About the only thing going right so far for Ron DeSantis in his neophyte presidential campaign is the money. But the way he is pulling it in is legally dubious, to say the least: The GOP presidential hopeful appears to be pioneering all sorts of ways to flout federal campaign finance law, both to goose his coffers and to allow his supposedly independent super PAC to run core elements of his campaign. The most glaring example? Using $82.5 million from his state-level super PAC—which was created to support his gubernatorial ambitions—to juice his national run.
First things first: Super PACs, according to campaign finance law, are supposed to operate independently of campaigns and their candidates. That independence is what allows them to raise infinite amounts of money from corporations and the super rich, thanks to the conservative Supreme Court majority ruling in Citizens United.
But DeSantis’ super PACs aren’t just working closely with his campaign—they’re taking over entire core campaign functions.
The super PAC supporting DeSantis’ national bid for president is the Never Back Down PAC: It is already organizing events for DeSantis on the campaign trail (a tactic favored by Carly Fiorina in the 2016 presidential Republican primary). And it is structuring, staffing, and building out an entire ground-game operation on DeSantis’ behalf, something seemingly unprecedented in a presidential primary.
Rather than just pouring money into independent expenditures like pricey TV-ad buys, as super PACs usually do, Never Back Down is hiring field organizers and recruiting an entire volunteer network to approximate a grassroots apparatus, complete with door-knocking. The Washington Post reported that the super PAC is running “a paid-field operation bigger than ever before tried in a presidential primary, on the scale of four simultaneous congressional races.” This is not a campaign bringing in enthusiastic volunteers; it’s a supposedly independent political entity paying doorknockers to gin up support on behalf of the DeSantis campaign. The super PAC has similarly spearheaded a campaign to drive small-dollar donations to DeSantis’ own campaign coffers.
“To my knowledge, a super PAC has never previously run the field operation for a hopeful president,” Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the watchdog group Documented, said in a recent interview. “It’s probably the first time we’ve seen a super PAC drive small-dollar donations to a presidential candidate,” he said, as well.
The most unprecedented thing, though—and this is where it goes from definitely unsavory and clearly in violation of the spirit of campaign finance law to possible actual transgression—is that transfer of $82.5 million from a state super PAC to DeSantis’ national super PAC.
Candidates are not allowed to take money raised by a state-level organization and spend it on federal races. (Campaign finance law is not especially equivocal on this point; it’s a violation of the ban on soft money, a key part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill of the early 2000s.)
And yet, DeSantisworld moved a gargantuan sum that he raised as governor of Florida (for a PAC now called “Empower Parents”), and reallocated it to fund expensive ad spots for his presidential run. Now, money raised to support DeSantis as governor is burnishing his culture war commitments and combating his reputation as a guy who eats pudding with his bare fingers nationwide. According to a complaint filed by Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, the transfer marks an $82.495 million violation of the $5,000 campaign contribution limit.
DeSantis’ role model in this money transfer is not Fiorina, but Republican congressman and fellow Floridian Byron Donalds. When Donalds ran for Congress in 2020, he resigned from the state committee associated with his time in the Florida statehouse. The money raised in that position was then transferred a handful of times, and was ultimately reallocated to a super PAC in support of his congressional ambitions. This, too, would seem like a violation of the soft money ban, as funds were transferred from a state-level PAC to a federal one.
But the FEC deadlocked last year in its finding over whether or not Donalds violated federal campaign finance laws. No surprise, it split along partisan lines: The body’s three Republicans said it was fine, its three Democrats said it was illegal. This was in regards to $107,000.
For the record, a deadlock decision does not mean the act is legal. But the DeSantis campaign took Donalds’ case as a model, and supercharged it. While Donalds’ defense hinged on the notion that he resigned the state-level committee before he had made clear any intention that he was running for federal office, DeSantis dispensed with that pretense altogether. (This month, at the Iowa Roast and Ride conservative campaign kickoff, DeSantis and his child were spotted autographing his national super PAC’s tour bus.)
The money in question is also roughly 800 times greater.
“It’s pretty brazen. It’s illegal for DeSantis to spend his $82 million state campaign war chest in support of his presidential run, and he’s doing it anyway,” said Fischer. “It remains to be seen if the FEC does anything, and even if they do find he violated the law, the decision won’t come until years after the election.”
Stuart McPhail, a litigation counsel at the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Lever the same thing. “There’s no one really guarding the vault here,” McPhail said to reporter Andrew Perez. “Even if someone did try to enforce the law, you have a current [Supreme] Court that is very skeptical of any kind of campaign finance law. And I think a number of them feel like they have friends on the court. The donors behind the campaign have friends on the court.”
Meanwhile, the FEC remains hamstrung by its partisan divide, and effectively useless in cracking down on these violations.
It’s a new big-money blueprint for politicians with national ambition: Win state office in a place like Florida with extremely lax campaign finance laws; raise six- and seven-figure checks from donors or corporations (a move that would be prohibited in states with actually existing money-in-politics statutes, like Minnesota); transfer the money to a federal super PAC; and then dare the FEC to enforce the rules. It’s also a way to pursue a huge competitive advantage in national races, where it can be harder to raise legal money, on the gamble that the rules won’t matter down the line.
There’s just one problem: DeSantis may think he is above the law, but he is not Trump. And while his antics have gone largely unpunished to this point, he doesn’t seem to have his rival’s panache when it comes to beating a rap (or much else, for that matter). Just last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said that his office had opened an investigation into the flights of migrants sent from Florida to California orchestrated by DeSantis’ office, and was evaluating potential criminal or civil action. Criminal charges have been filed in Texas over the DeSantis office’s flying of migrants to Massachusetts. It’s possible the Department of Justice may not be as favorable towards Meatball Ron as a deadlocked FEC.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to see how the DeSantis campaign could even exist without the support of this super PAC and big donations that finance it. The day DeSantis announced his run, his team reported a “record” fundraising day, having raised $8 million, but even that amount of money appears entirely reliant on big donors. Behind the facade of popular support being projected by the Florida governor, the New York Times found little grassroots enthusiasm:
“The DeSantis campaign said it had around 40,000 donors in May as “we raised over” $8.2 million, according to text messages and emails to supporters asking for more donations. That works out to an average of more than $200 per donor — a figure far higher than is typical for a campaign heavily funded by grass-roots support. By comparison, Senator Bernie Sanders, who was a Democratic online fund-raising powerhouse, raised $5.9 million in his first 24 hours in 2019 — but from 223,000 donors, for an average donation of around $26.”
The Sanders comparison is useful, but a Trump comparison is more apt. Trump is also a master of small-dollar fundraising (by Republican standards), of volunteer organizing, and of legitimate grassroots support. In 2020, he raised $378.1 million from small individual contributions, half of his total haul. “Small-dollar Don,” as Politico has called him, has continued to pace the GOP field in this respect. DeSantis, meanwhile, has his super PACs.
