Late last Thursday, NBC News reported that the DeSantis campaign was “planning a reboot” — presumably, one that will be more creative and profitable than the reboots Hollywood routinely churns out.
The DeSantis campaign would refine its message, give reporters more access to its principal, and take more of the risks typical of a candidate that knows he is running from a position of weakness relative to the race’s frontrunner. But the campaign would also radically retool its primary staff.
“Cody Hall is joining the campaign as a senior communications adviser,” NBC News reported. “He will remain a top political adviser to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, having also served as communications director after he worked on his 2018 campaign for governor.” This news followed the top-heavy campaign’s decision to shed about a dozen staffers, including two senior advisors who planned to transition to outside groups dedicated to helping DeSantis win the Republican presidential nomination. But this was just the beginning.
The culling has continued over the weekend and into this week. “All told,” NBC News reported on Tuesday, “38 staffers have been let go from the campaign since its May 24 launch.” Roughly 40 percent of the DeSantis campaign’s original staffers have been reassigned or let go. “We were just bloated,” one unnamed DeSantis advisor confessed. “We had too many people, that’s absolutely fair to say.”
These maneuvers will be welcome news to DeSantis donors who fretted over the campaign’s unsustainable rate of spending. So far, though, the only evidence of DeSantis’s reboot is in the campaign’s slow-motion effort to reorient its staff and the candidate’s decision to sit down with two high-profile interviewers, CNN’s Jake Tapper and radio host Megyn Kelly. These ventures will expose the candidate to a broader audience than the narrow band of GOP primary voters his campaign has targeted so far. But has exposure, or lack thereof, really been the governor’s problem?
The DeSantis campaign has admitted that it had a theory of the Republican race that turned out to be wrong. There’s time yet for it to change tack. But now, nearly one week into the “reboot” stage of this campaign, it is still unclear if DeSantis’s presidential vehicle plans to revise anything other than its staffing decisions and media outreach operation.
The governor’s campaign seems to be operating on the assumption that its problem wasn’t the messenger or the message but the medium. If the campaign’s failure to generate more traction than it enjoyed in May is attributable to any other factors, the campaign may run out of time to change course before persuadable Republican primary voters begin moving on to other options.