Nikki Haley Is Driving Ron DeSantis’s Team Insane

Ron DeSantis’s team can’t decide how to respond to Nikki Haley’s growing success in the presidential race. The infighting is so bad that some advisers are turning on each other.

Two leaders of DeSantis’s Never Back Down super PAC nearly got into a fistfight during a private meeting last week to discuss how to push back on Haley, NBC News reported Tuesday.

“You have a stick up your ass,” Never Back Down’s top consultant, Jeff Roe, told fellow board member Scott Wagner, according to an anonymous source who was in the room.

“Why don’t you come over here and get it?” demanded Wagner, a longtime DeSantis adviser. He had to be restrained by two other board members.

After the meeting, three close DeSantis allies launched a second super PAC for the Florida governor called Fight Right Inc. The move was partly urged by DeSantis and his wife, Casey, who are growing increasingly frustrated with Never Back Down’s leadership team, NBC reported.

DeSantis was once lauded as the natural successor to Donald Trump, but his campaign has failed to launch. When Haley first announced her candidacy, her support was in the single digits. She was far behind DeSantis, and even further behind front-runner Donald Trump.

But a Monmouth University poll released last week showed that Haley has surpassed DeSantis and now boasts a sizable lead over the Florida governor—even though she still trails the former president by a significant distance. Trump is still comfortably in first place with 46 percent support. But Haley has taken second place with 18 percent. DeSantis, meanwhile, trailed behind at a paltry 7 percent.

DeSantis’s major donors have grown frustrated with his lack of momentum, and one of his biggest former backers is considering switching to team Haley. Billionaire Ken Griffin, a Republican megadonor, told Bloomberg last week that he is “actively contemplating” donating to Haley’s campaign.

Griffin was DeSantis’s biggest donor during the 2022 election, giving $5 million to his gubernatorial reelection campaign. Griffin also repeatedly said he would “love” to see DeSantis run for president in 2024. But Griffin changed his mind in September, withdrawing his support from DeSantis in part due to the governor’s weird feud with Disney.

Biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy seems to be making all the wrong moves on his Iowa tour, raising the question—is the GOP presidential candidate even trying to win?

With the January 15 Iowa caucuses around the corner, Ramaswamy is still trailing behind his Republican opponents, failing to curry favor with new audiences or differentiate himself enough from Trump, in a way that has relegated him to mid-to-high single-digit percentage points.

“If viability were the reason to stay in a race, he’s long since left that behind,” David Kochel, a Republican strategist, told the Associated Press. “If you like Vivek Ramaswamy and what he is saying in this campaign, you already have a candidate, and his name is Donald Trump.”

Ramaswamy’s tactics in the battleground state are questionably counterintuitive for someone actually trying to get his foot in the White House.

On Monday, Ramaswamy nearly begged a diner full of Iowa voters to ask him about his controversial and baseless foreign policy positions, which rival Nikki Haley slammed as Putin-centric during the last GOP debate. “Putin and President Xi are salivating at the thought that someone like that could become president,” Haley said.

Still, one voter took Ramaswamy up on it. “My foreign policy is clear: Stay out of World War III; declare economic independence from Communist China,” Ramaswamy responded.

Yet there may be more to the entrepreneur’s failures in the battleground state than just his eyebrow-raising policy positions. In fact, Ramaswamy’s campaign has spent just a fraction of its marketing budget, booking only $162,000 worth of ads compared to the $8 million it said it would earlier this month, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact.

That’s a far cry from the amount invested by the other Republican presidential candidates. So far, Haley and her allied super PAC have spent nearly $3.5 million on advertising while DeSantis and his allies have spent more than $3.3 million, reported the AP.

It appears that Donald Trump has crafted a win-win situation for himself out of the gag order in his federal election subversion trial.

On Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals indicated that it may pare back the October 17 gag order preventing the former president and his team from talking smack about court staff, the prosecution, and any potential witnesses as he runs for a second term in the White House. Still, the panel noted, Trump is not above the law and should be restricted from engaging in witness intimidation. 

“There’s a balance that has to be undertaken here, and it’s a very difficult balance,” said Judge Patricia Millett, who ruled on the appeal, according to The Washington Post.  “We’ve got to use a careful scalpel here and not step into really sort of skewing the political arena, don’t we?”

But either way that the panel rules, Trump will likely come out on top. If Trump wins the appeal, he’ll have an open floor to vilify special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution behind two of Trump’s criminal trials. Previously, Trump has lambasted Smith as a “lunatic” and referred to his staff as “thugs.”

However, if Trump loses the appeal, it will effectively add a new weapon to his arsenal on the campaign trail, the claim that the state is preventing him from running for president again. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote, this is part of the former president’s larger assault on American institutions. “It’s hard to see how the legal system escapes the fate of other institutions of accountability whose images have been tarnished after seeking to contain or expose the ex-president’s unique brand of rule breaking,” Collinson argued. 

Trump’s legal team has argued that restricting his speech in any matter is an unconstitutional assault to his freedom of political speech, but that may not fly with the judge’s panel, which is responsible for the scope of rights permitted to a criminal defendant, especially one accused of thwarting the 2020 election, reported CNN.

Meanwhile, the original gag order, issued by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, never prevented Trump from attacking his opponents on the campaign trail. Instead, it explicitly permitted the former president to assail any of his formal political rivals, from President Joe Biden to former Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump has been charged with four felonies related to his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results. He has pleaded not guilty.

Florida Republicans have introduced a bill to make it even harder to pass ballot initiatives, ahead of a crucial vote for abortion access in the state.

State Representative Rick Roth quietly introduced a measure in early November to raise the threshold for ballot initiatives to 66.7 percent of votes. Florida already requires 60 percent of voters to support amending the state constitution, meaning the minority rules the Sunshine State. But Roth’s bill would make it even harder to ratify amendments.

Roth and his fellow Republicans argue that the new threshold is necessary to ensure “broader public support” for amendments. But what’s more likely is that they want to ensure certain issues never succeed at the ballot box.

One such issue is abortion access. Florida’s 15-week abortion ban went before the state Supreme Court in September. If the court upholds the law, then an even more restrictive measure banning abortion at six weeks—before most people know they are pregnant—will go into effect. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the hugely unpopular bill in April.

The pro-abortion group Floridians Protecting Freedom is working to get an abortion rights referendum on the state’s 2024 ballot. The group has collected a little more than half the signatures necessary to get on the ballot, but it already has enough for the state Supreme Court to review the amendment for a potential vote.

If it succeeds, then abortion protections would likely be enshrined in the state constitution, overriding any laws the legislature has passed. A February study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 64 percent of Floridians believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases—more than enough to defeat the state’s 60 percent minimum.

Hence the Republican need for Roth’s bill to raise the minimum to 67 percent. Roth introduced a similar measure last year that easily passed the state House, but it failed in the Senate.

Republicans are panicking about their ability to block abortion, and it’s no secret why. Every time an abortion-related measure is on a ballot, voters consistently choose to increase protections for the procedure, even in otherwise red states.

Most recently, Ohio voters chose overwhelmingly to enshrine abortion in the state constitution. The November ballot initiative came just a few months after Ohioans handily defeated a Republican attempt to raise the ballot initiative threshold to 60 percent.

House Republicans are trying to wrap up their impeachment effort against Joe Biden by January, a move that could disrupt attempts to avert a government shutdown.

Republicans have sought for months to prove that the president is guilty of influence peddling and corruption. The GOP’s lengthy investigation and impeachment proceedings have yet to produce any actual evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. But House Republicans are hoping to finish the impeachment inquiry by January and then decide whether to file formal articles of impeachment.

“We get those depositions done this year and … then we can decide on whether or not there’s articles,” House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan told Politico in a Tuesday story.

But that schedule would run right up against one of two deadlines for the government budget. Biden signed an eleventh-hour temporary spending bill last week, delaying a potential government shutdown until 2024. Congress has until January 19 to pass appropriations bills for some federal agencies, and until February 2 to determine funding for the rest.

This could spell doom for the impeachment effort. The Republican majority in the House is razor-thin, and the entire caucus would need to vote unanimously for impeachment articles to pass.

It’s unclear that the impeachment backers have the votes. Many centrist Republicans have indicated they don’t think the impeachment inquiry turned up sufficient proof. Meanwhile, there are 18 Republicans who won in districts that Biden carried in 2020. Backing impeachment could put those 18 in vulnerable positions ahead of the 2024 elections.

“Any kind of an impeachment puts our Biden people in a really tough spot,” a GOP lawmaker involved in the investigation told Politico, speaking anonymously. “Impeachment hurts us politically—it makes our base feel better.”

Even some hard-line Republicans are skeptical of the impeachment inquiry. Colorado Representative Ken Buck, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, has been an outspoken critic of the impeachment effort.

In July, Buck accused then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy of using “impeachment theater” to distract from his efforts to reach a deal on the federal budget.

“What he’s doing is he’s saying, ‘There’s a shiny object over here, and we’re really going to focus on that. We just need to get all these things done so that we can focus on the shiny object,’” Buck said. “Most of us are concerned about spending.”

Buck has decided not to seek reelection, so he won’t be worried about any consequences from voting against articles of impeachment. But other budget hawks may follow his lead.