‘I’m nobody’s puppet,’ DeSantis Super PAC quits four states after Nevada GOP moves caucus ahead

A super PAC that supports Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in 2024 has stopped knocking on doors in four states that will vote early in the Republican primaries, The New York Post reported on Thursday.

Never Back Down, which plans to spend $100 million to help DeSantis win the nomination, has closed its field offices in Nevada, California, North Carolina, and Texas in recent weeks, as NBC News first reported.

The super PAC’s spokeswoman Erin Perrine quoted that the reason for the shutdowns was to concentrate more on the first three states to vote: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

“We see real opportunities in the first three. The first three are going to set the conditions for the March states,” she said.

But, Perrine seemed to overlook the fact that Nevada’s GOP has moved its caucus ahead of South Carolina, making it the third state to vote. Nevada Republicans have scheduled their caucus for Feb. 8, 2024, while South Carolina’s primary is set for Feb. 24.

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Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC backing former President Donald Trump, ridiculed Perrine’s statement on X.

“Uh… Nevada is in the first 3?” she wrote.

“Never Back Down has some serious issues if they don’t even know the primary calendar.”

Reports suggest more than 250 staff members were working in the four states before the shutdowns.

The news follows a turbulent summer for the DeSantis campaign, which saw dozens of layoffs and a new campaign manager amid rumors of overspending.

The Florida Governor’s’ main rival for the nomination, Trump, is expected to appear in a federal court in Washington, DC, on March 4, a day before Super Tuesday, when 13 states will hold their primaries or caucuses. Trump is facing charges of trying to unlawfully overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden.

The Nevada GOP, which supported Trump’s false claims of election fraud, has sued the state legislature for adopting a state-run primary system without implementing certain voting integrity measures, such as voter ID and banning mail-in ballots.

Perrine said that the change in California’s rules, which will give all 169 state delegates to the primary candidate with the most votes or a share of them based on their statewide vote percentage, was a “Trump-inspired rigging” that made grassroots campaigning impossible.

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“When they changed it to a proportional, statewide winner-take-all, that completely eliminated the opportunity for grassroots campaigning,” she stated.

She also said that Nevada’s process was unfair and uncertain, and that both states had influenced their decision to stop door-knocking there.

“And so with neither state having a fair process, the door knockers that were in Nevada and California, we decided to make them kind of refocus into the first three,” she added, repeating, “The first three are going to set the conditions for the March states.”

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