Jeff Roe, longtime Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) consultant and chief architect of his flailing political operation, resigned Saturday from the super PAC charged with realizing the governor’s increasingly quixotic presidential aspirations.
Roe announced his departure hours after a damning Washington Post report on the collapse of Never Back Down (NBD), the super PAC Roe conceptualized to send DeSantis to the White House and usher in a new era of super PAC-driven presidential campaigns.
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“I cannot in good conscience stay affiliated with Never Back Down given the statements in the Washington Post today,” a statement from Roe read. “They are not true and an unwanted distraction at a critical time for Governor DeSantis.”
The Post report comes after five senior officials, pre-dating Roe’s departure, left NBD since late November and three others with Roe’s firm were fired. The Post writes of the dysfunction:
[T]he board chairman and the founding chief executive both resigned, amid internal concerns about legal compliance. A verbal conflict from inside the group’s Atlanta offices became public, as did DeSantis’s own misgivings about the outside group’s leadership. The governor and his campaign staff have been frustrated by reporting on the drama around Never Back Down and critical of the group’s ad strategy, with DeSantis’s second campaign manager, James Uthmeier, publicly instructing donors to give elsewhere for TV ads.
Roe’s departure, a mere three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, is unlikely to change the trajectory of a campaign that peaked before it even got off the ground. DeSantis, once seemingly universally projected as the successor to his political benefactor Donald Trump, began losing ground after a series of bad publicity in the days before the campaign’s official announcement in May.
It struggled to regain momentum despite his combined operations spending tens of millions of dollars.
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In no small part due to candidate performance, the campaign has floated in mediocrity since its kickoff, with DeSantis’s polling hovering just below his strong early 2024 numbers and his image as the tough-talking Trump alternative never again regaining its shine.
Understandably, sources close to the governor framed Roe’s departure as part of the natural evolution of a campaign seeking to circle the wagons in the final days before voters and caucus-goers in Iowa and New Hampshire go on the record with their choice for president.
“The professionals are out and DeSantis wants to go into the home stretch with his closest confidants,” one person familiar with the effort, who was not directly involved with either camp, told the Post. The person added that people in DeSantis’s inner circle want to “go into the final fight with people who are close to [Uthmeier] and closer to the governor.”
But there’s no questioning Roe’s historical importance to DeSantis, or that his Shakespearian arc mirrors th:at of DeSantis’s tragic rise and fall.
Roe made millions while emerging as perhaps the preeminent Republican campaign operative. His firm, Axiom, grew to be the largest Republican consulting firm in Washington.
He maintained his image as a campaign guru despite suffering high-profile — but lucrative — losses that included Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid and a string of failed Senate races.
Never Back Down was intended to be the culmination of years of work building his profitable operation.
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The strategy sought to take advantage of existing loopholes and absorb responsibilities traditionally held by campaigns, including advertising, field programs, candidate travel, and events.
But instead of the beginning of a new era in presidential campaigning, NBD might be remembered by history as the manifested failure of not only DeSantis but Roe. And, for its donors, NBD could serve as a painful lesson for putting hopes and fortunes behind the wrong candidate without the vision or operation necessary for victory.
“The super PAC model of winning a presidential primary, I think, is staggering, if not on the ropes,” said one DeSantis donor to the Post. “And if you’re going to have a successful presidential primary campaign you need to be able to raise hard dollars.”
Roe’s departure comes as DeSantis is a distant second to Donald Trump in Iowa — a state in which he has signaled his campaign is putting all its hopes — and bleeding in New Hampshire, where former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is in clear command of the second spot.
Yet with DeSantis having put all his eggs in the Iowa basket, his New Hampshire polling might ultimately be immaterial.
NBD is soldiering on with new leadership. But in mid-November, a new super PAC promoting DeSantis, , was created, and has increasingly sucked away dwindling resources from NBD.
The Iowa caucuses will take place January 15, 2024.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
