In his third staff shakeup in less than a month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis replaced his embattled presidential campaign manager with one of his most trusted, and most conservative, advisers: his gubernatorial office’s chief of staff, James Uthmeier.
Outgoing campaign manager Generra Peck will remain as chief strategist on the campaign as part of the restructuring. Peck guided DeSantis’s blowout reelection bid last year, but she quickly became the subject of criticism from DeSantis advisers and donors in mid-July after his presidential campaign stalled and money dried up.
[Marc Caputo is an excellent and well-connected Florida reporter, but I question whether the money has “dried up.” They’re building a massive ground game, so it’s clearly getting spent, but that’s a long-term investment. DeSantis raised $20 million in six weeks after launching his campaign in mid-May, about the same pace as Trump but without the big legal bills. Perhaps the Q3 figures are disappointing thus far, but we still haven’t yet gotten to the first debate either. Still, the churn does show a degree of concern within Team DeSantis and perhaps with its big-donor base super-PAC, Never Back Down. — Ed]
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