Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s early 2024 presidential campaign appears to have been underwritten by the Republican Governors Association (RGA), with almost $21 million contributed to the Friends of Ron DeSantis PAC being transferred to his Never Back Down PAC. In fact, by mid-2022, one-in-every-four dollars the RGA took in was redirected to the Friends of Ron DeSantis PAC under the guise of supporting the Florida Governor’s re-election bid.
These sums could make sense in a scenario where the Republican incumbent was in a serious fight with a strong Democrat challenger, or if the RGA was looking to knock out a sitting Democrat governor. But the 2022 Florida gubernatorial race was not one of these instances. DeSantis consistently led his Democrat opponent, Charlie Crist, who would go on to lose the election by nearly 20 points. The Democrat Governors Association, in comparison, spent just $52,000 in Florida in 2022.
Thusly, the Friends of DeSantis PAC received one quarter of what it transferred to DeSantis’s presidential PAC, $21 million, from the RGA, which made no effort to recoup the funds once it had passed through.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, who recently endorsed DeSantis for the GOP nomination, served as the RGA Vice-Chairman from 2020, until she was elected as Chairman proper in November 2022. As Vice Chairman, Reynolds oversaw the group’s budget, which runs into the tens of millions a year, in addition to political strategy and election spending. It was Reynolds – who promised the voters of Iowa she would remain “neutral” in the primary, before breaking the pledge this month – who directed the bizarrely large sums to DeSantis.
Furthermore, Under DeSantis’s governorship, Florida’s state pension system redirected investments to firms whose executives made large contributions to the RGA. DeSantis himself serves as chairman of Florida’s State Board of Administration, which in turn appoints the officials who approve investments for the state’s $180 billion pension fund.
Firms such as Aeolus Capital Management got a $50 million commitment from Florida just four months after DeSantis took office. Aeolus is mostly owned by billionaire Paul Singer, who sent $750,000 to the RGA the year after Florida invested $50 million. Three weeks after this, the RGA sent $2 million to the Friends of Ron DeSantis group. Singer also underwrites the Manhattan Institute, which counts on its payroll DeSantis endorsers such as Chris Rufo. There are further examples of such “coincidences,” and the state’s pension system itself has struggled under DeSantis.
Using the RGA as a third step in an investment and donation scheme also provides a work-around to Federal anti-pay-for-play laws enacted in 2011.
Adding salt to the wound for those who believed in the honesty and upstandingness of political figures like Reynolds and DeSantis, Republicans lost a handful of governors races in 2022 by razor-thin margins. In Arizona, the Democrat margin of victory was only 0.66 percent, in Kansas it was 2.21 percent, and in Wisconsin it was 3.4 percent, with Oregon suffering by just 3.42 percent. The $21 million the RGA gifted Ron DeSantis could have gone a long way in helping elect Republicans in these states.
Instead, it has ended up in the pockets of D.C. consultants, media networks, and anti-Trump Republican staffers.
