DeSantis fires about a dozen campaign workers as Florida governor fails to take over from Trump: report

Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has reportedly laid off about a dozen of his staff as his campaign wastes money without belittling former President Donald Trump’s leadership.

More employees are expected to lose their jobs over the next few weeks as a result of restructuring the cost-cutting campaign, less than two months after the Florida governor officially launched his bid for the White House, NBC reported.

Those laid off were mostly mid-level employees to cut costs after the DeSantis camp realized they may have hired too many employees too soon, despite raising $20 million after six weeks of campaigning, shared Sources of the point of sale with.

“They should never have won that many people, the burn rate was way too high,” said a Republican source familiar with the campaign’s thought process. “People warned the campaign manager, but she didn’t want to hear about it.”

Campaign manager Generra Peck, who led DeSantis’ 2022 re-election campaign for governor, is now in the hot seat, NBC reported.

A Morning Consult nationwide poll released Tuesday, which counts towards the Republican National Committee voting requirement, found that among the eight candidates who will take part in the first Republican debate last month, Trump leads with 56%, followed by DeSantis with 17%.

A donor told the outlet that the DeSantis campaign has been an interplay of employees coming and going, most of whom have never worked together before. He used three different campaign teams in his three runs for Congress and completely reshuffled his personnel in his 2018 run for governor.

Two senior advisors, Dave Abrams, the campaign’s communications and media director, and Tucker Obenshain, who oversaw external affairs, left the campaign this week to help a nonprofit group raise DeSantis’ national profile, Politico reported.

According to Federal Election Commission financial reports filed Saturday, DeSantis’ campaign has 92 people on the payroll in the first phase of fundraising — far more than any other Republican presidential candidate, NBC News reported.

According to a Florida Atlantic University poll released last week, DeSantis has failed to significantly trim the massive lead held by Trump, who has a 20-point lead over Florida’s governor in his home state.

“There’s a general feeling, including mine, that it just didn’t catch fire the way we thought it would,” a donor told the outlet.

According to a confidential internal memo obtained by NBC News on Friday, the DeSantis campaign is refocusing its efforts on states like Iowa, which used to vote, where they believe they can swap out Trump supporters.

“Early voters across the states have little obligation to the candidates they’re picking on such a distant election issue — including many Trump supporters,” the memo said. “In fact, our focus group participants in the first few states say they don’t want to make a decision until they meet the candidates or watch them debate.”