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Why Not Tim Scott? Or: How much worse does DeSantis have to get before Republican elites abandon him?

Slavery was not vo-tech for black people.

Jonathan V. Last's avatar
Jonathan V. Last
July 24, 2023∙ Paid
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U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) announces his run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination at a campaign event on May 22, 2023 in North Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images)

1. Florida Man

On Friday, after we got the big Don’t Call It Backing Down, It’s a “Reset” announcement, I wrote that the DeSantis campaign was in a death spiral.

It’s worse than I thought.

Over the weekend the NYT did a big takeout on the reset, replete with back-biting from inside the campaign. Sample hotness:

His Tallahassee-based campaign has begun shedding some of the more than 90 workers it had hired — roughly double the Trump campaign payroll — to cut swelling costs that have included $279,000 at the Four Seasons in Miami.

Wait. Hold on. They spent a quarter million at the Four Seasons?!?!?

There’s more.

Records show the DeSantis campaign made an $87,000 reservation at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Utah for a retreat where donors were invited to cocktails on the deck on Saturday followed by an “investor appreciation dinner.” It’s the type of luxury location that helps explain how a candidate who has long preferred to fly by private jets burned through nearly 40 percent of every dollar he raised in his first six weeks without airing a single television ad. . . .

His report showed $179,000 in chartered plane costs, along with $483,000 to a limited liability company that was formed within days of his campaign kickoff, with the expenditure only labeled “travel.”

Let me give you four reasons this burn-rate stuff is so bad that anti-Trump Republicans ought to move on from DeSantis ASAP:

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