Ron DeSantis Brings in New Campaign Manager to Assist With Flailing Campaign

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently brought in James Uthmeier to become his new campaign manager for his 2024 presidential run. Uthmeier previously served as chief of staff and has replaced Generra Peck. 

Peck will remain chief strategist for DeSantis’ campaign. 

This latest comes at a time when DeSantis has faced increased pressure from donors to ramp up efforts to upend former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. Trump is currently viewed as the prohibitive favorite in the current election cycle. 

These moves were announced on August 8, 2023, came after a series of layoffs and changes in strategies designed to address DeSantis’ falling national poll numbers. The DeSantis campaign has faced increased pressure from its bigwig donors and allies to replace Peck after campaign finance reports exposed the campaign’s large payroll and high cash burn rate.

Uthmeier served in the Trump administration as an adviser to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and was DeSantis’s main lawyer in the governor’s office before he assumed the position of chief of staff in 2021.

“James Uthmeier has been one of Governor DeSantis’s top advisors for years, and he is needed where it matters most: working hand-in-hand with Generra Peck and the rest of the team to put the governor in the best possible position to win this primary and defeat Joe Biden,” DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo declared in a written statement.

The DeSantis campaign has also brought in David Polyansky, who worked with US Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. He is generally viewed as one of the main architects of Cruz’s victory in the Iowa caucuses during the 2016 presidential cycle. 

On a prior occasion, Polyansky worked for Never Back Down, the super political action committee that has propped up DeSantis’s candidacy and have even crafted parts of its campaign strategy. 

“Governor DeSantis has to change the dynamics. That much is clear,” donor Dan Eberhart declared in a statement.

He described these shake ups as “a realignment rather than a reset” due to how these two new hires were already senior advisers in the DeSantis circle. 

Jay Zeidman, a DeSantis donor and managing partner at the private equity firm Altitude Ventures, said it was “no secret that the governor continues to assess the progress of the campaign.”

“This is a reflection of putting the right people in the right seats, versus probably what I assume a lot of people want the narrative to be that people are being pushed out,” he added.

The DeSantis campaign is clearly on the ropes. While DeSantis might be a good Florida governor, his presidential campaign has been a dud to say the least. Instead of taking a hardcore anti-imperialist line on foreign policy, he has come across as a milquetoast centrist on the issue of Ukraine among other foreign policy questions. 

If anything, DeSantis needs to out-Trump Trump on nationalist questions if he wants to have any chance of rising in the polls. Being a milquetoast Zionist candidate is not the key to winning the GOP nomination in 2024.

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