannounced DeSantis campaign. Rather they are being funded and organized by Never Back Down, a technically independent super PAC that unlike federal candidates can accept donations of any value from wealthy individuals and corporations.

The arrangement marks a new frontier in the rapidly shifting campaign finance landscape that governs presidential efforts, as outside groups allied with candidates behave more and more like traditional campaigns. Made possible by a pair of court decisions in 2010, super PACs have steadily evolved since, from deep-pocketed attack ad operations to sprawling organizations that undertake much of the work of a campaign, including candidate fundraising, strategic operations, polling, opposition research and communications.

Though super PACs are technically barred from coordinating major spending to influence an election with the candidates they support, the walls of demarcation mean less in practice. Little has stopped prospective candidates from working with their super PACs before announcing their campaigns. PAC staff can rotate over to the campaign after the candidate’s formal operation is announced. And detailed strategy ideas and planning can be shared between the two entities through publicly accessible websites.

Officials at Never Back Down — which is led in part by Phil Cox, one of the governor’s top political advisers — has been telling donors they intend to push the bounds of what an independent effort can do in presidential years. That includes a major push into the sort of organizing in early states that has historically been undertaken by candidates themselves.

“The reason why this is going to be expansive and a completely different kind of super PAC is really because of the movement you are seeing form behind Ron DeSantis,” said Kristin Davison, the chief operating officer of Never Back Down. “Our plan right now will be to tap into that grass-roots movement, sign up these supporters and then engage them into action.”

Never Back Down also plans to continue a relatively recent practice of spending unlimited donations from wealthy donors on donor prospecting to raise much smaller increments of money that can be directly controlled by the candidate. Super PACs now routinely send out digital ads soliciting emails and donations, with links that go directly to the candidates’ campaign accounts. Never Back Down, even before the DeSantis campaign exists, has been raising small-dollar donations for an account that is effectively being held in escrow until the Florida governor joins the race. The fruits of that effort won’t be clear until midyear, when the committee is required to report to the Federal Election Commission.

“Today what we see is super PACs trying to play more than an independent supporting role but a very well coordinated role, taking over some of the things that were traditionally done by campaigns,” said Saurav Ghosh, the Campaign Legal Center’s director on federal campaign finance reform. “The concern here is that these entities are being funded by a handful of megadonors that really want to make a huge impact and have expectations that in return they will have a seat at the table.”

A super PAC-heavy strategy, which has the benefit of deep pockets if the candidate has wealthy supporters, also comes with risks, however. Some donors and strategists questioned the approach, pointing to the possibility of a bloated outside committee that is walled off, at least to an extent, from the candidate. They also warned of competing factions between the campaign and the super PAC, with DeSantis — known for keeping a small inner circle and relying for most counsel on his wife — not able to coordinate between the two.

Candidates still have a significant advantage over independent groups in advertising costs, because television stations are required to charge politicians the lowest available rate for their ads. This was a drag on the Republican presidential super PAC Right to Rise, which spent more than $100 million, mostly on advertising supporting former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign.

“Now oddly enough if you’re trying to buy an ad during ‘Wheel of Fortune’ in Cedar Rapids, if you’re the candidate, they’ll probably charge you $400 and they’ll charge the super PAC $1,000,” said Mike Murphy, who ran that effort. “There are real operational limits, particularly in a presidential campaign. It’s better to have one than not. They’re an asset. But they’re not the receiver or quarterback — they can’t be.”

Never Back Down could receive a transfer of the more than $85 million that DeSantis has in a state fundraising account if he becomes a candidate. In addition to that financial cushion, the super PAC has announced already bringing in $30 million in its first weeks of existence, raising the prospect of a record-breaking outside operation for a GOP primary effort that could grow into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

DeSantis’s longtime fundraiser, Heather Barker, who served as a senior adviser to his reelection campaign last year, will raise money for the super PAC, according to people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss staffing. The move reflects Barker’s experience with major donors, these people said, while also signaling the prominent role the outside spending vehicle is expected to play in DeSantis’s operation.

Under current FEC advisories, candidates can appear at super PAC events or on phone calls with prospective donors as long as they do not request donations themselves. The main fundraiser for the governor’s prospective campaign committee, which is subject to individual giving limits, is expected to be Lauren Lofstrom, who is new to DeSantis’s orbit, according to people with knowledge of the move. Lofstrom was finance director for the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), which was run by Jeff Roe, the head of Axiom, who has joined the super PAC with several of his senior deputies.

The outstanding question is what will be left for the DeSantis campaign to do, and whether any of the officials now working for the PAC will move over to the campaign at a later date. A person involved in the effort, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss plans for the future, said there had been no discussions of such a move. Certain activities, like qualifying for primary ballots across the country, transporting the candidate, writing candidate speeches and preparing for debates, cannot be done by a super PAC, said Michael Toner, a former FEC chairman who now works at Wiley Rein.

“I just think the models of the super PAC taking the place of the campaign — the examples of super PACs successfully taking the place of the campaign — are few and far between,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who has worked with Priorities USA, a super PAC that has supported the Democratic presidential candidate since 2012 with advertising. “While it may be easier to raise money into a super PAC, it’s important to have significant resources that are under the direct control of the campaign, but more importantly, that a candidate has to have access to his or her brain trust.”

Super PACs have increasingly sought to push the boundaries of rules forbidding direct coordination with campaigns. In the 2022 Ohio Senate race, a super PAC called Protect Ohio Values spent over $1 million on the most basic strategy work of J.D. Vance’s campaign, including polling, opposition research, messaging strategy and ad writing. The information was posted by a user called “@protectohiovaluesforms” on the publishing platform Medium so the Vance team could use the information. The Campaign Legal Center has filed an FEC complaint challenging the strategy as illegal coordination between the two operations.

The super PAC supporting Carly Fiorina in the former Hewlett-Packard CEO’s bid for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination took on much of the voter contact efforts and other traditional political activity often run by campaigns. So expansive was the super PAC’s role that it staged aspects of her events and paid for signage and other materials simply by reviewing the candidate’s public schedule — a way to avoid running afoul of rules against coordination.

The aim of the pro-Fiorina group, said Steve DeMaura, who served as its executive director, was to “build a super PAC that would house as much as we could fathom.” He said he expected super PACs, which have already ballooned in importance over the last decade, to play an even more significant role in the 2024 contest.

“You’ve seen more and more people dabble with this approach,” he said. “Former president Trump has embraced it to a certain extent. Democrats are certainly using it in many ways. And there are signs that those running in 2024 see big upsides to running more of their operations through super PACs.”

The full extent of what Never Back Down will do this cycle is not clear. People involved in the effort say it is being run as a lean operation, with no consultants making points on advertising buys or large commissions. The group has already released some ads, including one attacking former president Donald Trump, DeSantis’s potential rival for the nomination.

The group has also begun to focus on building a ground game for an eventual DeSantis effort. At a recent Iowa event for Never Back Down, hosted by the group’s founder Ken Cuccinelli, volunteers collected the names and contact information of about 48 attendees, who will be contacted for future grass-roots organizing opportunities in the state, according to a person familiar with the effort, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the super PAC’s plans. While the super PAC and a campaign cannot pool such data, they are allowed to engage in equal-value list swaps to take advantage of each other’s efforts, campaign finance attorneys say.

The group is also launching a Students for DeSantis effort at universities in the early nominating states, as well as conservative bastions such as the University of Mississippi, Oklahoma State University, Texas Tech University and Brigham Young University. The effort, led by Marcel Teloma, a recent college graduate who developed the idea, will involve campus screenings, trainings, speaking engagements and event planning to support a DeSantis presidential bid, according to a Never Back Down official.

Experts said DeSantis has freer rein to engage with the super PAC’s leadership while he is still only a prospective candidate, given uncertainty about how the rules apply to politicians before they’ve launched their campaigns. Kenneth Gross, a senior political law counsel at the firm Akin Gump and a former FEC associate general counsel, drew a parallel to Bush, whose allies “raised and spent large sums before his filing for candidacy.”

“There was some hand wringing at the time but there was no successful challenge to the coordination rules,” Gross said. “As long as the candidate is still considering whether to run, it is hard to see a successful challenge against a prospective candidate coordinating with a super PAC.”

But that relationship can become more difficult to manage without private communication channels in the heat of a campaign, a fact that proved challenging to Bush in the 2016 campaign when his team struggled with how to deal with his Florida rival, Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also running for president in 2016.

“We were on the same page at the beginning of we’re going to have to attack Marco,” remembers Tim Miller, who worked as Bush’s communications director in 2016. “And then after a while when that didn’t work, the campaign side was like, ‘Well we need to focus on attacking Trump and building Jeb back up,’ and the super PAC was like, ‘Well, we’re going to continue to attack Marco.’ And people were like, ‘Are you guys on the same page?’ And it was like, ‘No, we’re not.’”

Miller said DeSantis could soon find himself in a similar situation with Trump, who has a supportive super PAC that is playing a much more traditional role of focusing on television advertising and opposition research.

“The Trump factor being such a wild card, the thing that would worry me most would be the super PAC has to be secondary to DeSantis on how do you deal with Donald Trump,” Miller said. “If DeSantis’s strategy is I’m going to get after Trump, he’s going to have to lead, and if his strategy is to give Trump some space, he’s also going to have to lead.”